A statewide therapeutic-care initiative supporting kinship carers across South Australia
Between 2018 and 2020, Secure Start delivered the Kinship CARE Project with the support of the South Australian Department for Child Protection.
The two-year project brought therapeutic-care principles to kinship carers across metropolitan and regional South Australia and provided an important opportunity to explore how psychological knowledge could be translated into practical support for families providing kinship care.
By completion, Kinship CARE had been delivered to 250 kinship carers across 24 locations — 17 metropolitan and 7 regional.
Twelve per cent of participating carers identified as Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander.
The project became an important part of the implementation and developmental history of what is now the contemporary Triple-A Model of Therapeutic Care.
Why Kinship CARE?
Kinship carers occupy a distinctive position in the lives of children.
They frequently step into the caregiving role following significant adversity, disruption or loss in a child’s life, while also navigating existing family relationships, relationships with birth parents, changing family roles and the practical realities of caring for children within the child-protection system.
The Kinship CARE Project was developed to provide carers with an accessible framework for understanding children’s behaviour and relationships and for considering how ordinary caregiving experiences could become therapeutic.
Rather than focusing simply on managing children’s behaviour, the project encouraged carers to ask:
What might be happening for this child?
What might this behaviour tell me about the child’s experience or needs?
What can I do in my everyday caregiving to help?
The foundations of Kinship CARE
Kinship CARE drew explicitly upon the Triple-A Model of Therapeutic Care.
Triple-A encouraged carers and professionals to consider children’s experience through three interrelated domains:
Attachment — what might the child have learned about themselves, other people and relationships?
Arousal — what might be happening in the child’s emotional and physiological state?
Accessibility to needs provision — what might the child have learned about whether important needs will be recognised and reliably met?
At the time of the Kinship CARE Project, therapeutic responding was organised through the CARE framework:
Consistency
Accessibility
Responsiveness
Emotional Connectedness
CARE represents an earlier stage in the development of Secure Start’s therapeutic-care work.
The contemporary Triple-A Model now uses AAA for understanding what may be happening for the child and AURA for considering how caregivers can respond therapeutically.
The Kinship CARE Project is therefore presented here as an important part of the developmental and implementation history of Triple-A rather than as a current alternative Model of Care.
A statewide implementation
Kinship CARE commenced in March 2018 and continued until March 2020.
Over the course of the project, training was delivered across South Australia rather than being restricted to metropolitan Adelaide.
By completion:
250 kinship carers participated
24 locations were reached
17 locations were metropolitan
7 locations were regional
12% of participating carers identified as Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander
The scale and geographic reach of the project provided an opportunity to apply a therapeutic-care framework across diverse kinship-care circumstances and communities.
What did the project involve?
Kinship CARE was designed to make psychological and developmental concepts accessible and useful to carers in everyday life.
Training incorporated discussion, practical activities, demonstrations, audio-visual material and opportunities for individual and group reflection.
Carers were encouraged to consider how children’s histories might influence current behaviour and relationships and how their own caregiving could provide different experiences over time.
The project placed particular emphasis on understanding children’s behaviour in relation to their needs.
It also recognised that providing therapeutic care can be demanding and that supporting caregivers is an important part of supporting children.
What did carers report?
Evaluation of the Kinship CARE Project produced encouraging practice-based findings.
Among carers completing the training and three-month follow-up survey:
84% reported improved relationships with children in their care.
89% reported greater confidence in their role as a kinship carer.
98% reported learning strategies that had helped them in their kinship-care role.
100% reported receiving helpful information.
Session-by-session evaluation also demonstrated very high levels of satisfaction, perceived usefulness and willingness to recommend the program.
A change in understanding behaviour
One of the most interesting findings concerned the way carers thought about children’s behaviour.
Before and after training, carers were asked about their understanding of the behaviour of children in their care.
Following Kinship CARE, carers were more than twice as likely to understand behaviour as an expression of children’s needs, rather than simply describing it in terms such as “naughtiness”.
This was important because one of the central aims of the project was to support carers to move from reacting primarily to the surface form of behaviour toward greater curiosity about what might be happening for the child.
Understanding does not mean accepting unsafe or harmful behaviour.
Rather, it creates additional possibilities for responding to the child as well as to the behaviour.
Relationships and confidence
The follow-up findings were also encouraging in two areas central to the experience of kinship care.
84% of respondents reported that their relationships with the children in their care had improved.
89% reported feeling more confident in their role as kinship carers.
These findings are particularly relevant to a therapeutic-care approach that places considerable emphasis on the caregiving relationship.
They should, however, be interpreted appropriately. The Kinship CARE Project was a real-world service implementation rather than a controlled clinical trial. The evaluation does not establish that Kinship CARE caused these reported changes.
The findings are best understood as promising practice-based evidence from a large-scale implementation.
More than a training programme
One of the most important features of the Kinship CARE Project was that implementation did not focus only on carers.
The project also involved preparation and support for Department for Child Protection staff and psychologists.
This created a layered approach in which carers could experience the therapeutic framework through the support workers working with them, while support workers could themselves receive support from psychologists familiar with the approach.
The intention was to develop greater consistency in language, understanding and practice across different levels of the Kinship Care Program.
Attention was explicitly given to fidelity and embeddedness.
This experience subsequently contributed to the contemporary Triple-A distinction between:
Foundation Training
Practice Integration
Organisational Embedding
Fidelity and Continuous Development
The project therefore contributed not only to the development of therapeutic-care content but to Secure Start’s understanding of how a Model of Care can be implemented across a service system.
Supporting the people who provide care
Kinship CARE recognised that therapeutic caregiving asks a great deal of carers.
Kinship carers may be managing children’s distress and behaviour while simultaneously navigating family relationships, contact with birth parents, financial pressures, interactions with services, their own feelings about what has happened within their family, and the ordinary demands of daily life.
Supporting carers was therefore an important part of the project.
This remains a principle of contemporary Triple-A:
The capacity of adults to remain therapeutically available to children is influenced by the support available to those adults.
What happened after the project?
The completion of the Department for Child Protection project in 2020 did not mark the end of Kinship CARE.
Between 2021 and 2024, the approach continued through the Martinthi Aboriginal Kinship CARE Program in South Australia, involving collaboration between InComPro Aboriginal Association, Bookyana Cultural and Community Services, UCWB and Secure Start.
Martinthi forms part of the subsequent implementation history of Kinship CARE and Triple-A-informed practice.
It is not presented here as outcome evidence, as Secure Start does not currently hold evaluation material suitable for public reporting.
From Kinship CARE to contemporary Triple-A
The Kinship CARE Project occurred during an important period in the development of Triple-A.
The experience reinforced several principles that remain central to the contemporary Model:
Understanding before responding.
Children’s behaviour is better considered in the context of their relationships, emotional state, learning and needs.
Everyday caregiving matters.
Therapeutic experiences are not confined to formal therapy sessions. They occur repeatedly through ordinary interactions with caregivers.
Relationships matter.
The quality of the caregiving relationship is itself an important focus of therapeutic care.
Caregivers need support too.
Adults are more able to provide thoughtful, therapeutic care when the systems around them support reflection and regulation.
Training alone is insufficient.
A Model of Care needs to become visible in everyday practice and supported through the organisation.
These lessons have contributed to the contemporary Triple-A Model of Therapeutic Care.
Today, Triple-A is organised around two complementary frameworks:
AAA — Understanding
Attachment
Arousal
Accessibility to needs provision
AURA — Therapeutic Responding
Accessible
Understanding
Responsive
Attuned
CARE remains an important part of this developmental history but is no longer presented as a separate framework within the contemporary Triple-A Model.
The significance of the Kinship CARE Project
The Kinship CARE Project represents one of the largest implementations in the developmental history of Secure Start’s therapeutic-care work.
It demonstrated that psychologically informed therapeutic-care concepts could be translated into accessible language for large numbers of caregivers and implemented across metropolitan and regional locations within a statutory child-protection system.
It also generated useful practice-based evaluation data and contributed to the development of Secure Start’s approach to implementation, organisational embedding and fidelity.
The project therefore occupies an important place in the history leading to the contemporary Triple-A Model of Therapeutic Care.
Learn more
Learn about the contemporary Triple-A Model of Therapeutic Care
Read the Triple-A Evidence & Practice Foundation
Learn about Triple-A Training and Implementation
Read about the CARE Curriculum: Development and Implementation History