Kinship CARE represents an important chapter in the development and implementation history of Secure Start’s work in therapeutic care and the Triple-A Model of Therapeutic Care.
Kinship CARE was developed specifically for kinship carers and the professionals who support them.
It recognised that kinship carers undertake a distinctive caregiving role. They care for children with whom they already have a family or relational connection, frequently while managing complex family relationships, experiences of loss and adversity, contact arrangements, changing family roles and the everyday demands of caring for children who may have additional developmental and relational needs.
The purpose of Kinship CARE was to make therapeutic-care principles practical, accessible and relevant to these circumstances.
A Triple-A-informed approach to kinship care
Kinship CARE drew explicitly upon the Triple-A Model of Therapeutic Care.
Triple-A supports caregivers to look beyond the immediate form of behaviour and consider what may be happening for the child 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?
This encouraged kinship carers to move beyond simply asking:
“How do I stop this behaviour?”
and consider:
“What might help me understand why this behaviour makes sense for this child?”
A particular emphasis within Kinship CARE was understanding behaviour in relation to children’s needs and helping carers consider how everyday caregiving experiences could support new learning.
The CARE framework
At the time Kinship CARE was developed, therapeutic responding was organised around the CARE framework:
Consistency
Accessibility
Responsiveness
Emotional Connectedness
CARE provided carers with practical ways of thinking about the relational and caregiving environment they created around children.
The CARE framework represents an important stage in the development of Secure Start’s therapeutic-care work.
The contemporary Triple-A Model of Therapeutic Care now uses two complementary frameworks:
AAA — understanding what may be happening for the child
and
AURA — considering how we can respond therapeutically.
AURA emphasises caregiving that is:
Accessible
Understanding
Responsive
Attuned
Kinship CARE and the CARE framework are therefore retained here as part of the developmental and implementation history of contemporary Triple-A rather than as current alternative Secure Start Models of Care.
The South Australian Kinship CARE Project
The most substantial implementation of Kinship CARE occurred through the South Australian Kinship CARE Project, a joint initiative of Secure Start and the South Australian Department for Child Protection.
The project was implemented between March 2018 and March 2020.
Kinship CARE training was ultimately delivered to 250 kinship carers across 24 locations in South Australia — 17 metropolitan and 7 regional locations.
Twelve per cent of participating carers identified as Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander.
The project was designed to do more than provide information about therapeutic care.
It sought to help carers develop practical ways of applying therapeutic principles within their own households and relationships with children.
Training used verbal content, practical activities, demonstrations, audio-visual material and individual and group reflection. Psychological theory was used to support understanding while maintaining a strong emphasis on practical application.
What carers reported
Evaluation of the Kinship CARE Project produced encouraging practice-based findings.
Among kinship carers who completed the training and a 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 evaluations also showed very high levels of satisfaction, perceived usefulness and willingness to recommend the training to other kinship carers.
Pre- and post-training evaluation identified an important change in the way carers understood children’s behaviour.
Following training, carers were more than twice as likely to describe behaviour as an expression of children’s needs rather than simply understanding it in terms such as “naughtiness”.
These findings provide useful practice-based evidence concerning the Kinship CARE implementation.
The project did not employ a controlled experimental design, and these findings should not be interpreted as establishing that Kinship CARE or the contemporary Triple-A Model caused particular child outcomes.
More than carer training
An important feature of the Kinship CARE Project was its layered approach to implementation.
The project did not simply train kinship carers and then expect them to implement what they had learned without support.
Kinship care support workers and psychology staff also received complementary preparation.
Kinship carers could therefore encounter therapeutic principles through the professionals supporting them. Support workers, in turn, could receive support from psychologists familiar with the framework.
The intention was to develop greater consistency in knowledge, language and practice across different levels of the Kinship Care Program.
This approach sought to support both fidelity and embeddedness.
The experience contributed to the subsequent development of the contemporary Triple-A implementation approach, which distinguishes:
Foundation Training
Practice Integration
Organisational Embedding
and
Fidelity and Continuous Development.
Connection as a primary task
Kinship CARE placed particular emphasis on the importance of the relationship between children and their caregivers.
Children affected by adversity may have experienced relationships as inconsistent, unpredictable, frightening, unavailable or unsafe.
Kinship CARE therefore encouraged carers to consider not only what they wanted children to do differently, but also the relational experiences they were creating around them.
Connection was treated as a primary caregiving task upon which many other therapeutic endeavours depend.
This relational emphasis continues within contemporary Triple-A through AURA and its focus on caregiving that is Accessible, Understanding, Responsive and Attuned.
Supporting carers
Kinship CARE also recognised the considerable demands placed upon kinship carers.
Kinship carers may simultaneously manage children’s needs, relationships with birth parents and extended family, financial and practical pressures, their own experiences of loss and family disruption, and relationships with child-protection and support systems.
For this reason, self-care and caregiver support formed part of the Kinship CARE approach.
The broader lesson remains important within contemporary Triple-A:
Adults are better able to provide therapeutic care when they themselves are adequately supported.
Martinthi Aboriginal Kinship CARE Program
Following completion of the Department for Child Protection Kinship CARE Project, the approach continued between 2021 and 2024 through the Martinthi Aboriginal Kinship CARE Program in South Australia.
Martinthi involved collaboration between InComPro Aboriginal Association, Bookyana Cultural and Community Services, UCWB and Secure Start.
This provided a further context in which Kinship CARE and Triple-A-informed principles were applied within kinship care.
The Martinthi period is retained as part of the implementation and developmental history of Kinship CARE and Triple-A.
It is not presented here as evidence of particular outcomes, as Secure Start does not currently hold evaluation material suitable for public reporting.
Kinship CARE and contemporary Triple-A
Kinship CARE is no longer presented by Secure Start as a separate contemporary Model of Care.
Its significance lies in what it contributed to the development and implementation history of Triple-A.
The project demonstrated the feasibility of taking therapeutic-care principles beyond a training room and applying them across a large statutory caregiving system.
It also provided experience in:
- translating psychological concepts into accessible caregiver language;
- supporting caregivers to understand behaviour in relation to needs;
- developing shared language between caregivers and professionals;
- layered workforce implementation;
- supporting practice integration;
- attending to fidelity and organisational embeddedness; and
- evaluating caregiver experience and changes in understanding.
These experiences have contributed to the contemporary Triple-A Model of Therapeutic Care, which brings together:
AAA — Understanding
Attachment
Arousal
Accessibility to needs provision
AURA — Therapeutic Responding
Accessible
Understanding
Responsive
Attuned
Continuing the work through Triple-A
Secure Start’s contemporary work in therapeutic care is now organised through the Triple-A Model of Therapeutic Care.
Triple-A builds upon more than a decade of conceptual development and implementation experience across foster care, kinship care and child and family services in Australia and Ireland.
Learn about the contemporary Triple-A Model of Therapeutic Care