Child Protection Duty Lawyer Guidelines to promote consistency and fairness

As part of our commitment to improve our child protection legal services, we are introducing new Child Protection Duty Lawyer Guidelines to promote consistency, certainty and transparency for clients and practitioners across the state.

These guidelines implement an action of the Final Report of our Child Protection Legal Aid Services Review released in September 2017.

‘Child Protection duty lawyer services are vital for many families and children, and require significant effort from practitioners, but currently there is no formal guidance to explain eligibility, the nature of the service, or to ensure access and quality are consistent across Victoria.’ 

Nicole Rich, Executive Director, Family, Youth and Children's Law, Victoria Legal Aid.

Therefore, the Final Report committed Victorial Legal Aid (VLA) to implement:

• state-wide Child Protection Duty Lawyer Guidelines to establish a consistent, certain and transparent service that supports children and families in the child protection system
• a consistent referral process based on existing practices to ensure all Victorians have equitable access to child protection legal services.

The guidelines consolidate current practice and their development has been informed by a working group with broad representation from VLA lawyers, administrative staff and panel lawyers from metropolitan and regional areas, Aboriginal Legal Services and VLA’s Legal Practice Directorate.

From 25 March 2019, the Child Protection Duty Lawyer Guidelines must be applied by VLA child protection lawyers, community legal centres and private practitioners delivering child protection duty lawyer services at Children’s Court (Family Division) locations across Victoria.

The guidelines set out:

• the different types of services to be delivered by the child protection duty lawyer service
• the eligibility criteria for the child protection duty lawyer service.

Referral process

To increase consistent access to child protection legal services across the state and avoid conflicts, the Final Report of the Child Protection Legal Aid Services Review also identified the need to establish a fairer and more transparent process for referring children, young people and parents to child protection lawyers.

Therefore, the new guidelines will be supported by an improve intake and referral process, modelled on the best practice already in place in many parts of the state. During the review we identified strong support from practitioners for VLA to do this.

To give clients choice and continuity, we will support referrals to practitioners with an existing relationship to the client, where possible all children will be referred to practitioners on both the child protection and youth crime panels, and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander clients will have the option to be referred to an Aboriginal community control legal service if it is available.

More information

If you have feedback or questions about the guidelines or the referral process, please contact the Child Protection Transformation team at childprotectiontransformation@vla.vic.gov.au

Read more about our Child Protection Legal Aid Services Review.