Services for Children and Young People

The Commission is able to handle complaints about services for children and young people and/or their carers in the ACT. Carers include parents, kinship carers, foster carers or others with caring responsibilities for children and young people.

A service provided for children and young people includes:

• Schools, including training and skill development
• Care, including respite care and recreation services
• Child protection services
• Youth detention
• Information, coordination, assessment and referral services
• Case management
• Sport related services
• Health services provided for children & young people
• Disability services provided for children & young people

We can handle complaints about individuals or organisations providing services to children and young people. If you have difficulty or concerns about making a complaint you can contact us by phone or email and we will talk to you about the process and we can help you write the complaint down. The complaint process is accessible, informal and free but we can also help by referring you for advocacy or legal advice if that would assist you to make your complaint.

The Commission generally tries to resolve complaints informally and where appropriate through conciliation. Information about conciliation is available in our conciliation FAQ.

Examples of complaints we have handled about services for children and young people include:

• A complaint about how an on-field race based comment was handled by a sporting association
• Access to financial assistance for a kinship carer
• How a school responded to a bullying claim by a young student
• Access to psychological and specialist health services for children in out of home care

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