Babies and children entering Oranga Tamariki care

Published: August 26, 2020

This report provides insight into the processes around a baby or child entering Oranga Tamariki care, including data on entry trends over the past 10 years.

Background

The decision to bring a child into care is not taken lightly and is made with their best interests in mind. There are, quite rightly, a strong set of checks and balances in the process to ensure that the right decision is made, and a number of different agreements, warrants and legal orders under the Oranga Tamariki Act, each of which can apply in a range of different settings.

Key findings

In this document showing data from 2010–2020 you will find:

  • information on the process for a child or young person coming into our care
  • an explanation of the warrants and court orders that enable this process
  • what it looks like in practice
  • an outline of some of the underlying factors that lead to a warrant or court order being applied for
  • the day-to-day care of children in our care
  • an outline of what the data tells us
  • an explanation of the data we hold
  • detailed tables which provide data on the number of babies, children and young people entering our care broken down by type of warrant or court order in force, age, ethnicity and region for the past 10 years.