Cause for concern: OT failing to keep up with reports of at-risk kids

Saturday, 11 July 2026

Plans to introduce mandatory reporting of child safety worries will inevitably increase reports of concern to child protection agency Oranga Tamariki. But new data shows the agency is failing to cope with the reports it already receives. Nikki Macdonald investigates.

When it was revealed in April last year that 1319 at-risk children were overdue to be assigned a social worker, Oranga Tamariki said cutting that queue was a “priority focus”.

But more than a year on, the number waiting has ballooned by almost 50%, to 1916. And they’re just the ones considered serious enough to make the cut for a social worker safety assessment.

The child protection system came under fire after investigations into the 2021 death of 5-year-old Malachi Subecz found he fell through the safety nets and was “allowed to be invisible”.

But in the years since, health workers, teachers, police and Oranga Tamariki staff have repeatedly told the Independent Children’s Monitor that reports of concern are being closed as requiring no further action, not because the risk doesn’t meet a standard threshold, but because there aren’t enough social workers to take them on.

“They [the notifier] may have a [child] who hasn’t been in school for three months, but we can’t look at that as we are dealing with kids with broken bones,” a Waikato Oranga Tamariki staff member told the Monitor last year. Some cases languished unallocated for over a year, staff said.

“We have children out there suffering the worst things you can imagine and seeing the worst things, then Oranga Tamariki says it’s not my problem,” a police officer reported.

With the soaring cost of living ramping up pressures on struggling whānau, family support organisations fighting for funding, and one in five social workers planning to leave in the next five years, growing queues for help are just one red flag of a much bigger problem.

“You’ve got a child protection system that’s under pressure and not able to perform at the level that’s expected,” says Independent Children’s Monitor chief executive, Arran Jones.

The growing queue for help

Reports of concern are a way for neighbours, teachers, relatives, family doctors, cops or anyone else connected to a child to let Oranga Tamariki know that that young person may be at risk.

That concern could be triggered by truancy from school, family violence, drug, alcohol or mental health worries or evidence that the child has been hurt or abused.

Reports of concern shouldn’t include situations of immediate danger, as that should trigger a 111 call. But they can include situations deemed “critical” or “very urgent“, meaning a child may have been seriously harmed or is at risk of serious harm.

Depending on the assessed urgency, a social worker is assigned to do a safety assessment within 24 hours, 48 hours or 10 days. If a case is “overdue allocation”, it’s exceeded that window.

Data obtained under the Official Information Act show Canterbury and Waikato have the largest queues of children overdue to be assigned a social worker, with 440 and 434 children respectively.

Oranga Tamariki chief social worker Nicolette Dickson says the majority of overdue cases will be in the least urgent category, and even then a social worker will have gleaned more information and will be carefully managing the queue.

“It’s not that they’re ignored cases, it’s about prioritising our ability to respond.”

However, she accepts that the numbers have gone backwards, despite having called it a “priority focus”.

“Of course we are extremely worried. It’s one of our top priorities to be able to make sure that our social workers can get out as quickly as possible to all of those children.”

Dickson says a huge spike in reports of concern in the 2024/25 year stretched the agency. However, those volumes have now stabilised, and the number of unallocated cases has still got longer.

And while Dickson argues the most urgent cases are visited quickly, OT consistently misses its target of responding to 95% of very urgent or critical reports of concern within 24 hours. Those numbers have also got worse, not better, with just 80% meeting the response window in the last quarter.

Dickson says a missed target could mean a delay of mere hours.

“That's not an excuse, it's just context to say these are not cases that linger for long times. We absolutely still, though, do want to lift their performance.”

Jones says the huge regional variation in the numbers of at-risk children waiting for a social worker reinforces what the Independent Children’s Monitor regularly hears and sees. The regions reporting the longest queues line up with the areas with higher rates of reports of concern being rejected as not needing further action. Which suggests cases are closed not because they’re not serious enough, but because there aren’t enough social workers to deal with them.

“What it tells us is, you’ve got sites under pressure, they’re unable to deal with the reports of concern that are coming in based on the resourcing that they have, they’re not meeting the timeframes and so ultimately - and this is what we hear from staff as well - they then just ‘no further action’ these cases, because they just can’t get to them.”

Youth health doctor Sue Bagshaw, a director of Christchurch-based Collaborative Trust for Research and Training in Youth Health and Development, says as a clinician she mostly gave up doing reports of concern for children over 10, because they would go nowhere.

“Often you would report it, the household is upset, parents or whoever is the guardian gets upset and gets defensive, nothing happens, because they’re not allocated to anybody, and the child is worse off.

“It’s just not good enough.”

Instead, she would try to work with the child, and bring in community organisations to help. But those support systems are also struggling in the face of funding cuts, Bagshaw says.

“Really the community organisations are doing the work of government, they’re doing the work of those social workers who are overwhelmed and expected to do everything. They need resources, they need funding by government.”

Bagshaw fears things will get worse, if the government goes ahead with its plan to bring in mandatory reporting of child safety concerns.

“Why we didn’t have mandatory reporting in this country, is because it works really well when you have high resources, and somebody is capable of working with the family and helping them to heal. But it works really badly when there are not adequate resources, and that’s Aotearoa right at this moment.”

Jones agrees that to really reverse New Zealand’s shocking child harm rate, we need both a “highly capable and well-resourced” community sector that can pick up non-urgent cases, and a “highly functioning” Oranga Tamariki.

“And we don’t have that. We don’t have either of those.”

Law Society family law section deputy chairperson Colin Abernethy, who acts as a lawyer for children, says reports of concern are increasing both in number and complexity, with cost of living pressures and a rise in mental health and drug and alcohol problems all ramping up stress on families.

He believes the system needs more resources at all levels, from extra Oranga Tamariki social workers to better legal aid pay for family lawyers to attract more into the field.

But he also thinks it’s not just OT’s responsibility to make sure kids are safe.

“There are lots of children out there who are in not good enough circumstances, and I think it’s incumbent on all the professionals involved to be making sure that all of the different organisations involved with the particular child are talking to each other and sharing any concerning information. That might be the school, the preschool, police, Barnardos, Oranga Tamariki.”

‘The math isn’t mathing’: a waning workforce

The latest social worker workforce survey found almost two thirds (61%) of all social workers thought the biggest challenge facing the profession was recruitment and retention. For OT social workers, that number was closer to 80%.

The agency already has 148 vacancies for front-line social workers, and chief social worker Dickson acknowledges more money won’t magic up more.

“It is a declining workforce, it is a hard-to-fill workforce.”

And that’s likely to get even worse. Almost half of all social workers (48%) are over 50, and almost one in five (19%) plan to leave in the next five years.

While that’s mostly due to retirement, more than 20% are planning a career change.

PSA union’s lead organiser for Oranga Tamariki, Josephine O’Connor, says the huge spike in reports of concern has not been matched by an increase in staff. And rising poverty and costs of living are heaping still more pressure on social workers.

“Working in Oranga Tamariki on a good day is going to be pretty difficult because of the nature of the work, and so when economic times deteriorate and fuel costs increase and the price of food increases and all of the variables associated with increases in abuse to children are on the rise, Oranga Tamariki will be one of the first agencies to see the fallout, so they know what happens.

“And then on top of that, they know that they're short-staffed … So the forces that are interacting with each other are causing them major concern.”

O’Connor says staff are also reporting that the number of community services that have had funding cut means that work now comes back to OT.

“One member said to me, they’re working in an office where there used to be eight social workers, there’s now three, and their workloads have increased markedly. They just said ‘Look, the math isn’t mathing. It’s not workable.’”

But attracting more people into social work, and support roles, and keeping the ones they have, would require paying them better, O’Connor says.

Social Development Minister Louise Upston says the Government’s September 2025 pledge to accept all the recommendations of Karen Poutasi’s review into Malachi Subecz’s death signalled “a firm commitment to improve child safety”.

The Government pledged $90m in this year’s Budget, to expand workforce training, increase Oranga Tamariki’s capacity to respond to reports of concern, and support a stronger role for Health New Zealand in responding to serious cases.

Dickson says that money will help fund 90-100 allied support worker roles to free social workers up to do their critical job of actually working with families. Under-pressure regions such as Canterbury and Waikato are likely to get a bigger slice of that pie.

But O’Connor is sceptical. “Only statutory social workers can do what statutory social workers can do.”

She argues that, after the endless reports and royal commissions into OT failings, fixing staff shortages should be an absolute bottom line.

“When you’re taking care of the most vulnerable people in the country, having enough staff should not be something that is partisan or fought over, it should just be a given.

“We don’t have to learn this lesson again, and it shouldn’t be tamariki and whānau, it shouldn’t be rangatahi, that are the collateral of austerity in the public service.”

The region where no report of concern is closed without action

Miria Tarau knows what happens when OT busts into a child’s life. And she knows what happens when someone finds the courage to speak up for a child, and it goes nowhere. Neither are great options.

“I’m always a strong advocate for the mahi that Oranga Tamariki do. It’s not an easy job, I get it. But the impact that sometimes our Oranga Tamariki involvement has on family, now that is where the tragedy is.“

She knows this, because she used to work for OT. Now she’s director of a Whakatane pilot project that Jones, of the Independent Children’s Monitor, hopes could be a model for doing things differently.

Te Pūkāea o te Waiora is a collaboration between OT and Ngāti Awa to deal with reports of concern, locally. While other regions have collaborations between OT and community and other government organisations to discuss how to deal with kids at risk, Te Pūkāea has set up its own call centre to triage and respond to reports of concern.

So any reports received by OT’s National Contact Centre relating to children in the eastern Bay of Plenty are sent to Tarau’s three social workers.

They sort them by urgency, as OT would normally do, and those cases requiring a statutory response are forwarded to OT. But there’s one major difference - every report is acted on.

“Rather than asking, does this require a statutory response, we first ask, what support does this whānau need to achieve safety and wellbeing, while maintaining the safety of tamariki?” says Tarau (Ngāti Awa, Ngāi Te Rangi, Ngāti Ranginui, Tūhoe).

“So we don't close any report of concern that comes our way. That's another reason why we took on the call centre - because of the amount of no further action cases that we were seeing. We saw those cases as whānau falling through the gaps.

“No-one was checking in on those kids, which means they were still at risk.”

For those cases not hitting the threshold for OT intervention, whānau can be helped by Ngāti Awa’s own social services, or referred to other specialist community services.

While the call centre currently has OT supervision, the project is hoping to get delegated authority to deal with reports entirely independently.

Two years into the pilot, Tarau thinks the model shows community-led responses can get in early and hopefully prevent families needing OT involvement. Tarau was initially seconded from OT, and was supposed to return. She chose not to.

“As I got more involved in this kaupapa, I just believed in it so much. It was like, this is the way we’ve got to go for our people, for our children, for our communities.”

Jones says projects such as Te Pūkāea seem promising, but need secure funding, after another seemingly successful pilot in Christchurch was axed when its temporary contract ran out.

The Monitor’s February report into progress since the death of Malachi concluded tamariki are no safer now than then. That won’t change until we get better at responding to cries for help, Jones says.

“That’s terribly distressing, and it’s not me that has to deal with the consequences of that. We hear from social workers talking about the inability to be able to attend to the reports of concern the way that they want, and how do they deal with that when they're driving home?

“That's pretty tough, and it's tough on everybody. It's tough on the family, it's tough on the relatives to know that children aren't necessarily any safer, and I think that's something that as a country we should be thinking about as well.“