Barriers to permanency planning: What the literature suggests

Early studies concerned with permanency planning identified that many children remained in care for prolonged periods of time, in the absence of clearly defined plans for their long-term future. The studies also highlighted concern that multiple placements have a deleterious impact on children. As a consequence, permanency planning frameworks were developed to address the problems of welfare drift, the essence of permanency planning being timely decision-making and concurrent planning. However, there appear to be some systemic issues impacting on the application of the permanency planning framework. There also remains a policy preference for family preservation, which adversely affects permanency planning. The need is to conceptualise permanency planning as existing along a continuum of planning options for children, co-existing with family preservation models.