Keynote Speaker: Dorothy Scott

Professor Dorothy Scott is the Foundation Chair of Child Protection and the Director of the recently established Australian Centre for Child Protection, which is funded by the Australian Government and located at the University of South Australia. She began her career in the child welfare field as a child care worker in a residential setting, and has practised as a social worker in foster care and adoption, mental health and sexual assault. She has conducted numerous inquiries and reviews of child protection policy and practice in Australia, and published extensively. Her current interests include the diffusion of innovation and the translation of research into policy and practice.

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There is a rich range of promising approaches emerging in the prevention of, and response to, child abuse and neglect. They include both research-based policy initiatives and practitioner-inspired initiatives. Yet the transfer of innovation across different cultural contexts and across different legal and service systems poses significant challenges. Among these are the need to preserve the integrity of a promising model while ensuring it has sufficient flexibility to adapt to a new context, and the need to embed an innovation in a new organisational structure so that it might be sustainable. Several Australian and New Zealand exemplars will be used to explore the implications of transplanting innovation for policy makers, practitioners and researchers.