What is Family Group Conferencing and how does it work?

A Family Group Conference is not a meeting where professionals tell a family what is going to happen. It is a process built on the opposite idea: that the family, given good information, private time and a bit of respect, is the group best placed to make the plan. This is what the process actually looks like, from referral through to review.

Where it came from

Family Group Conferencing began in Aotearoa New Zealand, out of Māori objection to a child protection system that removed children from their whānau (extended family and kin, a wider circle than the household) and made decisions about them without them. It was written into Aotearoa New Zealand law in 1989 and has since spread to more than twenty countries, including every state and territory in Australia.

The core idea has not changed. Where concerns have been raised about someone vulnerable, and an authority is at risk of taking the decisions out of the family's hands, the people who know and love that person are brought together to make the plan instead. Professionals set out the concerns and the limits. The family works out how to meet them.

Child protection is the most common setting. A child or young person may be at risk of needing out of home care, or may already be in care and need a plan to come home. But the same model is used in disability support and in elder care, and it fits anywhere the alternative is a decision made about a family rather than by it.

The model has three parts

People often picture the conference itself and stop there. In practice the conference is the visible middle of a much longer process, and most of the facilitator's work happens before anyone sits down.

Preparation: where the work really is

A referral comes in, usually from a child protection agency, sometimes from a school or another service. The first job is deciding whether it is a referral a conference can actually help with. Not every situation is suitable, and accepting an unsuitable referral does the family no favours.

From there the facilitator works out who the family is. That is a bigger question than it sounds. Key family members are not simply the people on the file. A genogram often surfaces grandparents, aunts, uncles, older siblings, a pastor, a neighbour who has been quietly holding things together for years. Part of the facilitator's craft is finding those people and getting them in the room.

Bottom lines, or "not negotiables"

Before the conference happens, the referring agency has to be clear about its bottom lines. These are the points that cannot be moved. A plan that crosses one of them will not be accepted, so everyone needs to know what they are before the day, not halfway through it.

Getting these stated plainly, in language a family can understand, is one of the most useful things a facilitator does. A vague bottom line sets a family up to build a plan that gets knocked back, which damages trust in the process and in the worker.

There is a harder part to this as well. People in authority sometimes want to make every decision a bottom line, and if they succeed there is nothing left for the family to decide. A conference that arrives with a long list of not negotiables is a briefing, not a conference, and families work that out within minutes. Part of the facilitator's job is to help the referring agency separate the genuine safety limits from the preferences, and to make the case that less is more. The shorter the list, the more room the family has to build a plan they will actually own and follow through on.

Preparing the people

The facilitator meets the referring caseworker, the other professionals attending, and each family member individually. Everyone hears what the conference is for, what will happen on the day and what is expected of them. The guidelines for the conference are explained during preparation, so that nobody is caught by surprise when they are raised on the day.

The facilitator meets the child or young person as well, and this is where a lot of the difference is made. The point of that meeting is not to decide on their behalf. It is so that they can decide for themselves how they want to take part, who they want beside them on the day, and what they want the adults in the room to know. They often have firm views about the meal too, and getting to choose what everyone eats is not a small thing when you are the reason all these people are coming together. There is more on this further down.

Domestic and family violence is a factor in many referrals. How it is responded to, and what that means for who attends and how the day is run, is worked through during preparation rather than improvised on the day.

The conference, stage by stage

On the day the conference moves through eight stages. The order matters. Each one sets up the next.

1. Welcome and guidelines

   Everyone is welcomed and the guidelines are put on the table straight away, because they were already explained in preparation. Agreement is sought from everyone present. The guidelines are what the facilitator comes back to later if the conversation runs hot.

2. Introductions

   People go around the room. Family members and professionals often do not know each other, and rarely understand each other's roles. This stage is not a formality, it is how the room becomes a group.

3. The referring caseworker shares information

   The caseworker sets out the concerns that need to be addressed to keep the children safe, what support the agency can offer, any orders in place, and the bottom lines around what the plan must achieve.

4. Service and family discussion

   Services describe what support they can put in. Family members ask questions and say what they can offer. Stages three and four together are the information sharing stage, and usually take about an hour. Managing this well is the facilitator's main task of the morning.

5. The meal

   A shared meal sits deliberately between information sharing and family planning time. It is not a break in the process, it is part of it, and it is often where the most repair happens between workers and family. What is eaten is discussed with the family beforehand, because food carries culture, and often it is the child or young person who chooses. Facilitators are taught not to skip it.

6. Private family time

   Professionals leave the room. The family, including extended family and people who function as family, works out the plan on its own. Advocates and support people may stay where safety or the voice of a child requires it, but their role is to support, not to make decisions. This stage is the heart of the model, and the discipline of actually leaving the room is what separates a Family Group Conference from an ordinary case meeting.

7. Plan validation

   The family presents its plan. It is checked against the safety concerns and the bottom lines, and if it meets them, it is ratified. If parts of it do not, the family is given the chance to work on those parts rather than having the plan replaced.

8. Documenting the plan

   Ideally the plan is written up by hand on the day and the family keeps the original. A photo goes out to key family members so they have a copy immediately. The formal document usually follows within five days, and a plan contact person is named to keep things moving.

Child inclusive means the child is actually there

In a lot of the sector, "child inclusive practice" means a specialist meets the child separately and reports their views back to the adults. That has real value. But in Family Group Conferencing it usually means something more direct: the child or young person is in the room, among their own family, while the plan about their life is being made.

They rarely come alone. A young person is encouraged to bring someone of their own choosing, and that is often not the adult a professional would have picked. It might be an older cousin, an aunty, a youth worker, a coach or a favourite teacher. Whoever it is, that person is there for them, not for the process.

How much a young person says is up to them. Some speak for themselves and are more direct than any of the adults present. Some prefer their support person or advocate to speak on their behalf. Some send something in instead of attending: a letter, a recording, a drawing, a list of things they want the adults to know. All of that counts as being heard, provided it actually reaches the room and is taken seriously.

What has to happen first

None of this works without preparation. In their meeting with the facilitator, the young person finds out who will be there, what is likely to be said about their family, that some of it may be hard to hear, and that they are free to step out of the room at any point without it being a problem. They find out what happens with whatever they choose to say. And they settle on a support person, who is then briefed on their role.

During private family time, that support person's job is to make sure the young person is safe and heard, not to take part in the decision making. It is a distinction worth spelling out in advance, because it is easy for a well-meaning advocate to slide into speaking for the family instead of standing beside the child.

Why it matters so much

This is the part that is difficult to convey to anyone who has not seen it. A young person on the edge of care has often spent a long time believing that they are the problem, that their family has given up on them, or that decisions about their life are made in rooms they are not allowed into.

Then they sit in a room and watch grandparents, aunts, uncles and older cousins turn up, talk about them with obvious care, and work out between themselves who is going to step up and how. Being told afterwards that your family met and made a plan is not the same thing as watching them do it. They see it first hand: that they are wanted, and that people will organise themselves around them.

That caution is right, and it is why the decision is made case by case during preparation rather than applied as a rule. Sometimes a young person should be in the room for the whole conference. Sometimes for part of it. Sometimes their voice should come into the room another way while they stay out of it. Working out which of those is right for this child, and then making it happen properly, is a core part of the facilitator's skill.

After the conference

A plan that nobody revisits is not much of a plan. The family group conference review checks what has actually happened against what was agreed, and gives the family the chance to adjust it as circumstances change. The sooner everyone has a copy of the plan, and the clearer it is about who is doing what and by when, the better the review tends to go.

Beyond child protection

Almost all the FGC work happening in Australia sits in the child protection system, and that is where our course examples come from. But the model itself is not specific to it. The mechanics stay much the same wherever it is used. What changes is who raises the concerns and what the bottom lines are.

Disability support

Planning around a person with disability where a service provider, a guardianship body or a tribunal has concerns about how things are being managed. The person at the centre is usually an adult, so they are ordinarily a decision maker in their own right, with supported decision making and an advocate of their own choosing where they want one. The facilitator's task of making sure that person is genuinely heard, and not talked over by the people organising their care, is the same task as ever.

Elder care

An older person whose capacity, care or living arrangements are in question, where the alternative is a decision made by a hospital, a service or a tribunal. Family conflict about care, money and who has been carrying the load is common in these situations, and private family time in a structured process can do a great deal of work.

What does not change is the shape of it. Preparation is still most of the job. The bottom lines still have to be stated plainly by whoever sets them. The family still needs the room to itself.

Family Dispute Resolution and complex families

There is an obvious use for this model in Family Dispute Resolution that we do not see often enough. Where a separation involves a large or complex family, grandparents doing much of the day to day care, siblings across different households, kinship obligations spread over several homes, a mediation between two parents can be too narrow a container for the actual problem. An FGC-style process brings the wider family into the planning rather than leaving them to be affected by it.

It is underutilised, and the main reason is cost. Family Group Conferencing is resource intensive, and in the family law context there is usually no agency funding it the way a child protection department does.

It is worth noticing the blind spot running the other way as well. The bulk of FGC practice sits in child protection, even though family fragmentation following parental separation is frequently one of the things that brought a family to the attention of child protection in the first place.

Why the process works

The mechanics above are straightforward enough to describe. What makes the difference is the stance behind them: that the family has the knowledge and the motivation to solve this, and that the facilitator's job is to create the conditions, not to supply the answer.

That shows up in small, deliberate choices. A circle of chairs with no head of the table. Guidelines agreed rather than imposed. A meal instead of a scheduled break. Waiting out a silence. Leaving the room and meaning it.

It also shows up in who facilitates. A culturally safe facilitator changes what a family is willing to say, and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander family led decision making has grown across Australia for exactly that reason.

Family Group Conferencing around Australia

Every state and territory now uses some form of family led decision making, though the names, the funding models and the way facilitators are engaged differ a great deal, and they change. If you are looking at this as a career direction, check the current arrangements in your own state rather than relying on any summary, including this one.

Why the facilitator's independence matters

One difference between programs is worth naming plainly. It is far preferable that the facilitator is not an employee of the department that is considering removing the child.

A conflict of interest does not have to be real to do damage. If a family believes that the person running the conference answers to the same agency that could take their children, they will hold back, and it is hard to blame them for it. Trust is what makes private family time work at all, and independence is a large part of what earns that trust.

Where the independence is missing, what you get is family led decision making in name but not in practice. All the machinery is there, the stages, the private time, the plan on butcher's paper, without the shift in power that gives the model its value.

Government arrangements, panels and tender processes in this field change regularly, and not always in a straight line. We keep the current picture, state by state, inside our training rather than on this page, because it dates too quickly.

Learning to facilitate

Family Group Conferencing suits people who already have some experience with families. Most of the people who train with us are community services workers, child protection practitioners, social workers or dispute resolution professionals. The skills that transfer well are preparation, patience and the ability to hold a room without taking it over.

Mi has been training and supporting Family Group Conference Facilitators since 2018, in partnership with Eve Clare, one of the most experienced FGC facilitators and trainers in Australia. The course runs across eleven online modules and three half day live workshops, around forty hours all up, and covers the whole arc described on this page: the history and philosophy, referrals and genograms, bottom lines and guiding questions, domestic and family violence, preparing children and young people, running the day, and documenting and reviewing the plan.

We also provide membership-based support for people already working as facilitators, which covers independent complaint handling, professional indemnity insurance referral, peer supervision and professional development. There is still no official government or industry standard for FGC facilitators in Australia, so our standards draw on the AMDRAS practice and ethical standards, adapted for this work.

We also have Family Group Conferencing videos and webinar recordings on our YouTube channel, including sessions with Eve Clare.

Looking for a facilitator rather than training? Our members are listed in the Find an FGC Facilitator directory.