Below, you’ll find a deep dive into our work with The Salvation Army (TSA) Indonesia.
The first section outlines the incredible impact our partnership has had on the lives of children living in TSA, Indonesia’s care. The second explores what work was done to drive these results. Feel free to use the links above and throughout the first section to take you straight to where you want to go
From policies and procedures to HUGE change for children
You’re about to read terms like:
✳️ case management,
✳️ essential information,
✳️ care plans
✳️ assessments and best interest decision making
✳️ protective behaviours.
I’m guessing they don’t exactly get you excited…
But I have a sneaking suspicion we can change that. Will you give me 2 minutes to try?!
Ok, here goes:
What if we tell you that SFAC training and consultation with The Salvation Army (TSA) in Indonesia on these topics (and a few others) has had the following impacts:
👶🏽 Over 300 children now have a written record of their history.
That’s 300 children living in the care of TSA, Indonesia, who now have access to clear records of who their family members are, their likes and dislikes at different ages, their medical and education history…
All the information a parent usually holds about their child.
Essential information that often gets lost when a child ends up being cared for by an organisation.
Essential information that means each of those children can now receive care designed to meet their unique needs.
🧕🏽👴🏽 Over 300 children’s immediate and/or extended family members have been identified.
This paves the way for many of those children to once again live with their biological families. In 2024, some children were reunited with their families, with many more to return to their families this year and in the future.
📉 In fact, the number of children living in TSA Indonesia’s children’s homes, has decreased by over 100! (you can read more about the details behind this number here – statistics like this should always be understood in context!)
Even for children unable to safely live with their families, knowing who their family members are and their family’s history is an important part of understanding who they are – the people and circumstances that have shaped their lives so far. Often, safe, enduring family relationships can be developed even when living in the same household isn’t possible.
🤰🏽🧑🏽🍼👶🏽 A mother and baby programme has been established.
Our early work with TSA Indonesia led to a recommendation to develop a mother and baby programme. Young, new mothers often felt their only option was to give up their child. This new programme allows them to live with their children. While in a safe and supportive environment, the mothers and their families or support networks have time to plan how they can care for the child into the future. This means more children are growing up with their biological mothers rather than in institutions.
🏢 Government inspectors were so impressed with the forms and recording processes TSA Indonesia developed in their work with SFAC that they have copied them to show other Indonesian organisations involved in child care and protection.
‘The government recently visited our children’s homes for inspections. They were very positive about our case files, saying no one else in the country has information about a child from the beginning to now. They told us they will tell other children’s homes to come and see how we are doing it.
The government inspectors copied our Essential Information and Care Plan forms – they thought they were simple and everyone should have them.’
(You can read more about the collaborative development of these forms and processes here)
This government interest suddenly means the number of children in Indonesia whose lives have been changed by SFAC’s partnership with TSA Indonesia has the potential to grow exponentially.
We don’t know about you, but these are the kind of changes we get excited about.
And that’s why our team of trainers are passionate about their work – even when it means talking forms and processes.
To be honest, finding ways to make sessions on topics like these fun and engaging might just be one of our most important skills!
Curious about how these changes happened?
Keep reading – everything you need to know is below.
(And if you’ve still got questions, feel free to get in touch on info@sfac.org.uk)
SFAC & TSA Indonesia – our partnership at a glance
Where: Indonesia
Who: The Salvation Army, Indonesia
When: 2017 to present.
What: TSA Indonesia first approached SFAC after their internal review process for children’s homes concluded improvements could be made in the way they protected and cared for children. They decided to start by commissioning an external review of one of their children’s homes to gain an independent perspective, identify current strengths and make recommendations for improvement and next steps.
TSA Indonesia were determined to ensure the children in their care were given the best possible chance to thrive. Like so many of the organisations SFAC works with, they were operating within a national system that prioritises institutional style care and offers few, if any, alternatives. Additionally, they faced significant geographical challenges unique to Indonesia and had a large staff to prepare for changes.
How SFAC’s 5 Pillar Model of Good Child Care & Protection Practice has transformed the way TSA Indonesia works.
At SFAC, all of our work is informed by our 5 Pillar Model of Good Child Care & Protection Practice:
Know the child
Know the family
Know the community
Know the context
Know the organisation
Where we begin working with a partner organisation depends entirely on what that organisation wants and needs at the time we first start working together.
Know the organisation. Know the context.
In this case, the work began with SFAC conducting an independent review of a babies’ home in Surabaya. The review was designed to help TSA, Indonesia to better understand the strengths and weaknesses of the home and to explore options for the future (Know the organisation). As with all SFAC reviews, all recommendations would be informed by research into local child care and protection policy and legislation and any challenges unique to the local context (Know the context).
SFAC’s review confirmed the challenges identified in TSA’s broader, internal review. The recommendations from the two reviews, changes to government and TSA International’s policies on protecting and caring for children, alongside legislation that allowed for children to be reunited with families, resulted in TSA Indonesia deciding to make significant changes to the way they work with children.
Supporting organisational change
For the changes to have the best chance of success, broad organisational support was needed. SFAC’s 4 Stage Cycle of Learning informed the next steps. The first stage involves understanding “what” and “why” – what needs to be done differently and why changes are important in ensuring children are given the best chance to thrive.
To help the TSA Indonesia staff process the recommendations from the two reviews and prepare them for making changes to their child care and protection practice, two of our social work trainers, Dan Hope (our CEO) and Mick Pease (our founder) delivered several interactive, in person advocacy workshops.
The workshops were delivered to children’s home directors, social workers and senior leaders. Dan and Mick used stories, discussions and activities to explore why children’s homes aren’t the best solution for every child.
They also covered:
✳️ Why reuniting children with families needs to be done slowly and safely and only in situations where thorough assessments of the child’s needs and the family’s capacity to safely and appropriately care for the child have been completed.
✳️ Why organisations need to have clear policies and processes in place to support the process of assessment and reunification.
✳️ And why some children’s homes will always be needed.
These workshops have been delivered several times over the course of our work with TSA Indonesia to incorporate different groups of staff, include new staff and to consolidate knowledge.
Once the staff understood the need for change and had a broad understanding of what it would look like, it was time to dive into specifics.
Know the child.
Until an organisation knows the children in its care the way a parent does, it’s difficult to make informed decisions about what will be in their best interests.
Dan ran training online and in person to help social work staff, children’s home staff and senior leaders identify what they knew about each child and to establish what additional information they needed.
Of course, exactly what an organisation needs to know about the children in their care will differ slightly from country to country and region to region. This is why these training sessions are run as interactive, collaborative workshops, with both SFAC and TSA staff bringing their expertise and knowledge to the table.
The training covered:
✳️ Essential Information: This is all the information about a child that a parent usually holds – when they started walking and talking, what they like and don’t like, any medications they take, who their friends are, who their family is, how their education is going, etc. When children grow up separated from their family, this information is often lost and, as a result, all children receive the same care (this is what “institutionalised” care looks like).
✳️ Care Plans: These are the future plans for the children and are developed based on the information identified in the Essential Information. Care Plans need to be specific and clearly state who is responsible for making sure each part of the plan happens.
Learning the skills involved in preparing high quality essential information files and clear, effective care plans is a process. This is why our work with an organisation is always more than “just” a few days of training and our partnerships are long term.
Here we can see our 4 Stage Cycle of Learning in action again.
Stage One
The initial training demonstrates what is needed (what is meant by Essential Information; what is a Care Plan) and why it’s so important (they form the basis of moving away from institutional style care to providing each child with indiviudalised care tailored to their unique needs and circumstances; as well as ensuring each child has access to a record of their lives)
Stage Two – Learning the skills and knowledge needed to do the work
Subsequent training teaches practitioners (for TSA, this is their team of social workers) how to gather and record essential information and how to prepare and implement a Care Plan.
Part of this training and consultation included working together to develop bespoke forms to assist in the gathering and recording processes. These forms are now in use. And, as you heard earlier, government inspectors were so impressed with the way TSA had been using them to improve children’s care that they have copied them to share with other Indonesian child care and protection agencies.
“Really helpful… The forms developed with SFAC helped us improve our practice. The training helped us understand how to use them and how to analyse. We know we can culturally adapt them and they are helping us identify strengths and risks to make best interest decisions.’
“For every step we now have forms, processes, understand why we are doing things and how. We still have challenges and learnings. We still make mistakes but we know SFAC is there to guide, help and assist us develop our skills and knowledge.“
Social Workers, TSA, Indonesia
We’ll come back to Stages Three and Four in just a moment.
First, it’s important to acknowledge that gathering this information for several hundred children spread across a diverse and challenging geography is no small achievement. Alongside learning a new way of working, the team were also dealing with the additional challenges of the pandemic, staff turnover and changes in funding and programme requirements. Challenges also faced by many of the organisations we work with.
However, by 2022, all 350 children living in children’s homes had a file with essential information and a care plan. Now that the children had clear records and plans for their day-to-day care, it was time to get to know their families and communities.
It was time to see whether some children could safely return to live with their families.
Know the family. Know the community
The next phase of our work with TSA Indonesia involved further training and consultation on what to consider when assessing whether or not it is safe and appropriate (i.e., in a child’s best interests) to return to live with their family.
This included learning core concepts and skills needed to:
✳️ Get to know the family and assess their capacity to care for their child(ren).
✳️ How to gather information about the child and family’s community (e.g. what risks exist in the community, what resources are available or lacking, what protective factors and strengths does the community demonstrate) and how to manage region specific challenges (e.g. Some Indonesian islands may not have a school or access to healthcare).
✳️ How to use the information gathered in the Know the Child pillar in the decision making process
✳️ How to analyse and assess how the information gathered above impacts the child’s care and wellbeing.
Having now received training on all five “Know the…” Pillars to at least stage 1 or 2 level, the impact of our partnership gathered pace.
When we began working with TSA Indonesia, 350 children were living in their children’s homes.
That number is now down to 240.
This change has occurred for a few reasons:
With appropriate processes in place, social workers started to reunite some children with their families after thorough assessments and analysis identified it was safe and appropriate to do so..
The children’s homes now have admissions processes in place, which means children are only accepted into care by court order or through a thorough assessment process.
Finally, some children have simply “aged out” of care – they are now too old to live in the children’s homes. How to appropriately support these young people is one of the questions being addressed in our current consulting work with TSA, Indonesia, along with how to provide the best quality care for children who cannot safely and/or appropriately return to their families.
The information gathered as TSA Indonesia continues to get to know each of the 5 pillars is also informing these consultations and assisting them in determining what programmes of support TSA Indonesia may wish to deliver in the future.
Stage Three – Becoming advanced practitioners
As we have continued to work with the TSA, Indonesia team, it has been important to include further specialised training. This Stage Three training is delivered to a few key workers to equip them with the skills and knowledge needed to turn their basic skills into advanced skills. As advanced practitioners, they will be able to support their colleagues in the ongoing work.
With TSA Indonesia, this stage has been and will continue to be, achieved in a few ways:
- Two social workers attended our Protective Behaviours (PBs) Foundation Course with Caitlin (chartered psychologist) and Leah (social worker). The PBs course helps participants with the process of identifying children’s needs, particularly their social and emotional needs, and gathering the information needed for their care plans. In future, the PBs framework will also be useful for them in working with families and in managing their workloads and preventing burnout. After attending the initial PBs training, these social workers have access to ongoing mentoring through our PBs Power Hours and additional PBs mini courses.
- Case Consultation – Dan has completed many online and in person case consultations over the years of this partnership. These mentoring sessions have provided the opportunity to discuss some of the more complex circumstances of some of the children. The conversations are designed to help senior social workers unpick how to make decisions that are in the best interests of each child.
Here’s an example of the types of issues discussed in case consultations:
For some children, being reunited with their families may mean no longer having access to education and health care.
For a healthy 7 year old child, the value of growing up in their family, connected to their community and way of life may well outweigh these challenges. Case consultation sessions help to identify the advantages and disadvantages for the child and explore creative ways to address issues like access to education.
For a child who needs regular medication and access to a hospital to survive and thrive, on the other hand, other options that allow the connection with family and community and also meet their health needs will need to be considered.
For a 15 year old who has been living in a children’s home since age 4 or 5, their final years of school and imagining their future accordingly, returning to live on a remote island cut off from the networks they’ve developed and access to education might not be the right choice. Other options would be explored in the case consultation session.
3. Further training and consultation sessions online and in person, as determined by the outcomes of Stage Four
Stage Four – Developing processes for quality assurance, evaluation and review
As new knowledge and skills are being implemented and improved and new processes put in place, so are processes for quality assurance and evaluation.
Training and consultation in 2025 include developing a panel system to review children’s files and social workers’ assessment processes to ensure each child has their unique needs and circumstances addressed appropriately. This is happening alongside training and support to keep developing social workers’ information gathering, assessment and decision making skills.
The evolving systems are being regularly reviewed and improved (with SFAC’s support initially) to ensure the process of getting to know each pillar is always up to date, details are constantly being refreshed, and everything is being done within the context of Indonesian law
This process of regular review and evaluation provides opportunities for TSA to reconsider the Know the Organisation pillar, especially in light of all the new information they have access to. As they continue getting to know the children, their families and their communities, they can make more informed decisions about their future contributions to child care and protection in Indonesia.
Ongoing consultation sessions are helping TSA Indonesia to consider what they want to do, what they can afford to do and what they will need in place to make those plans a reality.
To discover how we can also support your organisation’s mission, contact us at info@sfac.org.uk.
Reflecting on the collaboration so far
Our CEO, Dan, has led the work with Indonesia. We asked him to reflect on the experience so far:
“It has been a privilege to be involved with TSA Indonesia and witness the significant changes over the years. Seeing Riatun evolve in her social work to become a confident manager and mentor to others has been a significant highlight. In 2024 and 2025, it has been heartening to see so much of their earlier training being put into practice, and growing confidence in using their new case management systems and processes.
The work with TSA Indonesia has highlighted the value of the mentoring aspect of our work once again. The training is important, but it’s most effective when practitioners are supported with ongoing mentoring as they implement what they’ve learnt during the training.
Another highlight is always the amazing food! I am now a nasi goreng convert!”
This journey highlights the power of long-term partnerships and innovation in transforming child care practices. Together, SFAC and The Salvation Army Indonesia are creating a brighter future for children and their families.
You can ensure we can keep working with organisations like TSA Indonesia so more children thrive by donating using the button below.