The agency reported a nearly 45% rise in reports from July 2024 to March 2025, causing pressure on allocation timeframes.
Labour’s Willow-Jean Prime and the PSA’s Fleur Fitzsimons highlighted concerns over workload and staffing cuts impacting service delivery.
The Ministry for Children, Oranga Tamariki, is responding to a “significant” increase in reports of concern, with more than 1000 children overdue for allocation to a social worker.
As at March 31, there were 1319 children overdue to be assigned a social worker.
The agency has seen a largernumber of cases that need to be allocated – as reports of concern rise.
Oranga Tamariki data, obtained by NZME under the Official Information Act, shows almost 75,000 children and young people came to the agency’s attention in the 2023/24 financial year, ending in July, through reports of concern.
From July 2024 to the end of March 2025, Oranga Tamariki saw 81,013 reports of concern.
It’s estimated in the year to the end of March 2025, there was a nearly 45% increase in reports of concern, compared with the previous 12-month period.
“Increased volumes have placed pressure on the timeframes taken to safely allocate cases to a social worker,” the agency noted in its response.
Oranga Tamariki chief social worker Nicolette Dickson said that cases outside of that timeframe are often out of their 10-working-day target by a matter of days.
“There will always still be work being done by someone senior on that site to review those cases and make those judgment calls about which cases are next to be allocated, and which social workers are best to pick up each case,” Dickson said.
Independent Children’s Monitor Aroturuki Tamariki chief executive Arran Jones said his office had heard that a reduction in funding, and some service cuts in prevention and intervention, may have affected the need for people to make reports of concern.
A 2024 report from the Ombudsman caused Oranga Tamariki to change its policy around reports of concern.
“To see that there are unallocated cases is a concern,” Jones said.
He said people may have contact with Oranga Tamariki while a formal allocation is taking place.
“You want to make sure that a social worker is allocated quickly so that the work and the support can be put in place at the earliest opportunity.”
A follow-up report after the brutal murder of Malachi Subecz found children were “no safer now” than when the boy died in 2021. Reports of concern were raised with Oranga Tamariki before his death.
Jones said the follow-up report found sites were receiving reports of concern and then having to make decisions based on social workers’ resources.
“You’ve got differing thresholds in sites where response is required,” he added, noting “that’s a concern to have an inconsistent threshold for a response”.
We are not confident that tamariki in similar situations to Malachi are any more likely to be seen, or kept safe by the system than they were when Malachi died.
Chief Children’s Commissioner Dr Claire Achmad said numerous factors were likely responsible for an increase in reports of concern, including elevated stress levels, cost-of-living pressures and cuts to social services.
She reiterated the importance of timeliness when responding to reports of concern.
“I am concerned about that quite significant number of unallocated cases,” Achmad told NZME in an interview.
What we’re talking about here is the safety of children and young people in our communities. That needs to be absolutely paramount.
She noted that when a child or young person is seeing a social worker regularly, it can make a big difference in their experience in the state care system.
“When they don’t have that social worker support, that’s often where things fall down,” the commissioner said. “I’m really keen to see Oranga Tamariki focus in on ensuring that reports of concern are allocated appropriately to social workers, and there’s the right resourcing and system support for that to work well.”
Labour’s Willow-Jean Prime said it “concerned” her that there was a “high level of unallocated children” and called for reassurance from the agency and the minister that children would be allocated to social workers.
She said concerns had been raised about job reductions at Oranga Tamariki and how that would impact the work of others at the Government agency.
“We have urged the minister to stop these cuts. Sadly, there have been significant cuts to early intervention and prevention, but also in the restructuring of Oranga Tamariki, over 400 roles have been slashed,” Prime said in an interview.
“That is having an impact on the front line,” the Labour MP said.
Public Service Association national secretary Fleur Fitzsimons said there are major workload problems at the agency and this was a key reason their members took strike action last year.
“There has been some progress made on workload in the collective bargaining which union members will be voting on next week but the reality is that Oranga Tamariki needs more social workers and support staff to meet the increasing need to support children and their families,” she said.
Fitzsimons called it a “tragedy” that there were children overdue for allocation.
Oranga Tamariki said that every report of concern is important. When the agency receives a report, a number of immediate processes take place to determine whether an urgent safety response is needed. If so, the agency deems the case to be critical or urgent.
Remaining cases are triaged, meaning people are assessing how quickly they should respond, what that response should be and whether there is already support in place.
Cases that do need a social worker response are transferred to a site that aims to allocate a response within 10 working days.
“There are cases where we are not meeting our own timeframes to get out and provide that immediate social work response. Of course that’s something that we’re really focused on,” Dickson said.
“We’ve done a lot of work and we are seeing that heading in the right direction. It’s a continued priority focus,” the agency’s chief social worker added.
The increase in reports of concern was “definitely something that we [Oranga Tamariki] are very aware of”.
“In all honesty, [it] is putting more pressure on our responses. We do have very busy social workers working really hard to make sure, particularly those children who most need a response, get the response they need.”
Staff workloads
As at April 8, 2025, 305 care and protection social workers were dealing with a caseload of more than 20 children, with the average caseload sitting at 17 children.
Current workforce protocol requires “conversations about workload” to take place when a social worker is dealing with 20 or more children.
The protocol notes that caseload numbers alone are “not a sound measure of workload”.
Children are counted more than once if they appear in different phases, when caseloads are being quantified, through “intake”, “assessment” and “intervention”.
Oranga Tamariki noted caseload numbers alone were a “poor measure of workload”, as it can be influenced by complexity, available support and experience.
Higher caseload numbers can also occur if the same children are involved in more than one phase and are counted twice or three times.
“A common reason social workers are working with a higher number of children is because they are working with families with large numbers of children,” the agency said in the Official Information Act response.
Oranga Tamariki added it was working on reducing the number of less urgent cases which are unallocated at any one time, and is also working on reducing caseloads.
Fitzsimons said the solution cannot be to simply add to the workload of existing social workers, who were already over-worked.
Public Service Association National Secretary Fleur Fitzsimons said Oranga Tamariki needed more social workers. Photo / Mark Mitchell
“The recognised caseload is no more than 20 and these figures show 305 care and protection social workers have a higher caseload than that. This is unsafe and unmanageable and must be urgently reduced,” she said.
The PSA national secretary said figures show the agency need an additional 65 social workers as a minimum.
The Government’s response
Minister for Children Karen Chhour said she had sent a message around what Oranga Tamariki needed to do better, including engagement with children and young people and working with other government agencies to deliver better outcomes.
“Abuse or neglect of a child is never acceptable, but we can’t hide from the fact that it does happen, and we have long needed greater reporting of harm to ensure we’re really understanding what is happening in our communities,” Chhour said in a statement.
“Increased reporting over the past year shows that this message is getting through.”
The minister continued to encourage anyone who sees anything to say something, adding “increased reporting also shows that people feel like they can report their concerns to Oranga Tamariki or other government agencies and that these reports are being captured and actioned”.
Chhour admitted greater reporting was always going to lead to increased workloads, reiterating that was why the Government was increasing the overall number of social workers.
The minister also applauded investments to the tune of $68 million in case-management technology for social workers, which she said would allow them to spend more time with families, help young people and improve collaboration.
The funding boost, over four years, aimed to replace technology deemed no longer fit for purpose, including the case-management system that was more than 20 years old at the time of last year’s announcement.
Oranga Tamariki welcomed the funding at the time, saying it would increase the amount of time social workers have to engage with children, young people and families.
There is still work to be done, but our children deserve nothing less than a system that protects and values them.
The increase in reports is said to be due to multiple factors, including seeing more children at school and at doctors’ practices following the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, and a change in how the ministry reports some information.
Speaking to NZME, Oranga Tamariki senior leader Nicolette Dickson reiterated the importance of people making reports of concern.
Azaria Howell is a multimedia reporter working from Parliament’s Press Gallery. She joined NZME in 2022 and became a Newstalk ZB political reporter in late 2024, with a keen interest in public service agency reform and Government spending.
