Introduction

Ontario is working with children's aid societies, including Indigenous societies, to improve outcomes for children and youth who are receiving child welfare services. We are also working to strengthen accountability across the child welfare sector.

Ontario reports on performance indicator (PI) results in three key areas: the safety of children and youth in local communities, the permanency of their living arrangements and the well-being of children and youth in care.

These areas are aligned with the purpose of the Child, Youth and Family Services Act, 2017 (CYFSA). Results include:

  • 85 per cent of families investigated in 2019-20 did not have a recurrence of child protection concerns within 12 months after the investigation
  • 81 per cent of children and youth who came into the care of a society in 2017-18 were discharged from care within three years
  • the average score measuring the quality of the caregiver-child/youth relationship was six-and- a- half out of eight for 2020

Ontario introduced the public reporting of performance indicators to:

  • foster ongoing learning by societies and continued quality improvement in services
  • increase transparency and accountability in societies' ongoing work to achieve better outcomes for children and youth
  • support the effective and fiscally responsible use of available public funds
  • raise awareness of the performance of societies

All societies are required to publicly report five PIs, reflecting the safety, permanency and well-being of children and youth receiving their services.

The ministry first publicly posted aggregate data and society-level results for the five PIs, in June 2016. The ministry is now posting ten years of provincial aggregate and society-level results (2010-11 to 2019-20) on this site through a series of linked pages. For technical reasons, some societies are unable to provide all of their results in the two years following their transition from their legacy case management system to the Child Protection Information Network (CPIN). Also, some Indigenous societies had not operated long enough to have the two years of data required or had not participated in public reporting this year pending clarification on how this reporting reflects Indigenous data governance. Additionally, there have been delays in reporting because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Performance indicators

Ontario reports on five performance indicators under three key areas.