Best Resource for Preparing for Tasmania's Step by Step Foster Care Assessment

The best preparation resource for Tasmania's Step by Step foster care assessment is one that translates the assessment's competency framework into plain language before your first home visit, rather than leaving you to guess what the assessor is evaluating. The Step by Step is a structured psychological and practical review of your household conducted over six to eight home visits of approximately two hours each. It is the stage at which most prospective carers in Tasmania drop out — not because they fail, but because the process is more personal and more searching than the DECYP website suggests, and because applicants who feel ambushed by the depth of the questions lose confidence at the precise moment they need it most. A good preparation resource tells you what each session is designed to assess, what "Reflective Practice" and "Affect Management" actually mean in practice, and how to approach the process as a supported evaluation rather than an unpredictable interrogation.

What the Step by Step Assessment Actually Evaluates

The Step by Step is not a test of whether you are a perfect person. It is an assessment of whether you are a suitable professional volunteer — someone who can provide a therapeutic home environment for a child with complex trauma, work collaboratively with a Child Safety Officer and agency support worker, and maintain the child's connections to family, culture, and community.

DECYP assessors are trained to evaluate specific competency areas across the six to eight sessions:

Why Most Applicants Drop Out at This Stage

Research into Tasmanian carer recruitment consistently identifies the Step by Step assessment as the primary exit point for prospective carers who had genuine intent to foster. The reasons are almost always about surprise, not disqualification.

The depth of the personal history questions surprises applicants who expected a home safety inspection and a few straightforward questions. The assessor will ask about your childhood — not to expose damage, but to understand your frame of reference for parenting. An applicant who had a difficult childhood is not disadvantaged by that; an applicant who cannot reflect on it with some analytical distance is. Knowing this distinction before the first visit changes how you prepare.

The "Care Team" concept surprises applicants who assumed that having a child in their home would make them the primary decision-maker. In the Tasmanian system, legal guardianship for children on Care and Protection Orders rests with the Secretary of DECYP. This means a Child Safety Officer can make the final call on whether a child can attend a birthday party, travel interstate, or receive a particular medical treatment. The Step by Step assessment tests your actual comfort with this arrangement, not just your stated willingness. Applicants who haven't thought through what shared authority looks like in daily practice often find this the hardest part of the sessions.

The volume of the process surprises applicants who expected three or four short visits. Six to eight sessions of two hours each, covering personal history, relationship history, parenting philosophy, household dynamics, and practical safety — across eight to twelve weeks — is a significant commitment. Tracking what has been covered and what is still to come reduces the sense of indefinite exposure.

What a Good Preparation Resource Provides

The resources most prospective Tasmanian carers encounter before the assessment are:

The DECYP website: Mentions that the assessment involves home visits and covers "your life experiences and motivations." No competency detail.

NGO orientation sessions: Provide a general overview of what the Step by Step involves, typically in less than twenty minutes of an orientation session. Useful but surface-level.

The FKAT Handbook: Covers the assessment within a 90-plus page technical manual. Accurate but not structured as a preparation guide.

Facebook carer groups: Provide peer accounts of the assessment, which are emotionally useful but often focus on the most difficult experiences rather than the typical one.

A structured preparation guide provides what none of these do: a competency-by-competency breakdown of what each session is designed to assess, what language and framing the assessor is trained to use, what the assessor is looking for in your responses versus what they are not, and how to prepare your household and your thinking before the first visit rather than learning it through the process itself.

Who This Is For

• First-time applicants who want to understand what the Step by Step assessment is evaluating before the first home visit begins
• Anyone who feels nervous about the "personal history" element of the assessment and wants to understand what "Reflective Practice" actually requires
• Couples where one partner is more reluctant than the other — understanding the assessment's actual scope often resolves reluctance based on misconceptions about what it entails
• Applicants who have been "thinking about fostering" for six to eighteen months and identify the assessment as the specific thing holding them back
• People with non-traditional backgrounds — a history of mental health treatment, a prior divorce, a period of financial difficulty — who assume these factors disqualify them and want to understand how the assessment actually weighs complex histories

Who This Is NOT For

• Carers who are already in the assessment process and well into the home visits — targeted preparation helps most before the process begins
• Applicants with specific legal concerns about a particular element of their background that they believe may disqualify them — these require a conversation with a family lawyer, not a preparation guide
• Anyone who is already approved and seeking ongoing case management support

The Honest Difficulty of the Step by Step

The Step by Step is genuinely searching. It is designed to be. Tasmania's system has a documented history of failures when children were placed with carers who were not adequately assessed — the Commission of Inquiry into institutional child sexual abuse documented outcomes that occurred partly because assessment and oversight were insufficient. The current rigour of the process is a direct response to those findings.

What this means for applicants: the discomfort of the process is intentional and appropriate, not arbitrary bureaucratic intrusion. Assessors who ask difficult questions about your own childhood are doing their job. The preparation value is not in finding ways to deflect those questions — it is in arriving at those questions having already thought through your honest answers, so that the session is a conversation rather than a surprise.

The Right Preparation Approach

1. Read the competency framework in plain language — understand what Reflective Practice, Affect Management, and Care Team functioning actually mean before the first session
2. Walk through your own history with your partner before the assessment, specifically considering: your own upbringing, your experience of parenting or caring for others, how you manage your own emotional regulation in difficult situations
3. Prepare your home physically — dedicated bedroom, smoke alarms, medication storage, pool fencing if applicable — before the first visit rather than during it
4. Identify your support network and be specific about it: names, relationships, what kind of support each person can practically provide
5. Read the "Who Can Say OK" guide before the sessions, so that you genuinely understand shared authority rather than simply agreeing to it in the abstract

The Tasmania Foster Care Guide provides an Assessment Interview Tracker as one of its six printable worksheets — listing all sessions with space to record dates, topics covered, and preparation notes — alongside the plain-language competency breakdown that forms the core of its Step by Step preparation chapter.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does the Step by Step assessment disqualify people with difficult personal histories?

No. The assessment explicitly evaluates "Reflective Practice" — the capacity to examine your own history with honesty and analytical distance — not whether your history was difficult. Applicants with a history of mental health treatment, prior relationship breakdowns, or childhood adversity are regularly approved as foster carers in Tasmania. What matters is how you engage with those experiences, not their existence.

How long does the entire Step by Step assessment take from first visit to panel?

Typically eight to twelve weeks for the assessment itself, followed by panel review. Total time from initial enquiry to approval is generally six to eight months, though kinship carer pathways can be shorter when a child is already placed on a provisional basis.

What happens if the assessor recommends against approval?

You receive a "Proposed Negative Notice" and have the right to provide additional information or seek an administrative review of the decision. The appeal process exists specifically because the panel's decision is based on a recommendation, not an automatic outcome. FKAT's FAST program (Foster and Kinship Care Advocacy and Support Team) can provide support through this process.

Can the assessment be paused if our circumstances change?

Yes. If there is a significant life change during the assessment — job change, health event, household change — you can discuss pausing the process with your assessor. Restarting after a significant gap typically requires a review of what was already covered rather than starting entirely from scratch.

Is the assessment the same across all three Tasmanian regions?

The Step by Step framework is standardised statewide by DECYP. The assessor may be employed by an NGO agency rather than by DECYP directly, and individual assessors bring their own experience and style to the sessions, but the competency areas being evaluated are the same in Hobart, Launceston, and Burnie.

Do both partners need to participate in every session?

Yes, for couples. All household members over the age of 16 are involved in the assessment at some level, and for couples, both partners participate in the core sessions because the assessment is of the household, not of one individual.

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