31 October 2024
The ACCP is thrilled to announce that Director and Chair of Child Protection, Professor Leah Bromfield, has been named an SA Finalist for the 2025 Australian of the Year Awards.
Leah's nomination recognises her tireless dedication to establishing practical, evidence-based solutions to child abuse and neglect. For more than two decades, her passion and perseverance have driven profound changes in the way we prevent and respond to child harm across Australia. Read on to learn more about Leah's stellar career and achievements.
One of the first Australians to undertake a PhD specifically focussed on the child protection system, Leah’s doctoral work reconceptualised our understanding of abuse and neglect from something isolated to a prevalent and critical issue in our society. In the mid to late 2000s, her PhD findings contributed to changes in legislation, policy and practice guidance recognising chronic maltreatment and cumulative harm across Australia – relevance that endures today as latest data reflects that this continues to be the dominant pattern for children who experience abuse and neglect.
Also in the mid 2000s, Leah was a member of a small working group drafting a position paper advocating for a National Plan to bring together State, Territory and Commonwealth governments, which resulted in Australia’s first National Framework for Protecting Australia’s Children in 2007. Leah was appointed to bring the sector together and lead the development of Australia’s first research agenda under the National Framework and has been a formal part of the national governance structures for overseeing implementation of the framework since 2010, with direct outcomes of the framework including national standards for out of home care and the establishment of a National Children’s Commissioner.
In 2013, Leah was directly appointed by the Chair of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, the Hon Peter McClellan AM KC, as Professorial Fellow to the Royal Commission. In this role, she was charged with establishing and implementing a research agenda to help address the Commission’s Terms of Reference and provide thought leadership across the Royal Commission. Leah led the development of the Royal Commission’s research agenda, which comprised a phenomenal 100+ research projects in under five years – a body of work that represented the most significant single advancement in the global evidence base regarding Institutional Child Sexual Abuse and directly informed the Royal Commission’s conclusions and recommendations across all 17 volumes of the report, which was handed down in December 2017.
In addition to the direct impacts of the work of the Royal Commission, Leah was responsible for establishing and implementing the first formal research agenda to form a distinct pillar of a Royal Commission’s work. Drawing upon her leadership experience in both government and universities in addition to her subject matter expertise, she established a leading approach to research procurement, governance and project management that was highly effective, and which was subsequently used as the approach of the Disability Royal Commission and the UK Inquiry into Institutional Abuse.
In 2017, Leah’s achievements to date were recognised when she was awarded the National Public Sector and Academia Telstra Business Women's Award. In the same year, she was appointed Co-Director at the Australian Centre for Child Protection.
Following the Nyland Royal Commission into the South Australian Child Protection System, Leah was engaged as part of a five-member Professoriate by the South Australian Department of Premier and Cabinet. In this role, Leah provided strategic evidence for the newly established Early Intervention Research Directorate, and led the development of a new approach to better align evidence to the needs of the client groups in the child protection sector. Specifically, through the development of the Target Group to Outcomes Process and Evidence Matching System (TGO©), new tools and processes were developed to ensure that response and prevention programs and services in the field are delivering the right services and programs to the right children and families. In an overwhelmed and overstretched sector this provides enormous value across funders, service providers and ultimately and most importantly the vulnerable children and families in need. The impact of the TGO system contributed to a recommissioning of South Australia’s family support services to better align with evidence and population needs and was recognised by the South Australian Chief Scientist as a finalist in the Impact category of the SA Science Excellence Awards, and as a winner of the Impact Award in the 2018 Women in Innovation Awards.
In 2021, Leah was appointed Director and Chair of Child Protection at the Australian Centre for Child Protection. In the same year, she commenced a role as one of three Commissioners to the Commission of Inquiry into Tasmanian Government Responses to Child Sexual Abuse in Institutional Settings. The Commission of Inquiry covered an enormous breadth of activity through its 18-month life, including undertaking statewide community consultations, receiving submissions, hearing direct accounts from victim-survivors in private sessions, and from 165 witnesses across numerous public hearings. This work has had a profound and demonstrable effect on the Tasmanian community. The significant Final Report comprised eight volumes covering public schools, hospitals, the out of home care and youth justice systems, and all 191 recommendations in the Final Report were accepted by the Tasmanian Government.
As Director of the ACCP, Leah has led new models and approaches to centre lived experience and decolonisation, including through the establishment of dedicated Aboriginal leadership roles and the Lived Expertise Advisory Panel. Leah's longstanding commitment and focus on improving the lives of Australia’s most vulnerable children, their families, and their communities, is demonstrated on a daily basis through her practical yet strategic leadership of the ACCP and across the broader sector.
In 2023, Leah was appointed as the Chair of the South Australian Child Protection Expert Group, tasked with providing the strategic leadership and advice to support the South Australian government to create a 20-year vision to transform its approach to child protection. Building on a long career of game changing insights into improving child protection policy and practice, Leah’s influence and understanding make her uniquely qualified to lead this reinvention. The group will develop and implement a comprehensive vision for transforming child protection, with a remit to design for the future and focus on what we want child protection to look like 20 years from now.
The project is the culmination of Leah's work and expertise and, during an address at the South Australian Child Protection and Family Support Symposium in November 2023, she explained the project will be transformative, exploring unconventional approaches and interrogating long-held assumptions.
“We will be transparent and inclusive,” Leah told the symposium. “We know that ‘expertise’ goes beyond our group, and lives in frontline workers, community leaders, Elders and Aboriginal-led organisations, carers, and families with experience of the child protection system and the broader support services.
“In reimagining our approach, we will need to question the norms that have felt like immovable truths. We will need to listen and learn from each other—and critically from people with lived experience of our system. We will need to achieve unprecedented collaboration across different sectors; each with their own unique pressures, challenges and ways of working.
“We will need to be ambitious and courageous. But there is no reason why South Australia can’t lead the world in this.”
“Ambitious and courageous” aptly describes the decades of work Leah has put in to create this opportunity for groundbreaking social change.
The ACCP proudly congratulates Prof Leah Bromfield on being an SA Finalist for the 2025 Australian of the Year Awards and wishes her every success.
