2025 Needs and Impact Survey insights
Overview
Child Family Community Australia (CFCA) is an information exchange project led by the Australian Institute of Family Studies (AIFS) and funded by the Australian Government Department of Social Services (DSS). CFCA aims to support the child, family and welfare sector by providing recent and reliable evidence to inform your practice and improve outcomes for Australian families.
AIFS is committed to engaging with the sector to understand what practice topics are useful to you and your work and how you want to receive information. Our annual CFCA Needs and Impact Survey is one of the ways we do this.
The survey was live from 29 October to 30 November 2025.
This short article provides a summary of the findings from the 2025 survey. We explain how we plan to use the information to further understand the sector’s information needs; as well as to guide the development of new CFCA resources.
Who completed the survey?
The 2025 survey received 1,562 responses (compared to 890 in 2024) and 933 fully completed responses (558 in 2024) from a range of child, family and community welfare professionals.
Survey participants came from all Australian states and territories. This reflects our aim to have national reach and impact. The most represented states were New South Wales (35.9%), Victoria (24.2%) and Queensland (17.3%). The pattern of responses was broadly in proportion to Australian population figures.
Responses to the survey came from different sectors and organisation types. More than half of respondents (51.9%) worked in community-based support services or an ‘other not-for-profit organisation’ (Table 1). The next largest group of respondents (24.2%) worked in a government department or agency.
| Type of organisation | No. | % |
|---|---|---|
| Other not-for-profit organisation (charity, religious organisation or other type of non-government organisation) | 386 | 28.3 |
| Government department or agency | 330 | 24.2 |
| Community-based support service | 323 | 23.6 |
| Educational institution (e.g. school, university) | 125 | 9.2 |
| Private, for-profit organisation | 81 | 5.9 |
| Other | 68 | 6.0 |
| Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander specific (e.g. Aboriginal community-controlled organisation) | 53 | 3.9 |
Respondents were most likely to be employed as client-facing practitioners, clinicians or mid-level managers. Their main areas of work were family support services, education and training, child protection and/or out-of-home care, and domestic, family and sexual violence.
Respondents were relatively experienced: nearly 86% had been working for more than 3 years in their current sector and 43% for more than 10 years.
What you told us
Areas of practice you were interested in
We presented 23 broad topic areas and asked you to select areas where you wanted or needed evidence-based resources. More than 40% of respondents indicated an interest in topics related to child abuse and neglect, domestic and family violence, adolescents and young people, mental health and wellbeing, parents and parenting. The figure below shows the top 10 areas of interest and the percentage of those respondents who said they wanted resources on these topics.
The next figure displays the top 10 topics in 2024 and 2025. There was some variation in respondents’ preferred topic areas compared to the previous year’s survey. The topic with the greatest increase of interest was child abuse and neglect (which was ranked as the top priority in 2025, 4 places higher than in 2024).
Within these broad topic areas, we also asked people to identify subtopics of interest. The top 10 most requested subtopics in 2025 highlight some interesting differences from 2024 (see figure below). While intervention and prevention in domestic and family violence and interventions in relation to child abuse and neglect were again commonly endorsed topic areas, a higher proportion of the audience in 2025 were interested in child protection and abuse prevention. Several subtopics were new to the top 10 categories in 2025:1
- coercive control (domestic and family violence)
- mental health and wellbeing (adolescents and young people)
- harmful and risky behaviour (adolescents and young people)
- risk factors for child abuse (child abuse and neglect).
How accessible our resources are
A new question related to accessibility was included in this year’s survey. Respondents were asked if they thought AIFS resources and research were easy to read and understand. The majority of respondents (91.9%, n = 1,050) agreed or strongly agreed that AIFS resources and research were easy to read and understand.
How you want to receive information from us
We asked which CFCA resources support you to use evidence in your work. Most respondents used evidence from our online written resources, newsletters and webinars in their practice.
The helpdesk – which aims to help users understand or find these resources – was the least likely to be used for support. Although this resource is still well utilised, we will look at how we can further promote ways to help you to use our resources.
We also looked at how people in different roles used different resource types by comparing responses from the 3 most common role types: client-facing practitioners, clinicians and mid-level managers.
We found that slightly higher proportions of client-facing practitioners and mid-level managers use learnings from online written resources and newsletters in their work than do clinicians. Similar proportions of client-facing practitioners, clinicians and mid-levels managers used the helpdesk and information from webinars to inform their work.
If you are not familiar with the helpdesk, CFCA offers a free research and information helpdesk for child, family and community welfare practitioners, service providers, researchers and policy makers. We can help you with enquiries related to the latest stats and facts, evaluation advice, research findings and practice/policy pointers.
You can access the helpdesk using this web form. Alternatively, if you have used our helpdesk and would like to provide feedback on your experience, please feel free to contact us via email.
What participants liked about CFCA resources
The survey contained an opportunity for respondents to provide an open-text response about what they liked about CFCA resources. Most commonly, we heard that:
- AIFS/CFCA is a reliable source of information and produces trustworthy resources.
- CFCA resources are informative, well-researched and practical.
- CFCA resources are useful and relevant to practice in the Australian context.
- CFCA resources are of excellent quality.
- CFCA resources are easy to find, easy to read and easy to understand.
- There are a variety of topics and a variety of formats, which make resources accessible.
- CFCA resources are practical and shareable with colleagues and clients alike.
Here are some examples of things our audience told us they liked about CFCA resources.
What we could do differently
We are always keen to understand where our audience might see areas for improvement. The survey contained an opportunity to provide an open-text response about opportunities for doing things differently.
The most common suggestions focused on ways we might format our resources, deliver our content and how we could do more to promote our resources, including reaching specific target audiences. Respondents would like to see complex concepts delivered in plain language formats with simplified visuals that they can easily print for ease of access to a broader audience. Other ideas for improving accessibility are using tools such as audio accompaniments to resources and Auslan for webinars/video.
Respondents would also like to have access to resources that are relevant to various levels of knowledge, including advanced level resources for professionals who have prior familiarity with a topic. These suggestions indicate that our audience is broad (e.g. have different levels of existing knowledge) with diverse needs for us to consider and cater for.
Many respondents expressed a desire for resources that can be quickly read and digested to fit into their busy work schedules.
Some specific suggestions for improvement included:
- short summary documents that can be easily downloaded, printed and shared
- more simplified infographics to facilitate understanding of key concepts
- more culturally appropriate resources and culturally relevant coverage.
These suggestions were similar to those we received in the last survey but we also heard this time that some of our audience would like us to increase the use of QR codes to make accessing resources easier.
What we did differently after last year’s survey
Following last year’s feedback, we created short and accessible information sheets (with QR codes) on Supporting neurodivergent children and young people. We also included infographics in resources to facilitate understanding of key concepts (e.g. see Figure 1 in Understanding and responding to parents of transgender and gender diverse young people).
How will we use this information
We are reviewing the survey findings and your feedback so that it can inform our planning for the next 12 months. We use what you tell us to plan what topics we will research, what formats we can offer and what changes we can make to better meet your needs.
We will also be consulting our Critical Friends Network (CFN) of people working in the child and family sector. This group provides us with access to a range of sector and expert perspectives that can:
- inform our topic selection for new resources
- provide insight on key child, family and community welfare sector issues and challenges
- provide feedback on our resources
- help us understand how the sector can be supported to use evidence in their practice.
The CFCA team would like to thank everyone who completed our survey.
1 Coercive control was a new subtopic included in the 2025 survey that was not included in the 2024 survey. Mental health and wellbeing, harmful and risky behaviour and risk factors for child abuse were each included in the 2024 survey but were not in the top 10 that year.