Sarah Codrington

Sarah commenced her child protection career in 2009 in Alice Springs, Northern Territory (NT) where she worked across Central Australia with remote indigenous communities and fell in love with working remotely with Aboriginal people. Sarah struggled with how the NT system operated at the time and moved to Kalgoorlie, Western Australia wanting to learn a different way of practising and to see what Signs of Safety was all about. Working in the Goldfields, Sarah found her passion for child protection, discovering a new motivation and inspiration in the way she was able to work with and alongside children and families. Sarah then moved out to Warburton Aboriginal Community, working as a statutory child protection worker in this Western Desert community of 600 people. For Sarah, working and living in Warburton was the best learning experience of her career, specifically in how to do honest, open and robust child protection work.

Following her time in the Goldfields, Sarah moved back in early 2014 to the NT working across the case practice continuum from investigations and strengthening families through to reunification and long-term care in the roles of practice leading, team leading and then managing teams. In 2018, Sarah had the opportunity to head to Canada and work with a Delegated Aboriginal Agency in British Columbia that worked partly with the Signs of Safety approach.

Towards the end of 2018, the NT committed to a system-wide implementation of the Signs of Safety and Sarah completed her Signs of Safety training licence and joined Elia to support the commencement of the implementation. Sarah returned to working for the local Child Protection agency in the NT in mid-2019 and is now supporting the implementation internally whilst remaining part of the Elia Trainer and Consultant community and supporting the international vision of bettering child protection systems and therefore outcomes, for children and a families.