Victoria’s most at-risk children are falling through the cracks of a child protection system straining under increased demand and funding shortfalls, new reports show, as advocates warn of “stunning” gaps in data and lack of carer support.

The state’s commissioner for children and young people has also raised the alarm about cycles of ineffective referrals to voluntary services, and closed reports in 35 cases of children who died after interactions with the system.

“The commission has continued to see report after report to child protection with ultimately no improvement in the lives of children and young people. That needs to change,” the commissioner, Tracy Beaton said.

The commission’s report, tabled in parliament on Thursday, comes a day after the state’s auditor general released a report showing the out-of-home care system was not fully meeting children’s needs.

The reports come less than a week after Guardian Australia’s reporting on the inside of the kinship care system, through the story of a Melbourne childcare worker who took on the care of a baby she barely knew last year after a Friday afternoon phone call from child protection.

The auditor general found the work of child protection services has long been stymied by delayed, inaccurate and incomplete data. The problems directly hampered child protection workers’ ability to “make informed decisions, monitor placements and deliver effective child protection services,” the auditor general wrote.

Despite multiple previous reports identifying such systemic issues, the department’s appeals to the government for funding to address them had been unsuccessful.

The number of foster carers was also declining significantly, and putting increased pressure on the kinship care system – where a child is placed in care with a relative or close family friend – which now makes up 81.7% of placements.

Carer payments in Victoria are also the lowest in Australia, and a key factor in declining carer numbers, the report said.

Kinship Carers Victoria director, Anne McLeish, said carers had long been raising the issue of low payments. “The assessments of the needs of children are inadequate, and the amount of money attached to children who have high level needs is totally inadequate.

But McLeish said “the biggest single criticism that I would level against the department at the moment” was related to its issues with data.

“The lack of data is stunning,” she said. “I dare say that the system doesn’t even accurately know where some of the children that they’re responsible for are living.”

In a separate report tabled on Thursday, the commission for children and young people found children were getting caught up in a “refer-and-close roundabout”, where their cases were closed by child protection and referred instead to voluntary family services, which in 58% of cases were unable to engage with them.

In some cases this was because parents refused to engage. In others, families went without support due to long waitlists, as funding for these services only met one-third of the demand in the last financial year, the commission found.

Meanwhile calls to child protection services have steadily increased year-on-year, up from 118,096 in 2021-2022 to about 151,000 in 2024-2025. The subsequent increase in pressure made it more difficult for child protection staff to thoroughly assess risk and make informed decisions, including whether to progress a case to investigation, which was “particularly evident in cases involving neglect and cumulative harm,” the report said.

The commission also examined the cases of 35 children who had come into contact with child protection before they died. Those children had been the subject of 267 reports to child protection between them, an average of eight each, 231 of which were closed at the intake or investigation stage.

“Many of these reports contained information of real ongoing and/or escalating risk to the children and young people,” the commission found. “Notwithstanding this, child protection did not assess the children or young people to be at significant risk at the time of the report.”

In 2025, 75% of all reports received by child protection were about children who had been reported before.

The Community and Public Sector Union’s state secretary, Jiselle Hanna, said the reports confirmed what child protection workers had been telling the union for years.

“Despite their best work, ultimately the needs of our most vulnerable children are not being met. Staff and carer burnout is common. It’s due to chronic understaffing, underfunding and increasing pressure,” Hanna said.

“We have long been sounding the alarm, and now it is at fever pitch. Government needs to accept these findings, and fund and resource the calm, consistent, early support that keeps children safe at home and removals as a genuine last resort.”

The opposition leader, Jess Wilson, said on Thursday: “We’re seeing a system that, unfortunately, continues to fail the most vulnerable children in our society. We need to do better.”

The Victorian government has been approached for comment.

In Queensland, the child safety minister, Amanda Camm, said on Thursday the Crisafulli LNP government would reform the Adoption Act, after tabling a months-long commission of inquiry into the state’s child safety system yesterday.

This morning, she was asked about one of the commission’s most controversial recommendations: an end to the legislated principle setting adoption as a last resort for Indigenous children. The rule does not apply to non-Indigenous children.

The commissioner, Paul Anastassiou, said the government should “entrench adoption as the third permanency option for all children regardless of cultural background”. He acknowledged it came over the “strong submissions from First Nations stakeholders against adoption”.

Camm said she would “always put the interests of children first, no matter their cultural background, no matter where they live in this state”.

“We’ll consider that recommendation, and we will bring forward reforms that are in the interests of children.”

Additional reporting Andrew Messenger