Is headspace making a difference to young people’s lives?

Appendix B
While there is an overall relationship between youth population and funding, there is also
considerable variation observed. In the 2013-14 financial year, the funding made available to
fully operational centres in regions with less than 20,000 young people ranged from $600,000 to
$1,100,000.
These discrepancies are even more pronounced when considering the number of young people
residing within 10 kilometres of an operational headspace centre.
While these analyses do not take into account lead agency funding or justifiable year-to-year
variation which may exist in core grant funding, they demonstrate considerable variation in funding
relative to youth population. These analyses also demonstrate that extreme caution needs to be
applied when extrapolating from current centre level funding to future centres, either under a SA3/
SA4 centre allocation (this chapter) or alternative models of centre allocation.
Lead agency resources
The current headspace centre allocation model is designed to leverage off a combination of
headspace grant funds, lead agency resources, and a range of other funding sources such as
MBS and ATAPS.
However, the analysis of these resources is constrained by data availability. The analysis of
occasions of service in Chapter 6 indicates that in 2013-14, 36% of occasions of service were
funded direct from the headspace grant, 45.5% were funded by MBS, and 3.1% were funded by
in-kind support. In-kind support to occasions of service represents a very small proportion of
all occasions of service.
As discussed in Chapter 6, the estimation of the MBS financial contributions associated with
these occasions of service is not recorded within the hCFA. Other than the fees paid out
of the headspace grant to lead agencies, lead agency financial resources are not routinely
collected in the data made available to the evaluation team. While we have been able to
assess lead agency contributions to occasions of service as being small, it may be that lead
agency financial or in-kind contributions to other aspects of the headspace model (such as
accommodation, or administrative support) are much larger. These lead agency contributions
may offset deficiencies of the headspace grant observed in this section, and the level of
contribution may also vary widely across sites and lead agencies. However, these contributions
remain unknown. Therefore, any critique of the centre funding model needs to take into account
the unknown contribution of lead agencies.
In order to fully investigate the current centre allocation model, and to understand the true
costs of delivering the headspace service, the Department and hNO should give consideration
to routinely collecting lead agency costs and contributions.
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