A Year in Review: The CECW
The Center for Excellence in Child Welfare (CECW) was established in 2025 to strengthen Illinois’ professional services to children, youth, adolescents, and families by expanding training opportunities and connecting research to real-world practice for child welfare professionals, caregivers, educators, and others who support children and youth in the state’s welfare system. The cornerstone of CECW, the Child Welfare Office of Workforce Development provides comprehensive training for the child welfare workforce and foster and adoptive caregivers.
In partnership with the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS), the Office of Workforce Development saw record numbers of training participants enrolled in its training programs in FY2024 and FY2025, with the Registration and Logistics team reporting 164,528 and 161,797 total registrations respectively, far surpassing the ranges of 45,533 to 56,559 from FY2019-FY2023.
The Learning and Development Program’s activities included developing, updating, or revising 108 high-quality curriculum projects, working with subject matter experts to improve the quality of course materials, ensuring compliance with the Title II ADA guidelines and practices for all training materials, and generating 431 data analytics reports.
The Adoptive and Foster Caregivers Training Program offered a diverse array of in-person, web-based, virtual online instructor-led, and hybrid sessions during day and evening hours in English, Spanish, and other languages upon request, to foster, adoptive, relative, and non-relative caregivers across Illinois. The Program underwent strategic staffing and structural changes to strengthen leadership and improve service delivery to meet the evolving needs of caregivers and the child welfare system. Participants enrolled in over 35,000 instructor-led training activities and completed 13,604 eLearning sessions. Learner satisfaction remained consistently high throughout the year.
The Pre-Service and In-Service Program offered pre-service training, delivered through in-person and virtual instruction, and on-demand self-directed trainings for child welfare staff who serve in Placement, Intact, and Adoption specialties, including trainings on Foundations, Fundamentals, and Core Competencies, for a total of 19,476 session completions by 789 participants. In addition, 21,057 Post Module Foundations Courses were completed. Pre-service trainings are required for professional staff licensure, and in-service trainings are provided to assist licensed child welfare staff (in any direct or indirect service role) in achieving the required 20-clock-hours of training every two years. In a collaboration with Human Rights Campaign and DCFS, enhancements to current LGBTQIA+ training content were implemented in 2024-2025.
Reinforcing a Core Practice Model for Child Welfare that is grounded upon Family-centered, Trauma-informed, and Strength-based practice (or FTS Practice), the Field Implementation Support Program’s (or FISP) experts provided 198 hours of coaching on the Model of Supervisory Practice following cohort participants’ engagement in a comprehensive four-part professional training series. FISP also facilitated a Supervisory Enhancement Training Series, enhanced Child and Family Team Meeting Training, training for child welfare staff on Complex Trauma, and Motivational Interviewing professional development events including training and Practice Skills Labs, (an introductory MI training course was facilitated in collaboration with the Pre-Service and In-Service Program along with DCFS as well).
In an ongoing effort to satisfy Public Act 99-348 to provide an academy for training child protective specialists and their supervisors, the Chicago Child Protection Training Academy offered another successful year of simulation-based training for 87 participants, totaling 693 DCFS investigators or supervisors being trained through University of Illinois facilitated simulations since FY20. In collaboration with other universities and DCFS, CCPTA developed and launched a new simulation case in 2025 and implemented an enhanced version of facilitation. CCPTA regularly participates in discussions with research specialists from the Children and Family Research Center regarding evaluation findings and improvements for the program.
Rounding out the Office of Workforce Development accomplishments, from July 2024 through June 2025, the Academic Partnerships Program engaged 34 public and private universities, colleges, or schools; with 15 of these fully partnering in the University Partnership Program to offer the DCFS Foundation pre-service staff training curriculum in one or two-semester courses. A total of 416 unique students enrolled in these courses during this year for a total of 2,061 unique students attending one or more of these University Partnership courses since July 2019.The Academic Internship Program oversaw a total of 162 active internship placements for the year, and 39 job shadowing placements. All of these figures represent substantial increases over the prior year ranging in increase from 50% (Job Shadowing) and 53% (unique University Partnership students) to 90% (Academic Internships).
The heart of excellence in child welfare is a comprehensive and robust training program. CECW looks to build upon the successes of the Office of Workforce Development and is seeking additional partnerships to expand training opportunities focusing on specialized populations served within the child welfare system.