How We Can Help

We offer four core services, each tailored to the unique context and challenges of our clients:

  1. Webinars & Masterclasses – Scalable capability-building sessions for teams and systems

  2. Online Mentoring – Trusted, confidential support for leaders and reform teams

  3. Advisory & Consulting – Strategic insight and peer-level guidance for system improvement

  4. Evaluation & Research – Rigorous, practical studies that inform real-world decisions

All services are led or personally delivered by Dr Iain Matheson, unless otherwise agreed.

At Better Outcomes, we support leaders in out-of-home care and youth justice who are:

  • responsible for system reform, policy, or strategy

  • managing operational services

  • overseeing service quality or system performance

  • convening, representing, or supporting others in the sector

Our services are grounded, independent, and evidence-informed — drawing on more than four decades of cross-jurisdictional experience. While we primarily work in Australia and New Zealand, we’ve also partnered with organisations in Canada, the UK, Ireland, and the United States.

1. Webinars & Masterclasses

We deliver bespoke, interactive sessions that build capability, challenge thinking, and introduce new ideas across OOHC, youth justice, and system reform.

Our Webinars can accommodate up to 500 participants and are ideal for government departments, large community service organisations, and peak bodies wanting to reach wide internal or sector audiences.

Our Masterclasses are small-group and more in-depth, allowing for greater discussion of organisational and system implications. These are well suited to leadership teams, reform projects, and cross-agency forums.

A Hybrid model — blending webinar content with facilitated discussion — may better suit oversight agencies, smaller community organisations, or targeted government functions.

Unless agreed otherwise, all sessions are delivered by Dr Iain Matheson.

Past topics include:

  • The purpose of youth detention

  • Reducing and eliminating physical restraint

  • Foster care recruitment and retention

  • Education-focused out-of-home care

  • Leaving care, and education, training and employment

    Iain also speaks regularly at conferences and seminars, including keynote and plenary presentations in Australia, Ireland, Canada, and the US. He can deliver tailored workshops or events to support stakeholder engagement, strategic planning, policy development, and programme design.

Iain also speaks regularly at conferences and seminars, including keynote and plenary presentations in Australia, Ireland, Canada, and the US. He can deliver tailored workshops or events to support stakeholder engagement, strategic planning, policy development, and programme design.

2. Online Mentoring

We provide trusted, confidential support to leaders and teams working in OOHC and youth justice reform, strategy, operations, oversight, and evaluation.

Our mentoring — sometimes called “critical friend” support — is designed to help you think more clearly, act with greater confidence, and maintain momentum on complex or high-profile work.

Mentoring can be:

  • One-to-one or small group

  • 6 or 12 months in duration

  • Scheduled to meet your operational rhythm

Recent examples include:

  • A new CEO in a New Zealand community service organisation

  • A specialist national team within one of Australia’s largest CSOs

  • An Australian OOHC start-up navigating early-stage growth

  • A Canadian senior leader tasked with delivering a high-profile project

We now also offer more structured coaching programmes on specific topics for individual managers, change managers, project managers, policy analysts, trainers, researchers and other specialists, and/or their teams. We also plan to offer some of these as public programmes for small groups of individuals.

Due to timezone alignment, this service is offered primarily to organisations in Australia, New Zealand, the Pacific Islands and Territories, Canada, and the United States, but we will consider requests from the UK, Ireland, and elsewhere on a case-by-case basis.

3. Advisory and Consulting

Trusted, evidence-informed support for systems, services, and reforms that need to work better for children.

Our advisory and consulting services are designed to support meaningful, achievable change in out-of-home care and youth detention. Whether you're responding to high-stakes scrutiny, trying to fix what isn’t working, or building something new, we work with you as a trusted peer — not just a contractor.

We bring a unique combination of strategic insight, practice knowledge, and analytical rigour. Dr Iain Matheson is a Certified Management Consultant (CMC), a Fellow of the Institute of Management Consultants New Zealand, and has nearly 20 years’ experience in advisory and consulting roles. He has worked with governments, oversight bodies, NGOs, and reform initiatives in both Australia and New Zealand.

Our sister organisation, Matheson Associates Limited, is a registered provider on New Zealand’s All-of-Government Consulting Services Panel for both Policy, Research and Development and Operations, Management and Risk. In Australia, Iain has contributed to advisory work through formal government panel arrangements.

What sets us apart is our ability to work at the intersection of system strategy, service development, and evidence use. We understand both the policy settings and operational realities — and help clients move from complexity to clarity, without losing sight of children’s needs.

We support:

  • Strategy development and reform planning

  • Policy and system reviews

  • Cross-jurisdictional learning and adaptation

  • Integration of research, evaluation, and evidence

  • High-stakes problem-solving and turnaround support

  • Child-focused design and facilitation for engagement and planning

Examples of recent work include:

  • Ministerial appointment to a state expert panel on youth justice reform (Australia)

  • Independent review team member advising on youth detention infrastructure planning (Australia)

  • Evaluation advisory group member for a multi-year leaving care reform (New Zealand)

  • Strategic advice to senior leaders in government and community sectors

  • Facilitation of planning workshops and review of key service design documents

National contributions and citations:

  • Australian National Children’s Commissioner’s youth justice and child wellbeing reform initiative

  • New Zealand Parliament’s Social Services and Community Select Committee

  • NSW Parliament’s Inquiry into Child Protection

  • New Zealand’s Expert Panel on the Modernisation of Child, Youth and Family

4. Evaluation and Research

Better Outcomes delivers evaluation and research that is credible, practical, and useful — grounded in methodological rigour and deep sector knowledge.

We combine practice and policy experience in OOHC, youth justice, and child welfare with advanced evaluation expertise. Iain taught a postgraduate evaluation methods paper at Massey University for eight years, helping shape the practice of many of New Zealand’s — and some of Australia’s — current evaluators.

Whether we’re supporting commissioners or conducting independent work, we’re often brought in early to clarify scope, timing, and purpose — because early decisions make or break the value of evaluation. For larger projects, we may recommend an evaluability assessment to ensure resources are well spent or to explore better-fit alternatives.

We partner on:

  • Evaluation scoping, design, and planning

  • Theories of change, logic models, and monitoring frameworks

  • Formative and summative evaluations

  • Conceptually strong mixed-methods approaches

  • Literature scans, evidence briefs, and research syntheses

  • Supporting evidence use in reform, strategy, operations, and practice

We’ve worked with commissioners, statutory agencies, NGOs, and peak bodies to ensure evaluations are ethical, rigorous, and actually used.

Recent topics include:

  • Youth detention models and international best practice

  • Physical restraint of children in residential settings

  • Violence towards residential care staff

  • Education and OOHC

  • Informal kinship care

Earlier work includes:

  • Transitioning from care

  • Youth sexual offending

  • Foster care standards, carer recruitment and retention

  • Bicultural statutory social work practice

  • Foetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD)

  • Primary mental health and addictions

  • Early intervention family support

  • Teen parent and antenatal education

  • Children affected by disaster

  • Management of unallocated child protection referrals

We also collaborate with universities and research teams on large-scale or multi-partner studies.