TWO in every 100 children aged under 18 in NSW have been removed from their families and placed in foster care or with relatives at some time in their lives, new official figures show.

This amounts to about 36,000 children and young people who have had experience of out-of-home care either through abuse or neglect or because of parental illness or inability to cope. The high rate of removals in recent years is contained in a report, Estimate of NSW Children Involved in the Child Welfare System, by the evaluation and statistics branch of Community Services, now a part of the Department of Human Services.

It shows that in June 2009 1 per cent of NSW's children under 18 - more than 16,523 - were living in out-of-home care.

The number in care has risen by 72 per cent since June 2002, when 9273 children and young people were in foster or kinship care.

The number of children being removed from parental care has soared in recent years, partly because of increased awareness of parental drug and alcohol problems, and mental illness, and also because of an increased number of case workers hired after the department received a $1.2 billion five-year funding package in 2002.

Frank Ainsworth, adjunct senior principal research fellow in the school of social work and community welfare at James Cook University, said more children were being removed at birth from mothers who had already had a child placed in care. A 2006 legal amendment had reversed the onus of proof from the department to mothers. "It's modern-day eugenics," he said.

The Minister for Community Services, Linda Burney, said the government's new child protection system, introduced six months ago, aimed to reduce the number of children entering care by putting more emphasis on early intervention.

"If the current rates of children entering out-of-home care continue, 24,000 children will come into care by 2013/14.'' Ms Burney said.

This would not only have a devastating emotional cost for children and their families, it would increase the annual cost to the state from $589 million this year to between $800 million and $900 million, she said.

The report shows that 97 children newly entered the out-of-home care system every week in 2008/9 and another 130 a week were re-entering for a second or subsequent episode. Of teenagers aged 15 to 17, more than 3 per cent have been in out-of-home care at some time in their lives. The 2008 Wood Special Commission of Inquiry into Child Protection Services was highly critical of the foster-care programs run by Community Services, which is responsible for 85 per cent of children in care.

It urged responsibility for foster care to be transferred to non-government agencies which had a better record.

The Herald reported yesterday the new data also showed one-third of the state's 15- and 16-year-olds had been notified to Community Services during their lifetime due to concerns about abuse or neglect, and that 27 per cent of all children under 18 had been notified.