Child and youth welfare facilities is conformant with children’s rights. The regional government of Upper Austria organised a working group in which the competent authorities for the Upper Austrian child and youth welfare facilities and the University of Applied Sciences in Linz were represented for the purpose of developing a pilot implementation project. In Lower Austria, the University of Applied Sciences in St. Pölten was ready to add the standards to the curriculum of the study course Social Pedagogy. Vorarlberg announced that it wants to integrate the FICE quality standards into the requirements of the Land for residential child and youth welfare facilities. The Land Carinthia intends to deploy a working group to develop a structural framework in line with the standards with the support of the University of Klagenfurt. Most of the projects had to be postponed to 2021 because of the pandemic outbreak. The owners and operators of child and youth welfare facilities who had been involved in defining the standards and signed a commitment for their organisation to implement the same actively dealt with putting the FICE standards into practical daily care work in the past year. All of the initiatives were preceded by an analysis of the current situation to identify the areas in which the standards are already used and where additional implementation steps are required. Based on this information, specific measures were developed, but there were delays in the implementation thereof. Progress in the implementation of FICE standards The NPM commissions have been using the standards for the human rights assessments after monitoring visits since they were published. Another important step in the implementation of the standards would be their inclusion as an examination criterion on the monitoring visits to child and youth welfare facilities in the Laender. There was agreement in this respect from Vorarlberg and Upper Austria which was also communicated to the NPM. A FICE project next year will tackle the question of which further education programmes would be necessary to enable the staff to implement the FICE standards in their day-to-day work. Another project is for the development of quality standards for non-residential child and youth facilities. Decrease in number of children in out-of-home care The NPM special report on children and their rights in state facilities reported for the first time that the ratio of the number of children in out-of-home care to the total number of minors living in the Land varies in the Laender. The NPM recommended the Laender of Vienna, Styria, Vorarlberg and Carinthia to find the causes of this development and to expand their programme for nonresidential measures. The 2019 child and youth welfare statistics in Austria show that the number of non-residential child and youth facilities in Austria remained relatively constant compared to the previous year; however, fewer minors are looked after in full residential care. This is a positive development. At 12.3%, Vienna is still in first place when it comes to out-of-home care and Tyrol in last place at 6%. The variances between the other Laender have decreased. In Vienna the continued high numbers are most likely attributable to the fact that despite the expansion of the non-residential programme there 64