Our performance
The demand for our services in 2006-07
Public law
Overall, we responded to a total of 12,104
public law requests during 2006–07, compared with 12,775 in
2005–06, a decrease of 5.3%. These figures include all types of
proceedings such as Care, Adoption, Discharge of Care and Emergency
Protection.
Private law
In private law we have worked with courts
and judges to introduce dispute resolution schemes in family courts
in an effort to reduce conflict when parents divorce and separate.
Dispute resolution aims to help parents to work out their own
agreements and to communicate better with their children. Dispute
resolution schemes have been developed in all parts of the
country and have proved successful in terms of better outcomes for
families – around 60% of this work achieves full or partial
agreements.
In 2006–07 our practitioners participated
in 26,344 dispute resolution meetings, spending 57,880 hours on
these cases. This is an increase in time spent on early
intervention of 33.6%.
Children in cases
We promoted the interests of a total of
80,536 children and young people involved in our services. This
comprised 40,813 boys and young men (50.7%) and 39,723 girls and
young women (49.3%). This figure does not, however, include all of
our support work with contact centres. We estimate that we are
involved with around 100,000 children each year.
Doing what we said we would do in
2006–07
Each year Cafcass agrees what it will do with
the government. For 2006-07 we agreed two broad aims:
- Transforming services and modernising
practice
- Transforming the organisation
Below we highlight some of the work we did in
meeting these aims. For full details and our eight key
performance indicators please see our full Annual
Report.
Transforming services and modernising
practice
A number of important steps were achieved
during the past year to improve outcomes for children by
modernising the way we work. New National
Standards have now been agreed, which set out what service
users, partner agencies and practitioners in the family justice
system can expect from Cafcass.
We have introduced new tools to help our staff
keep people who use our services safe - a new Safeguarding
Framework and a revised Domestic
Violence Toolkit.
Transforming the organisation
Achievements include training for managers,
development of staff support groups, a new Equality and
Diversity Handbook, progress on diversity monitoring and the
launch of our Disability Equality Scheme, which was developed by a
group of disabled staff. We have also made changes to our
recruitment process, which has increased the numbers of black and
minority-ethnic (BME) staff in our workforce.
Work with others to improve things
for children and families
We work with other organisations who
provide services to children and families. This is important
as it will help services work better. To help Cafcass do more of
this we launched our Engagement
and Participation Strategy in October 2006. This was written
with other organisations and service user groups. It sets out how
we intend to listen and work better with everyone involved and it
will help Cafcass become more focussed on the needs of those who
use our services.