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Our Performance

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At Cafcass, our goal is to provide a first rate service to each of the 79,000 new children and young people with whom we work each year. Throughout 2008-09, we continued to make good progress towards this by successfully introducing a new structure, which has allowed us to provide more support and supervision to our Family Court Advisers (FCAs), who work with children and their families. Our budget settlement from the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) has allowed us to invest in improving our work and has strengthened our ability to recruit and retain the most talented staff. Crucially, it has also allowed us to invest in practice improvement so that we can be certain that we are providing each child with the level of service that they deserve.

 

The demand for our services in 2008-09

Children in Cases

Young girlWe worked with 79,096 children and young people in England involved in new cases. 40,366 were males (51%) and 38,730 were females (49%). Most children and young people we worked with were under 10 years old. If we add in the children whose cases were referred to us prior to 2008-09 and on which we continue to work, and those whose cases were closed during the year, the total number of children we worked with is approximately 150,000. Additionally, we support many more children and families through the work we commission from contact centres around the country.

Public Law

In public law, we work with children and young people who are the subject of a care application or other intervention by a local authority. In 2008-09 we worked on 10,451 cases public law cases. Of these, 6,473 were care cases, an increase of 3.7% compared to the previous year.

Private Law

In private law we work with children and young people whose parents are divorcing, separating or who do not live together and who cannot agree on contact and residence for their children. In 2008-09 we received 38,449 private law case requests. We continued to work closely with the courts and the judiciary to introduce early intervention schemes to help parents come to safe agreements about their children.67.8% of early intervention work reached a full or partial agreement.

 

In 2008-09

Our structure changed from 10 regions to 21 service areas. This has helped us to give staff stronger and more intensive support on practice issues and helped to ensure that we deliver a consistently high quality service across the country.

 

Priorities for 2009-10

Our new Business Plan 2009-11, Creating the conditions for excellence, which subsumes the final year of the previous plan, outlines the following six, equally important operational priorities:

  1. Deliver safe, high quality services
  2. Deliver services in a timely way
  3. Listen to, learn from and involved our service users
  4. Equality and diversity - central to all our work
  5. Develop a strong leadership which will achieve full staff engagement
  6. Implement a performance management approach which leads to further service improvement.

Click here to see the full Business Plan

 

MyCafcass

We have introduced a new web portal called MyCafcass, that is full of information on Cafcass and the family courts. The children's site includes our Hear4U service where children can receive help and advice from our young peer mentors.

Click here for more information about Hear4U and the Cafcass Peer Mentors

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