Home Page >  About Cafcass >  Our performance

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

Our goal is to build an inclusive organisation that promotes equality and diversity in our services and our work.  We want to value differences – of experience, culture and background.

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.

| Home Page | News | Cafcass and You |