Our Performance
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
We
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:
- Deliver safe, high quality services
- Deliver services in a timely way
- Listen to, learn from and involved our service users
- Equality and diversity - central to all our work
- Develop a strong leadership which will achieve full staff
engagement
- 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