Reporting about our work

Every year, Cafcass publishes a report of its work over the previous twelve months. The Cafcass Annual Report & Accounts 2024-2025 is our most recent report, it covers the period between 1 April 2024 and 31 March 2025. The report highlights the progress we made while also acknowledging the challenges we faced as an organisation. Here are a few of the highlights:

• This year, we worked with 132,416 children and young people. This is a decrease of 4,931 compared to last year.  
• Over 89,000 of these children were involved in private law family court cases which is when parents live apart and are struggling to agree on what is best for their children.
• About 43,000 of these children were involved in public law family court cases which usually involve children who are looked after by a local authority or who are going to be adopted or live with a special guardian.
• If you are a child or young person who is involved with the family courts, don’t feel like you are alone. 

• We know how important it is for the children we work with to be safe and well looked after. That’s why Cafcass workers want to build good relationships with the children they work with, and this year we have seen more children face-to-face to get to know them better.  

   

• Each year, some of the children and families we work with have experienced domestic abuse. This is when an adult may have experienced unpleasant behaviour or violence or both. Making sure we improve the way we work with these families is one of our priorities, and in October we published our new Domestic Abuse Practice Policy and shared an updated version in January. This year, 71% of the work we checked where domestic abuse was a factor was judged to be at a high standard. But, the know there is still work to do to make sure our work in this area is consistently good. 

• Sharing recommendations with children helps them understand the decisions being made about them in the family court. That is why we are sharing more recommendations with the children we work with. To understand what recommendations are and why we make them to the court, you can watch our latest film on the Cafcass website.

The Family Justice Young People’s Board (FJYPB) is a group of children and young people who have direct experience of the family courts. Members of the Board are passionate about improving the family justice system.

 In 2024-2025, the Family Justice Young People’s Board’s work with Cafcass included:

• Organising the 2024 Voice of the Child conference,
• Launching a second ‘Taking me seriously’ animated film, called Sharing recommendations with you; and,
• Reviewing all of the children's complaints that Cafcass receives. 

There are four things that we continue to hear very clearly from children:

• Receiving letters helps children feel connected to their Cafcass worker and makes them feel less worried. Children say that letters are something to keep and look back at in the future;
• Understanding what is happening, what will happen next and how they will be informed is important to children and we hear this a lot from them. Children want their Cafcass worker to speak to other people who know them and who are important to them;
• Sharing our recommendations to the family court with children, even when they are not what they have said they think is best for them, is very important to children. When children provide negative feedback, it is often when they say that our recommendations to the courts were not what they wanted to happen; and
• The opportunity to write to the judge is something most children want so that they can tell them in their own words what they want to happen.

Our annual report provides more information about the progress we are making to ensure this feedback from children is taken into account within our work with all families.

Since April 2024, we have continued to work towards our ambition of providing an exceptional experience for the children and young people with whom we work, everywhere and every time. This year we shared a mid-way report setting out our achievements so far and where we are continuing to progress.