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Our ambition and commitment is to listen, learn, and then improve our work with children and families.  

We are committed to learning and changing in response to the experiences of, and feedback from, children and families. We believe that unless we prioritise the importance of learning from how others experience us – and in particular, children - we will find it harder to change and to improve.  

Our strategy and our associated national improvement plan set out our clear ambition in relation to learning from feedback, so that we can demonstrate the use of children’s and family feedback in how we improve and change our practice.

Our practice framework, Together with children and families, prioritises the importance of making meaningful relationships. We want to establish trust in our work and show a strong commitment to making sure that we listen respectfully. We also want to share our thinking with families and with children about what we have understood their experiences, wishes and feelings to be.  

Our Together framework emphasises the importance of explaining how our recommendations to the family court promote the safety and best interests of all children in family court proceedings. Together commits us to understand what life is like for the children with whom we work and to ask them what we did well and what we could have done differently.  

There are four key areas of work that underpin our Feedback Strategy: 

1. We routinely seek feedback from children and families: we do this by encouraging them to complete our standard feedback forms for children, adults and professionals which are available on this webpage. We also use introductory letters when we first meet children to let them know that we would value their feedback throughout our work with them, right through until we send our goodbye letters. Everyone has the opportunity to provide feedback. We are committed to seeking feedback, listening to it, thinking about what it means and acting on it to drive our improvement work.
2. Conversations with children and families as part of our audit process: we have conversations with children, families and other professionals when we audit our work as part of our quality assurance process. This is to increase our understanding of how children and families have experienced us. It enables us to hear directly about the quality of our work and the difference it is making, as well as to identify where our work needs to improve.
3. Direct feedback from children and young people: we hear feedback from children and young people through channels such as an app used by our Family Court Advisers called ‘How it looks to me’, and our freephone feedback line, Hear to Listen. This enables a child to share their experiences at the end of family court proceedings. We also use complaints from adults and children as a form of obtaining feedback and learning for the future.
4. Listen and Learn conversations: we hold in-depth conversations with children and families. Where necessary, we use a restorative approach, which is a way that encourages open and honest feedback designed to help us, where we can, put right something that we did not do well enough.