A major report on a way of trying to divert child protection cases from court, or if not at least reduce the length of proceedings, has been published on the Centre for Research on Children and Families website. The ‘pre-proceedings process’ requires local authorities considering care proceedings on a child to send the parents a ‘letter before proceedings’ specifying the concerns, and inviting them to a meeting to discuss what can be done to avoid going to court. The parents are entitled to attend with a lawyer, and the lawyer is able to claim a legal aid payment for the work.

The research was inter-university and inter-disciplinary. The team from the Centre was Dr Jonathan Dickens and Julie Young, who worked in conjunction with colleagues from the School of Law at Bristol University, Professor Judith Masson and Kay Bader, and the report is also available on their website. The study was undertaken from 2010-2012, in six local authorities in England and Wales.

Most of the families involved were well-known to children’s services departments, but even so the process was able to help divert about a quarter of the cases, through alternative care arrangements or improved parenting. However, it made no significant difference to what happened in court, and cases with or without the process lasted just as long. The findings raise challenging issues for the current drive to reduce the duration of care proceedings to 26 weeks. If this is to be achieved, the courts will need to take more account of the pre-proceedings work.

For the full report and a summary version, please see http://www.uea.ac.uk/ssf/centre-research-child-family/research-fields/children-protection