Sharon Hodgson – 2014 Parliamentary Question to the Ministry of Justice

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Sharon Hodgson on 2014-05-02.

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what estimate he has made of levels of satisfaction with Cafcass among younger children who do not complete formal feedback forms.

Simon Hughes

While complaints made to Cafcass by children and young people are monitored nationally, it collects, monitors and acts on feedback at a local level. Cafcass has commissioned the Family Justice Young People’s Board to review how children and young people provide feedback to Cafcass and advise on ways to encourage more feedback both via formal and informal routes. Cafcass now has various methods of obtaining feedback from the children and young people it works with which include more formal methods such as feedback forms and more informal and child-friendly methods such as ‘feedback trees’. Feedback trees encourage children to write out or draw their feelings on how Cafcass has worked with them, allowing Cafcass practitioners to build on this feedback. There is no central or national monitoring of this informal feedback.