Fresh drive to speed up care proceedings

A legal requirement for public law care proceedings to be completed within 26 weeks was introduced in April 2014, but most recent government statistics show that during the third quarter of 2015 (July to September), the average time for the disposal of a care or supervision application was 28 weeks.

The figures show that 40 per cent of care or supervision proceedings were not completed within the timeframe.

As part of efforts to “support the family justice reforms brought in to avoid unnecessary delays”, the Association of Directors of Children’s Services has teamed up with the Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service (Cafcass) to update the template for local authority social workers to use when submitting evidence to support an application for a care or supervision order.

The original Social Work Evidence Template (Swet) was introduced in summer 2014 with the aim of providing consistent, more analytically focused reports to the courts.

A review of the template undertaken by ADCS and Cafcass resulted in a number of suggestions for further improvements. The ADCS said the accompanying guidance for the template has been simplified and incorporated into the template. Meanwhile the templates themselves have been simplified and welfare checklists have been incorporated into the template for ease of reference.

Andrew Webb, who led the work on the revisions on behalf of the ADCS, said the template has been refreshed to support changes in the family justice system, designed to improve the quality and timeliness of decision-making for children by the sector.

"I am pleased that use of these documents has grown steadily over the last year and that many people from a range of disciplines contributed to reviewing them.

"ADCS continues to encourage all local authorities to use the templates and to ensure their staff access the training materials that have been developed.

"We have seen major improvements in the responsiveness of the family justice system over the past couple of years and the Swet provides consistency both for practitioners and courts to support these improvements.”
 
Anthony Douglas, chief executive of Cafcass, said: “The revised national Swet has already helped to raise the standards of social work analysis in family proceedings.

"This is a vital area of social work practice which can and should make a positive difference to the lives of the most vulnerable children in England and Wales.

"The new template takes on board comments from the recent consultation and we are committed to continuously growing its relevance and impact.”