Children’s guardians in Manchester explain how they are tackling increased caseloads without cutting corners. By Camilla Pemberton
Children’s guardians at Cafcass’s Manchester office are taking a quick – and, by all accounts, rare – tea break to tell Community Care about their new ways of working. Rare, because guardians – appointed by the Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service to advise courts on children’s welfare who are under more pressure than ever as demand for them rockets.
The past 18 months have been turbulent for Cafcass. When care order applications began to soar in November 2008, following the outcry over the death of Baby P, so too did the pressure on the family courts. Cafcass struggled to meet the increasing demand and backlogs began to mount.
Now, the services’ latest quarterly figures have revealed the pressure is still on. March 2010 recorded the highest number of referrals (832) for a single month to date, while referrals to Cafcass Greater Manchester hit 91, the highest in three years.
Cafcass’s reliance on emergency measures – which permit cases to be allocated to duty teams rather than a named guardian – has attracted strong criticism. Although chief executive Anthony Douglas has said the system is “essential” to clearing backlogs, critics fear Cafcass is trying to eradicate the named guardian role, set out in the Children Act 1989.
They should welcome news that, according to Douglas, the future will see Cafcass relying far less on duty guardians. Instead, Douglas says the service is developing new models of “proportionate working”, using £10m awarded before the election.
He says Cafcass is looking at “every aspect of the professional task: attending court; attending reviews; reading files; doing viability assessments – and deciding what proportionate working is”.
Shabana Jamal, head of service in Greater Manchester, is convinced this style of working is the key to clearing backlogs and handling more cases, without relying on the duty system. In March 2010 – when referrals were highest – her team were working on 796 allocated care cases, compared with 598 in July 2009.
Nearly all cases in Manchester are allocated a named guardian within a week, according to Jamal, who says this has been made possible by “new, more time-effective ways of providing the same service” and good local agreements with the family courts.
“With each case, the issues are different so we have to be proportionate in the way that we work. It’s not about compromising the quality of service, it’s about cutting back on work which doesn’t add to the case and re-prioritising,” she says.
Sarah Nathan, one of Greater Manchester’s nine service managers, says: “We’ll work out the timeframe our guardians are working to and narrow down the meetings that aren’t essential, because they can read the minutes or talk to the child instead. Those are the decisions we’re making. We’re certainly not cutting corners which would put children at risk.”