Welcome to another week.

The Ministry of Justice (MOJ) has published a guide to understanding the data it publishes on the family courts in England and Wales.

The MOJ publishes updated statistics reports for the family courts every three months which offer a snapshot of what is going inside the courts.

The statistics have been criticised by family court reformers who say the system fails to collect in-depth data and important information, making the quarterly reports less useful than they could be.

However, they do offer a general overview of what is going inside the system, trends towards or away from legal applications to the courts and rises or drops in those applications.

The guide, which was published on 30 September, has 20 chapters which contain: background to the family law stats; descriptions about how the private and public family sectors work; information on the types of orders in family law and; how to read the charts and statistics in each family law update.

You can access the guide here.