Welcome to another week.

These are the latest child welfare items that should be right on your radar:

• Independent trust takes over children’s services from council
• MPs launch inquiry into rise of self-generated child sexual abuse material
• Paedophiles using ‘self-generated’ abuse images of children to target them for grooming, charity warns

A company charging £10,000 to train people to manage their private family law cases in court without a lawyer and represent others involved in divorce and child contact proceedings, has caused concern among parents on Facebook.

The Family Law Association (FLA) has been reaching out to posters on its Facebook page to recruit customers through unsolicited private messages, which are sent once Facebook users leave a comment under posts on the company’s Facebook page.

Steven Wade, co-founder of the Family Law Association and a former McKenzie Friend for Families Need Fathers, denied the company had sent out any unsolicited emails, telling Researching Reform, “We advertise our courses on our website and social media but don’t solicit individuals to offer them training or a franchise.”

Several parents going through the family courts sent Researching Reform the private messages they had received from FLA about its training scheme, after they left unrelated comments on the company’s Facebook page.

One family video-recorded the process and sent it to this site. The video confirms that a generic comment posted on FLA’s page triggers a private message about the company’s training programme.

The first message recipients receive says the company is looking for ‘graduates’ to join their team in 2021, and invites the recipient to click on a link if they want to know more. The cost of the training is not revealed until much later.

Once the user clicks on the link, a series of messages follow which mention the company’s drive to find new graduates for their programme and new consultants for their business, while asking the recipient if they would like to earn an income doing work that makes a difference to people’s lives.

The messages offer further encouragement by telling recipients that if they are interested in a career move and passionate about helping others, then “you are the kind of person we are looking for.”

After a recipient registers their interest, FLA’s team ask for their email and phone details and then move the conversation away from Facebook and onto email.

It is in these emails that more details about the scheme emerge, including the cost of the training.

The email implies the training is offered to anyone who would like it, but it becomes apparent that not everyone who pays the £10,000 fee and takes the course is automatically invited to join the company.

The email says, “if you’re successful in this training you’ll be set to become a franchisee for Family Law Assistance,” but gives no indication of how that success is measured.

Wade told Researching Reform that the offer of a franchise was “dependent on [the graduate’s] suitability and background.”

The email goes on to say that successful candidates become franchisees, and for £1,000 a year the franchisee joins FLA’s team, is added to the company’s website, receives training on how to run their franchise and is able to access clients.

The last section of the email says that interested recipients can then join a Zoom call to ask further questions, which the team then offer to arrange.

FLA’s messages and emails have confused parents, some of whom are considered to be vulnerable because of mental health conditions and special needs. Several parents reported that the wording gave them the impression they would be paid for work, while others thought the invitation was a firm offer to join the company’s team after completing the training.

Shortly after Researching Reform reached out to Wade to ask about FLA’s recruitment process, the private messages appeared to have stopped. One mother who posted on FLA’s page on Thursday said she had not received the same message as previous posters.

Concerns about McKenzie friends charging for their support have been raised by family lawyers who have commented that individuals without legal training offering advice and assistance in court could be detrimental to clients, and their cases. The concerns were followed by a set of guidelines issued in 2010 by the Family Division, which allowed lay advisors to represent parties and charge for their services.

Dwindling legal aid and the rising cost of conventional legal representation has created a gap in the market for family court assistance. This gap has been taken advantage of by lawyers (who can also act as McKenzie friends under the current rules, and use this loophole to offer limited services at a reduced rate) and non-lawyers alike.

The question over how much a McKenzie Friend can and should charge, without any legal qualifications, has been a source of heated debate within the family justice system.

Several lay advisors have been commended by family court judges for their ability to represent clients professionally and to the same standard as traditional lawyers and are often noted by families to be empathetic, because of extensive personal experience going through the family courts with their own cases.

Despite being able to charge for services, the McKenzie Friend sector remains divided about costs.

The first wave of McKenzie friends in Britain entered the sector with a sense of responsibility to assist those in need, and remain sensitive to families’ often difficult financial situations. These Original McKenzies, as they’re known, tend only to charge for their expenses – a train fare and a packed lunch.

Others, like FLA, see a business opportunity. FLA, which also offers assistance to litigants in person going through private family law proceedings, says its training course takes place over a 12 week period, and includes Zoom sessions, homework, feedback and communication from FLA co-founder and Steven’s partner, Michaela.

FLA’s course covers a range of topics and skills.

“We cover family law – child matters, finance and divorce in training. As well as providing training on the law itself we also deal with the practicalities of it, coaching clients to get them into the right mindset (being child focused, positive, reframing), how to market yourself, how to run the business, the implications of what we do, and so on,” Wade said.

Commenting on FLA’s training programme, one high profile McKenzie Friend said, “What the actual “F”, nothing surprises me in the dark world of MKF’s. Many have become part of the problem because they can see a way of making money.”

Another McKenzie Friend said, “I don’t know what on earth could cost £10k to be a McKenzie friend. If that’s true its baffling to me. I’ve done this job for a very long time but at the end of the day it’s a supporting role,” adding, “I don’t know what degree tuition fees are like these days but that seems like a comparable amount so I am truly shocked.”

An announcement by the government to offer people free college courses has given parents without funds for courses like Wade’s, who want to help others going through family court proceedings hope that they can get the skills they need.

The new initiative, which was announced at the end of September, enables people without an A level qualification to apply for free, fully-funded college courses with flexible learning built in for ease of study.

The offer is available from April next year, with the list of available courses to be announced shortly. (Click the updates section of the announcement page at the very bottom to find out when the list is published and keep an eye out for any updates).

On offer right now are the Open University’s free courses which are available to everyone, including a course on social work and the law, as well as dozens of other courses on law, mental capacity, human rights and legal research. (Just type law into the search bar and scroll down).

The courses are also categorised helpfully into ‘introductory’, ‘intermediate’, and ‘advanced’, and you can also see how long each course takes to complete.

A very big thank you to TumTum for her help and support during the investigation process, and for the several brilliant ideas she offered.

Today’s child welfare items, which should be right on your radar:

• Childhood vulnerability to victimisation in England and Wales: year ending March 2017 to year ending March 2019
• Ministers consider privacy law over access to child abuse records
• New Oftsed report: Matching in foster care: making good decisions for children in care and care leavers

It’s been a little busy at Researching Reform, so we apologise for not bringing you more in-depth news this week.

In the meantime, we’re sharing need-to-know developments, from the government’s Care Review to changes in the family courts:

• CARE REVIEW TO BE LAUNCHED ‘IMMINENTLY’, CHILDREN’S MINISTER SAYS
• The President of the Family Division Working Group on Medical Experts in the Family Courts – Final Report
• Private law children and Family Law Act 1996 cases must now be recorded in e-files
• New smacking ban becomes law in Scotland on Saturday

The latest child welfare items that should be right on your radar:

• Family courts to stay open during second national lockdown
• Mother of boys killed by abusive father begs government to overhaul family court
• Child poverty set to become ‘national crisis’, warns former PM

Welcome to another week.

As we slide into our second national lockdown, we thought we would share this piece of research we came across last weekend, which is now almost 40 years old, but sadly still relevant to many of the world’s family courts today.

The research, called “Abuse of power to sever family bonds” is an extraordinary look at the changing views of a New York family court judge, Peggy Cooper Davis, on the accepted wisdom around children in care, and adoption.

Davis, who graduated from Harvard Law School in 1968 (as a woman, of colour), and then went on to practice family law for a decade, before a three year stint as a family court judge in New York, reflects on the cruelty of the family court process, the many occasions she spoke to children who asked to be reunited with their birth parents, and adoption breakdowns.

She goes on to emphasise the gravity, and importance of child welfare work, quoting Leo Glasser, another family court judge in New York, who saw the family court as a “legal and social emergency room”.

The paper sounds a warning to child welfare professionals, telling them that courts should follow the advice set out in the now cult child welfare textbook “In the best interests of the child,” to ensure that biological and family disruptions are kept to a minimum, so detrimental are these shifts for children.

Davis goes on to talk about the perils of permanence – placing children “in limbo” in foster care into adoptive homes – and questions the sanity behind severing biological ties.

It’s important to note that at the time Davis was writing, a lot of research on how separation affected children had not been done, and so her analysis reflects some of those gaps, through no fault of her own.

What is astounding though, is her innate, instinctive understanding of the damage the system was, and is, doing to children, after just a few short years as a judge, and without the benefit of a body of sophisticated research to tap into.

If you have some Digestives and a few tea bags to hand, we highly recommend this read (and a purchase of the book we link to in the post). It is as eye opening as it is frustrating – that we are still in the same place more than thirty years on, and that people inside the system can well see its flaws, but often, unlike Davis, choose to do nothing about it.

Professor Davis is currently the John S. R. Shad Professor of Lawyering, and Ethics Director at the Experiential Learning Lab at New York University.

You can read her paper here.

Child welfare items in the news and other publications which should be right on your radar:

• Teachers and foster carers accused of child abuse in South Gloucestershire
• Over half of social workers yet to meet CPD requirement one month out from registration deadline
• Mothers’ details on marriage certificates (House of Commons Library)

Many thanks to TumTum for sharing the first item.

The latest child welfare items that should be right on your radar:

• Children as young as 13 are repeatedly raped in residential care, inquiry finds (Australia)
• Child sexual exploitation a hidden crime, public protection officer says (Scotland)
• Family court statistics quarterly: January to March 2021 (England and Wales)

A report published by the Nuffield Foundation’s Family Justice Observatory looking at remote family court hearings, has confirmed that mothers have had children removed from their care during telephone hearings – sometimes without the mothers in attendance.

The document, which was finalised in September and published on Tuesday, was sent to President of the Family Division Andrew McFarlane after he asked to see the report before it was released, according to several reliable sources with knowledge of the matter.

Views on remote hearings in the family courts during the coronavirus pandemic were collected from 1,300 individuals, with most of the respondents being legal professionals. Parents and family members made up just 10% of those who submitted feedback.

The findings from the Nuffield Foundation’s research are worrying, and suggest that remote hearings are, in many cases, breaching parents’ and children’s right to a fair trial, and in several instances causing significant harm to children and their families.

The research reveals that 40% of parents did not understand what was happening during their remote hearings, while 66% said their cases had not been dealt with well through the online hearing process. Only 12% of parents and relatives polled said they had no concerns about their remote hearing.

And despite court-ordered and agreed face-to-face child contact being allowed during the pandemic – and confirmed by the government to be the default position during lockdown – social workers were still reporting that this form of contact was being blocked by their local authorities.

One social worker who was quoted in the Nuffield Foundation’s report, said, “It’s horrendous – every week I go to a managers’ meeting and argue that the lockdown/COVID regs and government regs don’t prevent direct contact but we have only just begun to run it again. So contact virtual unless I can argue child is in family placement and was already moving between the two households before lockdown. I spent money on a laser thermometer as part of risk management but still no contact took place until recently.”

A barrister who had experienced remote hearings during lockdown said, “[The hearing was] virtual, but with a 12 month-old baby this was all but pointless. The baby was removed at four months, COVID lockdown happened at 10 months and no direct contact then for six months. It was completely inhumane.”

Another barrister noted, “Virtual contact. it was absolutely terrible, M posed no risk to the child and the LA was incredibly slow to even think about facilitating in-person contact, relying on the lack of resources. The judge was sympathetic to the lack of resources issue and told me that she could not make facilities available that simply weren’t available. I accept that, but this child was under one year old and had not seen its mother for five months.”

Other complaints made by parents, which clearly compromise the right to a fair trial, included an inability to speak with their lawyers or lay advisors during remote hearings, and an inability to see parties to the case during phone hearings, or the judge being able to see the parents’ faces, and a complete lack of support before, during and after the proceedings.

Parents also raised concerns about not being able to engage fully with the hearings because they simultaneously had to care for children in the home, and feeling excluded from the process after not being given even basic information about their case, or their hearing.

The findings have led the Parent, Family and Allies Network (PFAN), who were contracted by the Nuffield Foundation to gather views from parents for the survey, to call for a ban on telephone hearings.

PFAN interviewed 21 parents for the report but noted in their own documentation that several other parents in crisis reached out to them after feeling unable to carry on without emotional support.

PFAN’s notes on the interviews they conducted include deeply traumatic experiences of parents whose children were removed from their care.

One mother contacted the Network five days after her son was removed from hospital after birth. The mother was given the news by telephone from the social worker, but only after a hearing had taken place.

The mother had not been notified that a hearing was scheduled, and she had no legal representation or support. Her baby was taken just hours after she received the news from a social worker who was not known to the mother.

The mother did not know who to call or where her baby had gone.

PFAN make three key recommendations in their own report: remote hearings should only take place where face-to-face hearings are impossible and the matter is urgent, no telephone hearings at all for family cases, and better support for parents and family members who engage in remote hearings where they are deemed to be necessary.

Researching Reform supports these recommendations, and would also encourage the government to implement the following policies:

All child welfare professionals designated as key workers to ensure family courts and child contact centres remain fully open during tiered restrictions and lockdowns

We now have enough information about how to contain the spread of the virus. Court rooms should be regularly disinfected, seating should be safely distanced and masks should be worn but drop-down or hand-held microphones (used safely) should be available to ensure people are heard clearly. Temperature checks and symptom checks should be carried out before hearings start. Hand sanitiser should be made available in every room and at the front door.

Contact centres and child contact venues should be wiped down after every meeting. Mothers, fathers and family members visiting children should wear masks while being allowed to hold and play with their children. Temperature checks and symptom checks should be carried out before contact. Hand sanitiser should be made available in every room and at the front door.

Local authorities must be made aware that face-to-face contact during the pandemic is still allowed during lockdowns and tiered restrictions.

Do you have any additional recommendations? Let our readers know in the comments section.

Apologies for the quick and dirty post, work is a little busy at the moment.

Additional Links:

• Normal Contact Rules For Birth Parents and Children in Care Apply During Lockdowns
• Victims’ Commissioner Urges Government To Scrap Covid Child Contact Policy
• Nightingale courts will be used to hear family cases

A remote conference offering parents, children and child welfare professionals a tutorial on young people’s legal rights has been organised by charity, Article 39.

The online seminar, which costs £10 for adults to attend, with concessions available for people under 25 and unemployed students, will share updates on the legal rights of young people and children under legislation including the Children Act, Children’s and Families Act, Care Act, and the Housing Act.

The conference’s Eventbrite page says the day-long session will also show you how to access help and outline the remedies available if a young person’s legal rights are breached. 

The session is going to be chaired by Article 39 Director Carolyne Willow, and will look at topics such as benefits for families, income maximisation, racial discrimination and housing, under the theme of ‘law in the time of Covid’.

There does not appear to be a segment about children’s rights during the child protection process, so we hope Carolyne will allow for questions on this topic, and perhaps even consider launching a separate seminar for this issue.

The online conference takes place tomorrow from 10am – 4.30pm, and if you have any questions you can contact Article 39 on 020 3195 1906 or at info@youthlegal.org.uk.

To book tickets for the event, and find out more about the day’s seminar, click here.

Many thanks to Nick for alerting us to this conference.