By Aliya Saied-Tessier

Every day, judges and magistrates make decisions in family courts that have substantial bearing on children’s lives, including where a child should live, who they should spend time with and who should have parental responsibility for them. The main consideration of every decision is the welfare of the child (s.1 Children Act 1989). Yet the family justice system has been described as ‘operating in the dark’ (Curtiss 2019, 25 June)1 without the necessary data to demonstrate that professionals, and the decisions they make, actually help children involved in proceedings.

This paper sets out the significance of data within the context of the family justice system, current limitations, and opportunities and recommendations for improvement. It covers all parts of the family justice system, from children’s social care involvement to family courts, including both public and private law proceedings.

Key points

• The family justice system has been described as ‘operating in the dark’, with fundamental data problems including a fragmented system of data owners and users, and significant data gaps.

• While professionals are working to improve data and its supporting infrastructure (and there are examples of positive innovations such as data linking e.g. Administrative Data Research (ADR) UK’s Data First family court dataset), it remains the case that the family justice system lags far behind other public services in terms of data availability and quality.

• A coherent plan involving all data owners and users in the system could seek to build on data improvement work, fill data gaps, publish more aggregate data, increase safe data linking, and raise standards of data literacy and use.

• The Ministry of Justice (MoJ) is best placed to oversee a data improvement plan and coordinate the rest of the system, building on the data mapping exercise undertaken by the National Centre for Social Research (NatCen).

London: Nuffield Family Justice Observatory. 2024. 25p.