Child Focused Courts
What are Child Focused Courts?
The Child Focused Court (CFC) programme is replacing the Child Arrangement Programme for determining issues about arrangements for children in Cumbria. A new standard procedure will be adopted in Cumbria (and other areas) with the aim of putting the child's welfare at the forefront of any decisions made by the court.
When does the CFC start?
All application made about a child issued on or after 17th November 2026 in Cumbria will follow the CFC programme.
How are Child Focused Court's Different?
The CFC process can be broken down into the following steps:
- Application and allocation to Cafcass or Local Authority.
- Information gathering - Preparation of the Child Impact Report within 8 weeks.
- The court reads the CIR and lists the case for a Decision Hearing
- Decision Hearing usually within 10 to 12 weeks from application.
The central aim is to front-load risk assessment and information gathering, rather than multiple hearings and sequential reports.
Key features:
- Early gatekeeping and multi-agency information-gathering.
- As soon as the application arrives, it is subject to early judicial/legal adviser gatekeeping and rapid screening for local authority involvement and safeguarding concerns.
- There is deliberate multi-agency working: CAFCASS, local authorities, police and domestic abuse specialists share information at an early stage.
- Preparation of the Child Impact Report (CIR) instead of a short safeguarding letter.
Most cases will involve a CIR being ordered before the case has a hearing before a judge so that as much information is known about the child and the family circumstances before any hearing takes place.
What are Child Impact Reports?
Rather than a brief safeguarding letter, CAFCASS (or where relevant the local authority) prepares a Child Impact Report (CIR).
The CIR is detailed and can include:
- direct work with the child (often with the child’s words and sometimes photographs),
- information from schools, GPs and other agencies,
- domestic abuse risk assessments (e.g. from IDVAs) where appropriate, and
- broader welfare analysis and recommendations.
The CIR will be prepared in 8 weeks. In most cases the child or children will be spoken to by the author of the CIR to understand and report their perspective on the situation.
What happens after the CIR is prepared?
After the CIR is prepared a judge and a legal adviser reads it (second gatekeeping) and usually lists the application for a Decision Hearing at which the parties attend and discuss with a judge what is best for the child or children involved.
What happens after at a Decision Hearing?
The Decision Hearing is first substantive hearing that takes place with and the CIR will have been prepared. This allows the judge to actively investigate and problem-solve, with the child's voice and welfare at the centre of the decisions, rather than simply case-manage in an information vacuum.
The process is explicitly child-led and safety-focused, intended to be more trauma-aware and less adversarial for those who have experienced domestic abuse. The aim is to have fewer, more purposeful hearings with an emphasis on early resolution.
Because so much work is done up-front, there is an aim to:
- reduce the number of hearings,
- speed up overall case duration, and
- avoid routine review hearings, only listing reviews where they actually advance the case.
If the judge cannot conclude the case at the Decision Hearing the judge will consider what other evidence may be needed and timetable the case to a final hearing.
What are the advantages of the Child Focused Court Approach?
Pilot areas report that a Child Focused Court approach brings many benefits, including:
- Safer decisions for children – particularly in cases involving domestic abuse or other serious harm, by ensuring early, holistic risk assessment and trauma-aware practice.
- Better experience for court users – making private law proceedings “less brutal” and less adversarial, especially for victims of domestic abuse, and more comprehensible and supportive for children and parents.
- Better experience for children, whose early involvement ensure that their voice is kept at the forefront of the decision making for them.
- Efficiency and timeliness – reducing delay, backlogs and repeat litigation by front-loading work and resolving as many cases as possible at (or soon after) the Decision Hearing.
- More sustainable orders – by engaging parents with the child’s perspective and the underlying welfare issues, the evidence is that orders are more durable, leading to fewer returns for enforcement or variation.
Will there still be urgent hearings?
Yes but only in cases that are genuinely urgent as the court will not have much information about the child's circumstances before the CIR is prepared.
The types of cases where the court may agree to list a hearing before the CIR is prepared are:
- Cases where a child is about to be taken abroad to live;
- Circumstances where the child's welfare requires intervention to prevent an immediate significant harm;
- Cases where a parent has removed a child from their usual home or area to live somewhere else where the parents have not agreed this should happen.
This list is not exhaustive and there may be other circumstances that would give rise to an urgent hearing prior to a CIR being prepared.
There are some circumstances that the court is unlikely to consider urgent, for example:
- Cases where one parent has stopped a child seeing another parent;
- Cases where the dispute between the carers relates to the detail of the arrangements for the child; and
- Cases where the issue relates to where a child should go to school, where a child should live and other long term arrangements for the child's life.
In all these situations the court is likely to want a CIR prepared before making any decision, so that it knows both parents' point of view and importantly the child's perspective on the situation.
Will there still be Fact-Finding Hearings?
Yes, but only in cases that need them in order to reach a decision about the child's welfare and arrangements.
It will be expected that any case that requires a fact-finding hearing will be timetabled and listed at the Decision Hearing. The CIR will include recommendations as to which issues the court needs to resolve before a decision can be made about the arrangements for the child.