Cafcass eLearning completion rates for all staff

If you’ve read the posts on the Cafcass webinar training sessions that they provide to their FCAs you may, like us, be interested in hearing about the other training that Cafcass provide to their employees.

First let’s look at Cafcass employee numbers:

Now let’s look at how these FCAs are split across the Cafcass Service Areas:

And let’s look at how many cases they’re responsible for:

And, incase you’re interested, here’s the gender breakdown for these employees – we’ve included the HCPC gender breakdown too so you can compare like-for-like across all social workers:

Cafcass Training and Completion Rates

When asked, Cafcass had this to say about their elearning platform and course content:

Cafcass has an online eLearning platform called MySkills. Cafcass’ uses the Totara eLearning platform to run MySkills and the tool Cafcass uses to develop eLearning modules is called Adapt.

Both platforms are provided by Learning Pool. MySkills is an eLearning platform which offers training and learning on a range of social work and non-social work topics.

MySkills allows Cafcass staff to access both internet based courses and book training sessions provided by Cafcass on a variety of topics. MySkills is hosted and maintained internally by Cafcass staff in the National Improvement Service (NIS) team.

Cafcass have a series of training materials that they refer to as Knowledge Bites (which are basically a couple of pages in PDF format for each one) These are referred to as elearning by Cafcass but do not appear in the list below. This is because the list of courses below are “proper” elearning courses that require more than a minute of two of perusal.

In the table below we have provided the total access rates as provided by Cafcass under a series of FOI requests. We have contrasted this with the employee numbers as of this year and we show the differential – in other words we’re also showing you how many Cafcass employees have NOT completed each of these training courses.

The last 2 columns will be updated from time to time. Most courses are assumed to still be available on MySkills but this isn’t confirmed until we see actual confirmation from Cafcass on a course by course basis. You’ll also see that where we know, we’re providing the “last accessed” date, again where we have that date as reported by Cafcass.

Cafcass add (24th May 2017):

Further to experience in social work, our Family Court Advisers receive training while at Cafcass in order to assist with their continued professional development; as part of registration with the HCPC, all social workers on a biennial basis must provide evidence of their professional development.

All social work staff are required to complete six core inhouse training modules upon joining the organisation, which will be completed within the first six months:

• Risk and Harm in Cafcass;
• Legal Context and Court Skills;
• Case Work Start to Finish;
• Interviewing Skills in Cafcass;
• Child Sexual Exploitation;
• Introduction to Private Law/Public Law

Of course the problem with this is that we can now see the completion rates for these core modules:

Which hardly sounds like “All social work staff are required to complete six core inhouse training modules upon joining the organisation, which will be completed within the first six months” because as we can see, their supplied completion rates don’t support this statement.

HCPC and Cafcass Training Requirements

All FCAs are registered with the HCPC and therefore subscribe to the professional capabilities (section 5) in accordance with their registration. You can read the HCPC requirements here:

• HCPC Standards of Conduct, Performance, and Ethics PDF
• HCPC Standards of Education and Training PDF

Observations

Take a look at the completion rates for completing an expenses claim. – Remember that these figures are for all employees including FCAs – Cafcass say that their system does not provide a departmental or role based breakdown on employees who use their MySkills system.

Now compare these figures to any of the courses that relate to actually supporting children.

And compare it with the webinar attendance figures for Parental Alienation and for Emotional Harm run by their own Chief Executive Anthony Douglas:

How can any modern organisation operate like this? Surely they have policies and procedures on staff training?

A researcher asked:

Please provide a copy of your learning and development department (or whichever department is responsible for this) policies and procedures on staff requirements to complete online and offline learning.

Cafcass responded: Cafcass does not have specific policy on staff requirements to complete online and offline learning.

Conclusion

As adults and parents we teach children that to become good at something they need to practice, they need to study, they need have an open mind, and they need to revise.

It seems Cafcass does not operate under the same ethos with their own employees.

Shocking!

Voice of the Child

In a Family Law system designed for combative parents there is no real allowance for the views of children and any understanding of how Family Law ultimately impacts on children most of all.

We speak for the children in Family Law so that, finally, the children have a voice.