I was 52 last week, so I suppose that since I’ve had twice as many times around the sun as there are supposed to be weeks in two generations worth of care proceedings, it’s unsurprising if I feel like everything is changing and yet everything stays the same. But really, I do despair.

Cleveland…

Orkney…

Re P…

ABE (Achieving Best Evidence) Guidance (in various iterations)…

Nobody has ever heard of them, it seems. Or at any rate 90% of the professional witnesses who set foot in the family court haven’t. And the 10% who have often have a very *ahem* idiosyncratic understanding of what the ABE guidance actually says, and why it says it. Or so it sometimes appears to me, the grumpy old woman.

Our bundles in the family court these days are chock full of case notes made by social workers which are written in the style of a particularly naff letter, addressed to the child in question – who is imagined in years hence to be reading through their social care records. For reasons I don’t comprehend at all, these narratives are invariably phrased in ‘age appropriate’ i.e. childlike language, even though they will plainly not be read by the child until adulthood. There is no call for quote marks or verbatim records of question and answer in this sort of document, because this is story telling – a narrative you are valued and believed, and I was doing it all for you. Goodness only knows what the grown up child will think of this if they ever come to read it. They surely won’t be frozen at their current age as their unimaginative pen friend from the past always seems to assume. They will probably be coming in search of facts and explanations, not platitudes and feelings. The explanation for such cringeworthy prose is always that ‘they ‘we are trained to do it like this’, or ‘it’s policy’ or (slightly better) ‘it’s meant to keep us focused on the child at the centre of the case’. But nobody can ever really explain how it helps the child – and I am afraid if I am brutally honest I think this style does more to make the adults feel better than it ever will the child: they are a virtuous signal of child focused practice, but most often performed without any actual thoughtfor their real life impact for the child – whether one is thinking of the child as child now, or the future adult they will become. And when this format of a time capsule letter to a child is used to document a ‘disclosure’ (cringe) made by the child, there is a real danger that the needs of both the child now and the adult to be are lost. Because these records need not to be about telling a story, or to be warm and fuzzy. They need to be an accurate record of what happened and what was said. They are the primary evidence. Cold hard facts are called for. I’m being slightly OTT about it, I know. But as you can probably see, this irks me a teeny bit. It is invariably well intended, but it is confused.

Fortunately, it seems only to be social workers who do this. But even leaving aside the ‘Dear Johnny’ style of record keeping, our bundles are full of school safeguarding logs and social work case records made by well intentioned teachers and social workers, which document a child giving an account of abuse they have suffered, which are created in good faith in line with their training and statutory guidance – but which are nonetheless significantly compromised by their failure to follow the fundamental principles of best practice in gathering and documenting childrens’ evidence. Typically, the original handwritten note has been destroyed (it’s always policy), the typed log might or might not be a verbatim record of the note or a synthesis of what was in the note and what the author also recalled a few days later (but no, they can’t remember which now – it was a long time ago), it will omit any record of what questions were asked by whom (and obvs., the author won’t be able to remember what questions were asked by the time they get in the witness box), they will usually say nothing about the child’s demeanour, and will often not capture the actual words spoken by the child, only a rough approximation (or they won’t differentiate between quotes and summaries). That is if there even is a record. You’d be surprised how often there is not. (In this post I am not even going to attempt to deal with the much broader guidance within the ABE guidance – about questioning style and other matters – suffice to say those too are areas of similar difficulty, although a fair proportion of teachers seem to understand they should ask limited, open questions and not leading questions when a child is telling them about apparent abuse).

It truly is a case of parallel universes: what a court process demands forensically of the primary records of important events in a child’s life, and of things they have said about it. And what professionals think they need to do in terms of record keeping, and why. And worlds collide when these logs, these crucial pieces of evidence, come under the spotlight in a courtroom. It is not a fun experience.

It is neither fair on the children themselves – whose complaints may be true and yet not capable of proof – nor on the professionals, whose dedication to the child at the heart of the case may be criticised because they have failed to follow guidance they have never heard of. They were after all, only trying to help, to do their job, to protect the child.

A colleague sent me this interesting 2025 article highlighting the clash between the ABE guidance and Guidance issued by the DfE to school safeguarding staff. It draws attention to the incompatibility of the DfE guidancewith the ABE Guidance. I acknowledge the points made in the article about the practical challenges for staff in a busy school to be able to document as perfectly as we would wish them to do from our narrow forensic purposes. These challenges come across when you hear teachers telling you about their involvement with the children we encounter in care proceedings in the family court. We cannot expect perfection. And undoubtedly some judgment calls will have to be made about whether in the particular circumstances it is possible or appropriate to make an immediate written note, but I see no reason why teachers could not be told that it is generally much better to note as it happens and if not immediately after, whilst acknowledging that sometimes things are too fast paced for that to be possible, or that sometimes there may be other priorities (taking a child somewhere private, supporting them in their distress or managing other children in the room for instance). Instead the guidance tells school staff NOT to make a contemporaneous note.

Incidentally, I’m not quite sure I agree with or understand the suggestions made by Fiona Scolding KC for what sounds like a parallel investigation to be launched by the school, because I don’t really understand how that can cure the problem of poor primary record keeping – nor do I understand why it is needed if there is already a joint s47 investigation underway. But I may be misunderstanding what is being suggested. I certainly agree that there are problems both with existing practice and the guidance in question.

Having seen the article though, I went to the DfE webpage housing the relevant guidance – and was pleased to find it is about to be relaunched. Excellent news. No doubt it will be much improved, thunk I. Well… It may well be improved, but sadly it does not appear to be improved in this respect. Paragraph 555 of the imminently current guidance seems to contain the same flaws.

Personally, I don’t think this issue is limited just to the DfE guidance. I’m sure it is contributing to the problem, but it is merely symptomatic of a widespread culture of belief and validation, and a generally very poor understanding of why records of this sort are important, how they may be used and what might undermine them. It would be very easy to help social work and teaching professionals to understand this better through training and simple guidance – and thus to give them a fighting chance of making good judgment calls and good records, that would help the children they are supporting.

From what I see and hear from my perspective in the family court, apart from their basic training, teachers and social workers generally get their safeguarding training delivered annually by local child safeguarding boards (LSBs) (or cascaded down to them internally by someone who has received that training from the LSB). ‘That’s what we were told to do in our level 3 training’ is a refrain I have heard many times (I have to say I’ve never heard the DfE guidance being cited by a school witness – but perhaps it is this guidance upon which the LSBs frame their training?), And who is responsible for those LSBs? Police, social services and health. You’d think that a triumvirate involving the police, who are supposed to be working directly to the ABE guidance routinely, would have a good chance of developing training that encapsulates its core messaging – but I am not sure that is in fact the case.

Very often – shockingly often in my experience – even the police officers in the Child Abuse Investigation Team do not even understand the ABE guidance (assuming they have heard of it and received some training on it – which is not a given). And if they don’t understand it how can we expect teachers and social workers to have a clue? Again, these are training issues. And they ought to be remediable. But since I keep encountering the same issues, it appears that is not happening consistently.

So, for any professionals working to safeguard children who may be reading this blog (hello, welcome and how did you find your way here?), particularly those who think their first job is to believe and to demonstrate belief in the child: the way to support a vulnerable child who is telling you about some awful thing that has happened to them is to make absolutely sure that you write down exactly what they said, and exactly what you said (and exactly what anyone else in the room said) to the best of your ability and as soon as you reasonably can. Best if you can do it as its said, but that isn’t always possible. That will be important to them in due course. It will help good decisions to be made about that child to keep them safe. Generally professionals are distraught (and sometimes cross) when they realise that although they have followed their training and done their best in difficult circumstances, their actions have unwittingly compromised professional attempts to safeguard the child they so strongly believe to have suffered harm. ‘I didn’t realise’, I recall one particularly invested social worker saying as I saw the penny visibly drop behind her eyes.

If I were self-interested I’d simply shrug and say that I suppose this continual stream of rubbish records keeps the lawyers busy, so I really shouldn’t complain – but it really doesn’t help anyone. It obscures the truth, it wastes time and money, and jeopardises child safeguarding. And its actually very boring for the lawyers – this again? we groan. Moreover, it is quite likely in the end to leave a child feeling very acutely that they weren’t believed (by the police, the judge or the jury) even though they were assured at the time that they were and they would be. And of course, as important as that, is the risk that poor record keeping will obscure the fact in some cases that a ‘disclosure’ is actually a misunderstanding of something innocent, the product of overt or unintentional adult influence, or even in some rare cases, an outright lie.

So for my part, whenever I challenge these sloppy records on behalf of my client, I do so knowing that – regardless of the merits of the particular case – I am challenging a practice which lets down both children and adults, both victims and the wrongly accused, and which may let perpetrators walk free. And I do so knowing that I am challenging the poor quality training and guidance which lets down the dedicated teachers and social workers who do their absolute best to protect the vulnerable children in their care. Every time I pick up a new bundle with the same flaws evident, I take a deep breath and go again, in the hope that perhaps at some point I can retire this particular line of questioning.

It ought to be obvious, but for the avoidance of doubt, nothing I say in this post is about a particular case. What I am talking about is recurrent themes that I have been encountering in a range of cases for the last 24 years, and which are showing no sign of becoming a thing of the past.