 members, Bath University professor Joanna Bryson, expressed anger at the decision of Google to pull the plug.Now into its 18th year, Cafcass, the body that represents children in the courts system, is approaching adulthood. Like a parent sending their offspring into the world with good A-level results, Liberal Democrat Baroness Claire Tyler can take some satisfaction in stepping down as chair of the organisation just as it is granted an ‘outstanding’ rating from Ofsted.
That’s no small achievement, given Cafcass – the Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service, to give it its full name – had a difficult birth and a torrid early life. In 2010 it was condemned as ‘not fit for purpose’ by MPs.
There have been growing pains and not everyone shares Ofsted’s opinion of Cafcass still, but it’s clear that Baroness Tyler leaves the operation in a better state than she found it. “It’s great to have left on such a high, without a doubt,” she smiles.
But she’s keen to stress that it was not a one-woman rescue job. “I like to think I’ve made a contribution to the organisation’s continuous improvement, but the really hard work has been done by the chief executive, the senior management team and particularly the frontline practitioners. I think what a board does, and what a chair does, is to create a culture, set the tone in which that hard work happens.
At its inception, Cafcass was that rare thing, a policy that achieved wide consensus – agreement that it was a good idea to bring together the various quangos and services for children in one place, and agreement, too, that the implementation was entirely cack-handed.
Cases like that of Toni Ann Byfield – shot in 2002 while staying with her gangster father – brought its failings into sharp and serious relief. The Chief executive, Anthony Douglas, took over a chaotic organisation in 2004 and has been there ever since, despite continued criticism that was crowned by the Commons Public Accounts Committee report that damned Cafcass as ‘not fit for purpose’ and accused it of failing children.
One of Tyler’s first tasks as chair was to get Cafcass to actually do its work on time, so that reports were delivered to courts and cases could go ahead, rather than allowing proceedings to drag unnecessarily.
Next came investment in the employees – Cafcass is the biggest employer of social workers in the country. “Staff had lost their confidence, and sometimes other professionals in the courts treated them in a pretty poor way and their views were often overridden or people didn’t take much notice of them,” she says.
There are still challenges, of course, not least an increased workload. Public law cases, typically when a local authority applies to take a child into care, jumped by nearly a third between 2015 and 2017 and private law cases involving warring parents hit 42,000 last year.
Baroness Tyler explains: “It’s absolutely clear to me that austerity has taken its toll, with early intervention services falling off and things like children’s centres closing down.” She cites recent research by the Sutton Trust which found that around 1,000 children’s centres have closed in recent years.
Critics claim there is still some way to go when it comes to improving those outcomes. The APPG on Domestic Violence is chaired by Labour MP Jess Phillips. Its 2016 inquiry into the family courts found that “children’s safety is being compromised”. In the same year, Women’s Aid, which supports the APPG, published a hard-hitting report entitled 19 Child Homicides, which focused on cases involving 12 families where the children had been killed by abusive fathers given access by the family court.
“Cafcass did not come off well from our inquiry,” Phillips tells The House. “Every year, hundreds of women get in touch with me and very few are complimentary about Cafcass.
As a former chief executive of Relate and part of the Kids in the Middle coalition of family charities and agony aunts, Baroness Tyler insists she has years of experience in dealing with cases where domestic abuse was a feature. That work also gives her a certain perspective. “My view is when it goes wrong in one case and it results in a homicide, that’s one too many,” she says.
That may not convince Jess Phillips, who has a separate inbox to deal with all the Cafcass correspondence she gets, or other MPs overwhelmed by emails on the topic. But Tyler points out that only a tiny minority of break-ups end up in the courts and MPs’ view of Cafcass may be coloured by the fact they only hear from folk when things have gone wrong.
And she’s not walking away from the issues. With a range of roles including involvement with the APPGs on children, social mobility and wellbeing economics, as well as continuing work with Relate and the National Children’s Bureau, she’ll remain busy. And she intends to bring her experience to bear in the Lords.
She’s keen to flag up how her outside appointments will make her a better peer, able to amend legislation in an informed way.
With Cafcass, she has experience of taking a much-criticised and troubled organisation and turning it into something she can be proud of. Perhaps, in fact, Baroness Tyler is what the Lib Dems need right now.You can wade through this whole article if you really, really want to. But… I can give you a real quick heads-up of everything you need to know to warm up your voice for presenting and public speaking. Right here and right now.
In a ‘full-bodied’ way i.e. loud!
This will bring much more volume, resonance, colour and clarity into your spoken voice.
Recent UK based research into singing presents compelling evidence that it will additionally help you with stress reduction, lowering blood pressure, reducing chronic pain – the list is too long for this article!
What’s that? You’ve got a singing voice like a foghorn? No problem. Be the loudest foghorn in the orchestra!
Well, there is a method to the ‘madness’… it’s a voice coaching class for people who deliver presentations and speak in public. This stage of the class, I hasten to point out, is the ‘before’ rather than the ‘after’. What you want to be avoiding rather than what you want to be aiming for. Contrast and compare is a very useful teaching tool! Feeling a bit silly and practising something a little unusual in relative privacy is called.. rehearsal!
The voice teacher, who is leading the session, points out that most people feel a little bit stressed at the prospect of delivering a presentation. And a few of us can experience real terror at the thought of addressing an audience. This of course affects many aspects of our delivery not least of which is the quality of our speaking voice.
Distributing the weight evenly across both feet.
Everyone, at the very least, looks much more confident and self assured. But will this be enough to change the quality of the sound that they make?
The teacher again leads the group into repeatedly vocalising the vowel sound ‘ah’. The group sound is no longer ragged but, actually, distinctly harmonious. The group sound is louder, warmer, more resonant and each vocalisation gains strength and lasts longer.
Was this change in the group sound reflected in the subjective vocal experience of the individual participants? The consensus seemed to be… Yes. Very much so!
The teacher points out all he asked the group to do was to think differently about their posture. The changes in the power of their vocal expression seemed to be automatic – like the cart following the horse.
By all means try out the above experiments/ scenarios at home but do go easy on the hunchy crunchy scenario – act it rather than live it.
In the early 1940s, the surgeon William Faulkner carried out an experiment in which he measured his patients’ physical responses to both stressful and pleasant thoughts. When his patients thought of something unpleasant, he noticed that the movement of their diaphragm became restricted, shallow and irregular. These breathing changes were accompanied by a corresponding tightening of the throat and negative changes in the characteristic of the patient’s speaking voice.
Conversely, when his patients thought of something pleasant, the movement of their diaphragm became expansive and regular and the levels of tension in the throat were reduced. All of this was accompanied by positive changes in the characteristics of their voices.
The human voice is, amongst other things, a muscular mechanism. A muscular mechanism that conveys ideas, emotion, facts and imagination. Like all muscular mechanisms it is amenable to training which enhances its endurance, strength, balance, and flexibility. And these qualities are all enhanced through a mixture of repetition and rest and recovery.
We shall look at a few simple reps, i.e. repetitions, which will do much to enhance the warmth, authority and resilience of your voice.
Anyone who has been to a gym induction session in the past 2 decades will know how much emphasis the instructor will place on correct posture while carrying out the reps. Or, as I prefer to express it, mindfulness of posture and balance… Archaic greek egyptian statuary here?
The 5 minute voice warm-up.
So, there you have it from the mouth of the master. You’re in excellent company! Repeating basic vowel sounds will work every bit as well for your speaking voice as they will for singing. Okay, okay I’ll make it even easier for you. You only have to do 3 vowel sounds – ‘oo’ as in zoo, ‘ee’ as in sea and ‘ah’ as in apple.
For a deeper explanation of the postural