Rees lunchtime webinar – Seeing the whole system: Data, evidence and trust in family justice
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Family justice research has long lagged behind fields such as health and education, leaving fundamental questions about policy, practice, impact, and effectiveness only partially answered. This gap matters. Decisions made within the family justice system are among the most consequential the State can take for children and families, yet the evidence base has often been fragmented and small-scale. While qualitative research remains essential for understanding lived experience, the absence of robust, system-wide analysis has done little to address persistent concerns about transparency, consistency, and accountability – or to build public confidence in how decisions are made and their impact on families.
Advances in access to large-scale datasets, alongside growing capacity to link administrative data across justice, health, education, and welfare, are delivering new insights at scale for family justice. In particular, advances in cross-sector data linkage allows researchers to move beyond partial views of the system, providing a clearer picture of how family justice operates in practice. These approaches are shedding light on patterns of decision-making, operational pressures, and striking geographic variation, while enabling more rigorous assessment of outcomes and effectiveness.
This talk will summarise these advances, arguing that scaling up research is not simply a technical shift, but a step-change in advancing what we can know, and what we can confidently say, about family justice. Strengthening the evidence base in this way is critical not only for improving policy and practice, but also for enhancing transparency, accountability, and ultimately public trust in a system responsible for life-changing decisions about children and families.
Bio
Karen Broadhurst is a Professor in the School of Social Sciences at Lancaster University. Karen was awarded an OBE in 2026 for services to child and family justice research, and conferred to the Fellowship of the Academy of Social Sciences in 2020. Karen is recognised nationally and internationally for high quality, high impact research that has catalysed measurable change in policy and practice, with a specific focus on women and children involved with children’s social care and the family courts. Karen’s team produced the first estimate of women’s repeat appearances in the family courts catalysing major improvements in preventative services for mothers living apart from their children. She designed the Born into Care series for the Nuffield Family Justice Observatory, uncovering the scale of infant removals at birth and drawing attention to glaring breaches of women’s rights in the immediate post-partum period. Karen collaborates with colleagues in the US, Australia and in Europe to improve justice for families, with her most recent ESRC funded project focusing on women caught between systems of family and criminal justice, and outcomes for children. Karen has held numerous expert advisory roles, including for the Commission on Justice in Wales, The President of the Family Division’s Public Law Working Group and the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care.
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