Client Stories
Cafcass
Find out how Littlefish and Cafcass built a long-term technology roadmap and collaborative partnership to deliver innovative and people-centric technology services.
Customer Overview
The Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service (Cafcass) represent the interests of children and young people in family court cases in England. It independently advises the family courts about what is safe for children and in their best interests, employing almost 2,000 social workers across the UK.
Service challenges
In tendering for new IT services, Cafcass sought to work with a provider that could offer a more personal, empathetic experience than their incumbent. Cafcass also felt its needs had outgrown this supplier, which offered a more monolithic and rigid experience, and constrained its efforts to deliver excellent service to children and families, leaving employees (most of whom are social workers working remotely) frustrated at the reliability of their IT/IT support.Cafcass was concerned about its IT service causing operational issues and impacting its ability to scale flexibly while still delivering great IT services to support its employees and their vital work.
A user-centric solution from Littlefish
After an extensive procurement process (as a public sector body, Cafcass must adhere to government regulations for procurement), Cafcass chose Littlefish as their managed service provider, placing Littlefish at the centre of their new, multi-provider, operations.As well as technical ability and knowledge, Littlefish was chosen as Cafcass’ partner above other MSPs due to the like-mindedness of our teams and how both organisatioms prioritise delivering service excellence to end users. For Cafcass, an IT service provider that could understand, empathise with, and embody its own people-centric values and, in this way, support their practice, was vital, forming part of its strategic objectives.
Since Littlefish have been appointed, they have been consistently delivering really excellent service to our staff. We have really tough expectations and have a sliding scale approach to customer satisfaction, so as the years go on, it gets harder.I’mreally pleased to report that Littlefish have consistently met this scale.
As well as supporting Cafcass through the delivery of a significant IT transformation programme, Littlefish provide Cafcass with:
- Service Desk (including three onsite engineers)
- End User and Desktop Support
- Connectivity
- Cloud Application Management
- Service Availability and Business Continuity
- Cyber Security Operating Centre and Governance
- Vulnerability management
Positive outcomes
Littlefish’s work with Cafcass to consolidate its move to a cloud-first modern delivery model has been hugely successful and has enabled the organisation to adopt technology with reduced complexity while cementing flexible working. As a principally remote organisation, with staff working in a variety of locations with children and families – as well as attending court – the ability for Cafcass to work from anywhere is essential.
We use our technology every day, for everything we do, it’s so important it works when we need it to work – the reliability of the IT systems we now have is absolutely fantastic.
Cafcass’ internal survey on user views of the IT service (including hardware, software, and support) showed a 95%+ satisfaction level, with the majority of respondents giving a 5/5-star rating. Additionally, 95% of staff say they have the technology they need to carry out their important work effectively.Cafcass believes that working alongside Littlefish has been a contributing factor to it recently being judged by Ofsted as ‘Outstanding’ (April 2024). After all, enjoying trouble-free IT allows users to concentrate on their work, and Cafcass believes its ‘Outstanding’ inspection report reflects both themselves and the partners they choose to work with.
There’s a lot of exciting things happening at Cafcass, and Littlefish are very much part of that journey.