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I had my final hearing last week so thought I would come back and post the outcome.
I had a very unfavourable CAFCASS report. Their recommendation which I never agreed with was supervised contact only. The respondent had a barrister for the hearing, I was self representing as I have always been. I had actually had unsupervised contact before the hearing but it seems that her Barrister convinced her to go down another route so their stance was that they had tried more but it didn't work so they want to go with the recommendations in the S7 report.
The final order after a long day in court was a big victory with me and I walked away with overnight contact, shared holidays, alternate birthdays & Christmas and all the other trimmings, It actually turned out that I ended up declining some contact the judge was suggesting such as direct contact midweek due to the distance between us.
The judges comments were in effect that the CAFCASS report wasn't balanced and I was able to prove in court (by very positive contact reports) that their recommendations were not in the children's best interests. As the hearing went on you could see CAFCASS were clearly switching sides.
So if anyone is going through similar and it looks hopeless my advice would certainly be don't give up. I swallowed my pride and went to a child contact centre.I made it work, made sure the children always left happy and those reports were the biggest thing I had in my favour. I fought false allegation after false allegation and walked away with everything I wanted plus more. It often felt like I was fighting a losing battle but I never gave up.
Well done! Glad you got everything you wanted.
Congratulations, that's great news Woody! It's really motivating to hear about others success, particularly for our members that are struggling and not feeling confident about the way their own case is going,
Thanks for the update and all the best for the future.
This is great news and we'll chuffed for you.
I'm going for something very similar and approaching final hearing. I only want my midweek to be one overnight so fingers crossed.
Best of luck for the future.
well done, and excellent result 🙂
Well done buddy I'm happy for you I've just started all this process and hope to get some sort of result like your s
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