The family justice system is complex, but excessive fragmentation hinders transparency, leading to poor accountability for service improvement and overall performance. The family justice system involves many organisations across government and the independent judiciary. There is no single body accountable for overall system performance, including delivery of the statutory time limit of 26 weeks for most public law cases. The FJB, set up to improve performance across the system, was supposed to meet quarterly but only met on average 2.5 times a year from June 2018 to December 2024 and has no overall strategy to improve family justice. The Board set six priorities for the family justice system in 2024–25 but did not monitor one of these at all. There is a lack of transparency about how, and by when, departments expect the six priorities to be delivered. Neither is there an effective mechanism to hold individual bodies to account. 3 The purpose of Local Family Justice Boards is to help improve services locally, but these local boards have no accountability, are not resourced and their performance is variable. recommendation MoJ and DfE should assess the strengths and weaknesses of the current accountability arrangements for family justice, and report back by December 2025 on how this might be improved, including: • how accountability can be strengthened across the system by consolidating current responsibilities or increasing transparent reporting; and • how both departments can better support the Family Justice Board nationally, and Local Family Justice Boards locally, to improve performance.