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Normally, if you go to court and get a court order, then you are at liberty to publish this in any way you wish. However, court orders issued under the Children's Act are different, in that if you publish (and the word publish is very wide ranging in its meaning) the order, then you are in contempt of court.
So if you have a court order which says that your ex has restricted or no access to your children, you are not allowed to show this court order to anyone who has control of your children (nurseries, schools, holiday schemes etc) unless the court has specifically granted permission - rather silly as they would need to know not to hand over your children to your ex.
If anyone is going through the court system now, or in the future, I would recommend mentioning this to your solicitor to get the courts permission added to the court order.
I have raised this with my MP - will be interesting to see if anything comes of this.
Did a judge tell you that? I've never heard that before. I'm familiar with family courts and court orders can and should be shared with the school and/or nursery if it's about contact or residence, especially if there's a problem with your ex picking your kids up when she's not supposed to. From what I know, you can't show it around, but there's never been a problem with schools having a copy of the order. Everything else except the order is private, though. I think it's the court rules or something like that. It gets kind of complicated, on top of the Children Act they also have rules in the family court and they aren't in the actual act. But those rules have changed a bit now anyways, and anyone who is in a professional supportive position can have access to orders.
It's something that came up recently and was confirmed by my barrister and solicitor when I saw them a couple of months ago.
My barrister was of the opinion that you couldn't show the school the court order, but could probably say that it existed. I'll dig out the relevant bit of law (and precedent if I can find it), but if you can find anything which contradicts or updates this, I'd be extremely interested.
I've found it .... it's the Administration of Justice Act 1960 (s12)
(1) The publication of information relating to proceedings before any court sitting in private shall not of itself be contempt of court except in the following cases, that is to say . . .
(a) where the proceedings . . .
(i) relate to the inherent jurisdiction of the High Court with respect to minors;
(ii) are brought under the Children Act 1989;
(iii) otherwise relate wholly or mainly to the maintenance or upbringing of a minor.
As I say, if you have any information which overrides or updates this, I would appreciate this - I'm not unduly worried about my actions as I am sure that any judge would agree that showing the court order to relevant parties is in the best interests of the child, but it would be nice to be able to dismiss this before it becomes a distration.
It looks as though my information on the above is wrong, or at least out of date. There should be more information clarifying this shortly (which is going to be very helpful to me). Will be interesting for my solicitor also 😮
Further to this, can someone (ie the childrens legal centre) tell me how far this goes - the reason for asking is that I intend to take my children to see their maternal grandmother (MG) this year and I want to make it clear that my ex must not go while the children are there - this is based on the fact that the order says only supervised contact at a contact centre, and the reason I don't want my ex to go is that I have no confidence that MG will stop my ex from drinking, or put the needs of my children before those of my ex. I therefore want to be able to tell MG that the contact order states that contact is only to be supervised at the contact centre as I'm 100% confident that my ex has told MG that the contact centre is for her convenience.
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