Guide

Keeping a contact record for the family court in England and Wales: what to write, what to leave out

Last reviewed 13 September 2026. England and Wales only. Written for parents, not lawyers. Every rule and case cited is linked at the end so you can read it yourself.

What changed in March 2026?

A new version of Practice Direction 27A, the rule that governs what goes into a family court bundle, came into force on 2 March 2026. It does three things that matter to a parent keeping a record.

• It caps the electronic bundle at 350 pages (paragraph 11.2(b)).
• It caps a witness statement at 25 pages, excluding exhibits, and a chronology at 10 pages (paragraph 8.1).
• It lists classes of document that must not go in the bundle unless the court directs otherwise. Paragraph 5.2 names them, and the list includes “notes of contact visits”, along with copies of emails and text messages, WhatsApp and social media messages, voice notes and other recordings, and photographs.

This surprises most people. The instinct when a contact arrangement is going wrong is to write everything down and then hand all of it over. The rules now say the opposite. A judge in a care case in August 2025 was sent a bundle of more than 1,200 pages and listed what was wrong with it:

“In this matter no permission was given to depart from Practice Direction 27A. Despite this, a bundle that exceeded 1,200 pages was filed. The bundle: a. included contact records (notwithstanding Practice Direction 27A expressly excluding those records and the Court’s order requiring they only be served) …”

“I regret this has not been an isolated example and I have shared these experiences with the Designated Family Judge for Nottinghamshire.”

Re W (A Child) (Finalisation at IRH) [2025] EWFC 266 (B), Mr Recorder O’Grady, paragraphs 112 and 113

That was a public law case with lawyers on every side. The point carries to a private dispute between parents: the raw record is not the document. The document is what you draw out of it.

What can the court actually use?

The same paragraph that excludes contact notes also says what is allowed. The bundle must contain “only those documents which are relevant to the hearing and which it is necessary for the court to read or which will actually be referred to during the hearing”, and the exclusion “does not prevent the inclusion in the bundle of specific documents which it is necessary for the court to read” (Practice Direction 27A, paragraph 5.2).

So the question is never how much did you record. It is which specific entries does the court need to see to decide the point in front of it. If the application is about a pattern of missed Saturday visits, the court needs the dated entries for the Saturday visits, with what was arranged and what happened. It does not need the Tuesday phone calls that went fine, the messages, or your thoughts about why.

In practice the entries go in as an exhibit to your witness statement, which has its own limit of 25 pages. Practice Direction 22A says the statement must be in your own words, in the first person, and must separate what you saw yourself from what you were told by someone else, naming the source (paragraphs 4.1 and 4.3). A dated selection of your own entries fits that shape naturally. A two-year printout does not.

Why does it matter why you kept the record?

Two judgments from 2025 treat a parent’s record in opposite ways, and the difference is not how detailed it was. It is why, and how, it was kept.

In the first, a mother’s diary from 2022 was accepted. The judge said her intent in keeping it was “of little relevance if the entries are likely to be accurate”, and gave two reasons for finding they were:

“M was not aware of litigation when she began to write it.”

“M also noted F calling to apologise, which rather suggests that the diary is neither fake nor exaggerated. For the avoidance of doubt, M’s diary is more likely than not to be genuine.”

Father v Mother [2025] EWFC 284 (B), His Honour Judge Newport, paragraphs 120 and 150

In the second, a mother had kept a log of every video call between the child and the father for two years, recording the precise length of each call and remarks such as that he “was not engaged and was eating his food during the call”. The judge described it as:

“a self-serving document, compiled for the purpose of litigation” which “reads as a surveillance log of F, when what had been intended was for A to be able to enjoy – in a child focussed way – spending some time with her father.”

X (father) v Y (mother) [2025] EWFC 62 (B), Recorder Moys, paragraph 44

The court found the mother’s expectations of a two-year-old’s video calls unrealistic and unduly critical, and made an order under section 91(14) of the Children Act against both parents for 24 months, restricting further applications without permission.

Read together, the two cases give the practical rule. A record that was begun before any dispute, kept routinely, and which notes the times the other parent did the right thing, reads as an honest account. A record that was begun to build a case, that logs only the other parent’s failings, and that scores their behaviour, reads as surveillance. The second kind can count against the person who kept it.

Note also what the second record was. It was one parent’s log of the other parent’s contact. A record of your own contact, what was arranged for you and what happened when you turned up, is a different thing, and much harder to characterise that way.

What should each entry contain?

Enough to establish what was supposed to happen and what did, and nothing that will read badly in two years’ time. For each call or visit:

1. The date, and if it is a stay, the date it ended.
2. What was arranged. The scheduled start and end. If there is a court order or written agreement, the times come from that.
3. What happened. Took place, did not take place, no answer, cancelled, moved by agreement. If it took place, the actual start and end.
4. Who, if there is more than one child or more than one adult involved.
5. Where, by name if it matters (a contact centre, a school gate). Not an address.
6. One or two sentences of plain fact. “Arrived 09:58. Told at the door A was unwell. No earlier message.” Not “She did it again.”
7. When you wrote it. Ideally the same day. If you are writing up something from last week, say so in the entry. A record that is honest about its own gaps is more credible than one that pretends to have none.

Write in the first person and in your own words. Separate what you saw from what you were told: “A told me she had been at a party” is fine; “she was at a party” is not, because you did not see it. This is the same distinction Practice Direction 22A requires in a witness statement, and it is easier to keep if the record already makes it.

Note the good as well as the bad. A month where every entry says “on time, went well” is not wasted. It is the baseline that gives a missed visit its meaning, and it is the single thing that most clearly separates a routine record from a case file.

What should you leave out?

• Opinions about the other parent. Their motives, their character, what they are “really” doing. The court will form its own view. Yours, written down, makes the record look like advocacy.
• Scores and grades. Rating a call, counting seconds, noting what the other parent ate. This is what turned the log in X v Y into a “surveillance log”.
• Things you did not witness. Or, if you must note them, say who told you.
• Long message threads. Copies of texts, WhatsApp and social media messages are separately excluded from the bundle by Practice Direction 27A (paragraph 5.2(b)). Keep them if you need to, but a contact record is not the place to paste them, and they will not go in the bundle anyway without a direction.
• The other parent’s address, or your own. A record may end up being read by the other side. Nothing in it should disclose a location that a court has allowed to be withheld.
• The child’s words, unless you are careful. What a child said can matter, but a record full of a child’s reported complaints about the other parent reads badly and can raise its own concerns about how the child is being drawn into the dispute. If it is important, write down exactly what was said, when, and what prompted it, and nothing more.

Should you record calls or handovers?

The Family Justice Council published guidance on covert recordings in family proceedings concerning children on 15 May 2025. Its central sentence is that “the covert recording of children rarely promotes a child’s welfare whatever the intention” (paragraph 1.5). On recordings between parents, it notes that surveillance of that kind can demonstrate the sort of thinking that is itself a form of harassment or control.

Recordings are also on the Practice Direction 27A list of documents excluded from the bundle without a direction (paragraph 5.2(c)).

A written note of what happened, made openly by you, is on the right side of that guidance. A recording made without the other person’s knowledge is not, and the fact of having made it may say more to the court than what is on it.

Is a notebook enough?

For many people, yes. A dated paper diary, kept in the same place, in ink, written on the day, has been accepted as evidence by family courts for as long as there have been family courts. The Notes app on a phone, or a simple spreadsheet with one row per contact, does the same job. What matters is the discipline: every contact, same day, same format, facts only. Not the tool.

Where a tool earns its place is at the other end, when someone needs the ten relevant entries out of two hundred, in date order, with the times compared, and without retyping them. That is the part the rules now put the weight on, and it is tedious to do by hand from a notebook.

How does a record get in front of the court?

Not on its own. A contact record reaches a judge as an exhibit to a witness statement, in proceedings that already exist or that you start.

Exhibiting it to a statement

Practice Direction 22A sets out the form. Your statement is in your own words and first person (paragraph 4.1), distinguishes what you know from what you were told (paragraph 4.3), and refers to each exhibit with the words “there is now shown to me marked …” (paragraph 4.5). It ends with a statement of truth in the prescribed wording, which begins “I understand that proceedings for contempt of court may be brought against anyone who makes, or causes to be made, a false statement…” (paragraph 6.4). The statement itself is limited to 25 pages. The exhibit is the selected entries, not the whole log.

Enforcing an existing order

If there is already a child arrangements order and it is not being kept, the application to enforce it is form C79. The court fee is £270 (Family court fees, EX50, updated 13 July 2026). The government’s guidance leaflet is CB5. One prerequisite is easy to miss: under section 11K of the Children Act 1989 the court cannot make an enforcement order unless it is satisfied that, before the breach, the other person had been given a copy of the warning notice that goes with the order. If your order does not carry one, that is the first thing to sort out.

What the court is weighing

It is worth knowing that the Court of Appeal has moved away from long itemised lists of allegations in domestic abuse cases, on the basis that what usually matters is a pattern of behaviour rather than a schedule of dated incidents (Re H-N [2021] EWCA Civ 448, paragraphs 43 to 46). That judgment is about fact-finding in abuse cases, not contact records generally, and it should not be stretched further than that. But it points the same way as everything else here: a short, dated, honest record that shows a pattern is worth more than a long one that tries to prove every incident.

Sources

Everything above is checked against the documents below, as they stood on 13 September 2026. Rules and fees change; read the current version before relying on any of it.

1. Practice Direction 27A, Family Proceedings: Court Bundles, in force 2 March 2026. Paragraphs 5.2, 8.1 and 11.2. justice.gov.uk
2. Practice Direction 22A, Written Evidence. Paragraphs 4.1, 4.3, 4.5 and 6.4. justice.gov.uk
3. Re W (A Child) (Finalisation at IRH) [2025] EWFC 266 (B), 18 August 2025, paragraphs 112 and 113. Find Case Law
4. Father v Mother [2025] EWFC 284 (B), 28 July 2025, paragraphs 120 and 150. Find Case Law
5. X (father) v Y (mother) [2025] EWFC 62 (B), 10 March 2025, paragraph 44. Find Case Law
6. Family Justice Council, Covert recordings in Family Law proceedings concerning children, 15 May 2025, paragraphs 1.2 and 1.5. judiciary.uk
7. Re H-N and Others (Children) (Domestic Abuse: Finding of Fact Hearings) [2021] EWCA Civ 448, paragraphs 43 to 46. BAILII
8. Children Act 1989, section 11K (enforcement orders: warning notice). legislation.gov.uk
9. Form C79, apply to the court to enforce a child arrangements order, and leaflet CB5. gov.uk
10. Family court fees (EX50), updated 13 July 2026, fees order 2.1. gov.uk