Parenting Plan &
Co-Parenting Mediation

No. There is no legal presumption of a 50/50 split, and the word custody has not been used in English law for over 30 years. The law asks what is best for your children, not what is equal for the parents. Shared care works well for plenty of families, particularly where the two of you live close together and the children are school age, but it is one option among several rather than a default.

Alternate weekends with one or two midweek nights remains the most common arrangement, usually because it fits the school week and keeps travel manageable. Week on week off is increasingly common where parents live close to each other and the children are older. For younger children, patterns that avoid long gaps, such as the 2-2-3 rotation, tend to work better. There is no right answer, only the one that fits your week.

There is no age at which a child gets to decide. The Children Act says a child’s wishes and feelings should be considered in the light of their age and understanding, so the older the child, the more weight their view carries. In practice a court will rarely impose an arrangement on a teenager who is set against it. At 16 years old, the court will not make a child arrangements order, unless specific situations apply. In mediation you can arrange for your children to be seen by a specially trained mediator so their views are heard properly rather than second hand.

Not on its own. A parenting plan is a written record of what the two of you have agreed, and most families never need it to be anything more. If you want it enforceable, it can be turned into a child arrangements order and approved by a judge, which we can arrange for you. Our guide on whether a parenting plan is legally binding covers this in more detail.

It usually needs adjusting at some point, because children grow and circumstances change. That is a feature of a parenting plan rather than a failure of one. Most parents build in a review date at the outset, often after the first few months and then annually. If you cannot agree the change between you, coming back for a single session is far quicker and cheaper than going to court to vary an order.

Start with why. Repeated changes are often a symptom of a schedule that does not fit someone’s working pattern, in which case the plan needs fixing rather than enforcing. Where it is deliberate, a parenting plan is not enforceable but a child arrangements order is, and a court can attach a warning notice to it. Coming back to mediation first is usually quicker, and a court will expect you to have tried.

Yes, and it makes no difference to the children’s position. Arrangements for children are decided on the same basis whether the parents were married, in a civil partnership or never lived together. The only thing worth checking is whether both parents have parental responsibility, which a father has automatically if he is named on the birth certificate for a child born after December 2003.

Mediation is voluntary, so nobody can be made to attend. If your co-parent declines or does not respond, your mediator will sign the MIAM certificate you need in order to apply to court, so nothing is lost by trying. Since April 2024 the court can also take an unreasonable refusal to consider mediation into account when deciding who pays the costs. If you do end up applying, the average private law children case took 37 weeks to be decided during 2025, according to Ministry of Justice figures reported by Today’s Family Lawyer.