"15. I am the first to acknowledge that a judge … is entitled to take a proactive, quasi-investigative role in care proceedings. Equally, she will make findings of fact on all the evidence available to her, including her assessment of the parents' credibility; she is not limited to the expert evidence. I am also content to decide the question in this appeal on the basis that a judge … is not required slavishly to adhere to a schedule of proposed findings placed before her by a local authority. To take an obvious example: care proceedings are frequently dynamic and issues emerge in the oral evidence which had not hitherto been known to exist. It would be absurd if such matters had to be ignored.

16. All that said, however, the following propositions seem to me to be equally valid. Where, as here, the local authority had prepared its Schedule of proposed findings with some care, and where the fact finding hearing had itself been the subject of a directions appointment at which the parents had agreed not to apply for various witnesses to attend for cross-examination, it requires very good reasons, in my judgment, for the judge to depart from the schedule of proposed findings. Furthermore, if the judge is, as it were, to go off piste", and to make findings of fact which are not sought by the local authority or not contained in its Schedule, then he or she must be astute to ensure; (a) that any additional or different findings made are securely founded in the evidence;