Annex 1
Post Adoption Support: Adoption Allowances
Lowe and Murch's Research (Supporting Adoption;
reframing the approach, BAAF 1999) which covered children
adopted above the age of five years, showed that 61 per cent of
the families responding to the postal questionnaire received an
adoption allowance. However, figures from Barnardo's show that
only 15 out of 52 (29 per cent) of children placed by them during
1998-99 and only 16 out of 68 (23.5 per cent) in 1999-2000 were
eligible for adoption allowances. The postal survey in the Lowe
and Murch study was conducted in Autumn 1994, so there is some
possibility that the position has worsened. (While some of the
children placed by Barnardo's may have been younger than those
in the Lowe and Murch study, they were all children that the local
authorities referring them to Barnardo's had considered hard to
place.)
The Lowe and Murch study gives examples of the
inconsistencies encountered by adoptive families, including one
where the family had adopted children from two different local
authorities whose attitudes contrasted sharply; with one "(their)
attitude is very much you're taking on older children, difficult
children who need an awful lot of support and therefore you've
got enough worries without having to worry about money and they
were very generous and still are". With the other authority
the same mother felt that she had to fight for support, even for
a large sibling placement.
BAAF's study Surveying Adoption (Ivaldi
2000) showed (not surprisingly) that single adopters were more
likely to need an adoption allowance than couples (53 per cent
compared with 14 per cent) although where adoption by foster carers
was proposed there was little difference between the expected
need for an allowance for single carers compared with couples
(45 per cent compared with 39 per cent).
April 2001
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