SUMMARY
We were established in May 2012 to provide post-legislative
scrutiny of the existing statute law on adoption. Our work has
taken place against a backdrop of increased public and media focus
on adoption, driven in part by the Government's commitment to
reforming adoption services. In light of Government proposals
for reform, and the introduction of the Children and Families
Bill in February 2013, we have not restricted ourselves solely
to scrutiny of the current statute law. We have, where appropriate,
given consideration to the issues raised by the Government's proposals.
In particular, we were invited to provide pre-legislative scrutiny
of two draft clauses of the Bill published in November 2012, on
which we reported in December 2012.
None of our witnesses called for wide-ranging changes
to the legislation. Instead, there was over-whelming evidence
that the big issues of concern—delay in the adoption system
and the shortage of adopters—were the result of failures
in practice. Legislation is clearly only part of the picture.
We have therefore given attention to how practice, as well as
legislation, might be improved to transform the lives of children
for the better.
The Government wishes to increase the number of children
being adopted; we agree that there is the potential for more children
to benefit from adoption which is in many ways unique in its benefits.
Adoption is, however, only one of several solutions for providing
vulnerable children with the love, stability and support they
need. Long-term fostering, friends and family care, and special
guardianship also play a significant role in meeting the needs
of many of the children who cannot be cared for by their birth
parents, and for whom adoption may not be appropriate. We are
concerned that the Government's focus on adoption risks disadvantaging
those children in care for whom adoption is not suitable. Improving
the outcomes for all children in care should be the priority;
all routes to permanence merit equal attention and investment.
We also believe that early intensive work with birth
parents where there is capacity to change has the potential to
enable children to live safely within their birth families and
to reduce the number of children in care. We urge the Government
not to undermine the potential benefit of preventative programmes
by focusing on adoption at the expense of early intervention.
Children adopted from local authority care have a
range of needs due to their early life experiences, often of abuse
or neglect, which are not resolved simply by being adopted. We
are concerned that the provision of post-adoption support is often
variable and sometimes inadequate. We believe such support is
essential to ensuring the stability of adoptive placements, and
to increasing the number of adopters coming forward. We therefore
recommend a statutory duty on local authorities and other service
commissioning bodies to cooperate to ensure the provision of post-adoption
support.
The shortage of adopters is a recurrent theme throughout
our evidence. The Government is seeking to address this in the
Children and Families Bill by giving the Secretary of State the
power to direct local authorities to outsource adopter recruitment.
We share the Government's concern about the fragmentation of
adopter recruitment and low levels of recruitment
by some councils. We note, however, that some smaller local authorities,
through joint working with neighbours and integrated management,
have been able to improve their adoption services, including recruitment
of adopters and speed of matching children with adoptive families.
We recommend that the Government should encourage and facilitate
further joint working. Furthermore, we strongly encourage the
Government to allow sufficient time for the sector to develop
viable and achievable measures to address the shortage of adopters
before taking the steps envisaged in Clause 3 of the Bill.
In undertaking our work, we spoke with children in
care and children who had been adopted. We were left with the
strong impression that children who had experience of care and
adoption proceedings did not always feel that their views had
been heard. We find this worrying. We recommend measures to improve
the performance of Independent Reviewing Officers and guardians
appointed by the Children and Family Court Advisory and Support
Service, in the hope that these steps will address some of the
concerns voiced to us by children.
We welcome the Government's focus on improving adoption
services, but we are concerned that insufficient work is currently
done to monitor outcomes, rather than processes. Some adoptions
break down and those children re-enter the care system. More needs
to be done to measure rates of, and reasons for, adoption breakdown.
Without robust research and data we cannot be confident that the
investment in improving adoption will actually transform children's
lives for the better.
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