Making happy families

At the start of 2013, children and families minister Edward Timpson delivered a stark ultimatum to councils: recruit more adopters and place children more quickly or relinquish that role.

The warning came as part of an extensive push by the government, spearheaded by Education Secretary Michael Gove, himself adopted as a baby, to increase the number of looked-after children adopted.

Figures released in 2012 showed that 4,600 children deemed eligible for adoption were waiting for homes, with an estimated 2,000 adopters needed to meet this backlog. A further 600 adopters also need to be recruited each year to keep pace with demand.

Councils also have a 639-day (21-month) deadline to place a child highlighted for adoption from when they enter care. But statistics from the years 2009 to 2012 shows the three-year average for 37 councils was considerably above that, at between 692 and 1,082 days.

To address this, £150m of early intervention grant money for 2013/14 has been diverted into an adoption reform grant, the bulk of which is for councils to use on improving recruitment and support.

Better recruitment

Bournemouth Council, named by the British Association for Adoption and Fostering (BAAF) as the best adoption service of 2012, has used this money to create its first dedicated adoption marketing officer role.

"Before, our marketing activity to recruit adopters was very limited and had no strategy," says David Rafelle, who took up the role in April.

Since then, marketing activity has included a poster design competition among local primary school children, helping promote adoption among parents as well as ensuring an eye-catching design.

A series of coffee morning events for the public to meet local adopters is also being planned, as are online chats with a social worker about adoption via social media.

The service has also looked closely at the way it deals with calls from those interested in adopting "to ensure we speak to them and get the ball rolling that very day", adds Rafelle.

John Simmonds, BAAF's director of policy, research and development, says setting up tracking panels, where staff monitor prospective adopters' applications and ensure they are regularly updated with clear information, is another way councils are using extra government money to reduce delays.

Voluntary adoption agencies (VAA) have also been given a cash injection to bolster their recruitment efforts, with a total of £17m of grants available over the next three years to help them expand and create new agencies.

Norman Goodwin, chief executive of voluntary adoption agency Adoption Matters Northwest, suggests this funding boost marks a significant shift in the relationship between voluntary agencies and local government as "before we've always had to go cap in hand to councils".

Developing concurrent planning is another area where Goodwin anticipates both councils and VAAs will use their extra money. This is where children are placed with foster parents who are also approved as potential adoptive parents while a decision is made about their future. Councils will be required to consider this as an option under the Children and Families Bill (see box).

Adoption Matters North has been using the approach for the past two years. "It speeds up the process of adoption and is better for the child and placement stability as they do not have to move again," says Goodwin.

Finding adoptive parents for hard-to-place groups, such as sibling groups, older children and those with disabilities, is another focus of the government's reform agenda. Part of the early intervention grant has been ringfenced to incentivise recruitment in this area.

BAAF's National Adoption Week from 4 to 10 November will also focus on recruiting parents for such children, in addition to encouraging greater use of social media in recruitment.

Adoption parties, where prospective adopters and hard-to-place children meet during an activity day, are also being increasingly used. BAAF's adoption parties usually involve 40 to 60 adopters at venues such as adventure playgrounds, explains Simmonds.

BAAF is able to find homes for about a quarter of children who attend, "which is an exceptionally good rate" among these hard-to-place groups, he says.

While government investment in adoption has been broadly welcomed by the Association of Directors of Children's Services (ADCS), the group continues to lobby against the Children and Families Bill provision to remove the adoption recruitment function from councils.

ADCS president Andrew Webb says latest figures showing a rise in the number of children who are adopted demonstrate councils are "working extremely hard" to cut out delays.

"If you want to develop an adoption market, it doesn't seem sensible to make it illegal for the biggest supplier in that market to take part. It's an inappropriate threat," he adds.

The government's use of maps and scorecards of councils' adoption recruitment performance has also been criticised for being out of date by organisations such as adoption support agency Adoption UK. They say that most of this information is at least a year old, and poorly presented across a series of Excel spread sheets.

Adoption UK chief executive Hugh Thornbery says Department for Education officials and ministers he has met share his concerns and have indicated these will be improved.

"To be meaningful, they need to be real-time and simple," he says. "Also, they need to have more projections. That would be more useful than historical data."

Webb also warns against confusing the speeding up of the adoption process with eradicating unnecessary delays. "It is right that we address delays, but we must remember that some potential adopters benefit from time to reflect, and it would be wrong to rush them," he says.

Access to support

A lack of support for adopted children and their new families is widely regarded as the key factor in placement breakdown.

Latest figures from BAAF show a quarter of adoptions where children were placed at age seven to eight fail by the time the child is a teenager.

"We hear some terrible stories from parents supported by other agencies who say their requests for help were just not answered and they had to battle to get the support they need," says Adoption UK's Thornbery.

A lack of access and funding for expert therapists locally is a key issue, he says. Another is poor quality partnerships between councils and local support services such as child and adolescent mental health services (CAMHS).

The government is expecting councils to use some of the £150m of early intervention grant diverted into adoption reform to improve access to support.

In addition, a £19.3m Adoption Support Fund has been created specifically to improve access to therapeutic support, including play therapy and intensive family support.

This fund is to be piloted this year and will be rolled out across England by 2015. In the long term, the government expects it to be topped up by contributions from councils and adoption agencies, and become self-sustaining.

During the pilot, personal budgets will be tested, enabling parents to have greater control over the support they access. These have the potential to dramatically improve support for adoptive families, says ADCS president Webb.

"Current adoption support tends to be time limited and not last years," he explains. "But what the government is developing through this fund is much more exciting as it enables parents to directly access support when they need it. It's a logical way to deliver services."

A lack of clear information for families about support available is also an issue the government wants addressed.

A Department for Education report released in March - Understanding Attitudes, Motivations and Barriers to Adoption and Fostering, based on in-depth interviews with adoptive parents and an online survey of 5,000 people - found a lack of information about support was a key barrier to adopting.

"Adoption and fostering are complex issues, but there is a need to translate them into more digestible messaging," the report says.

The government hopes its First4Adoption website, which launched this year, will help families understand the range of support potentially available to them.

The site presents a raft of information including an "adoption passport" outlining support that councils may offer such as family mediation, school preference, priority council housing and financial support through nursery hours and adoption pay and leave.

The Children and Families Bill will also hand prospective adopters and adoptive parents the right to information from their council about support.

Yet, despite calls from charities such as Adoption UK, the bill stops short of legally guaranteeing access to support, outside of statutory adoption pay and leave.

Without this legal guarantee, families in parts of England will continue to struggle to access support, fears Thornbery.

"We were calling for the government to bring in something around entitlement of support, but the government was not prepared to do that," he says. "They felt councils would find ways around that so their response instead was to set up the National Adoption Support Fund, which, while extremely important, still doesn't give families a guarantee that they will be supported."

In the absence of such a guarantee, Thornbery urges all councils and voluntary adoption agencies to use their extra government money to ensure no adoptive family is turned away when they need help.

Trigger points

Thornbery wants all agencies to be aware of trigger points in an adopted child's life when support is likely to be needed, such as the move from primary to secondary school and puberty.

Adoption UK seeks to achieve such continuity of support by maintaining long-term relationships between social workers and families.

"Our families' relationship with their social worker is such that they know they can ring any time night and day," he says. "Issues arise early on in the placement, but things may settle down and not surface again for years."

Bournemouth Council's adoption service plans to improve access to therapeutic help by having a clinical psychologist attached to it, as well as a medical adviser on hand to support families long after a child has been placed. Other support includes adopters' groups every two to three months, with regular expert speakers.

"We also run children's groups where adopted children can get together and talk, during something like a pizza evening," says marketing officer Rafelle.

Paying close attention to a child's sense of wellbeing during the process of moving to their new home can also help them feel more secure and lessen the risk of breakdown, he says.

"We have a moving calendar that is very visual and bespoke to the child. One was pirate themed for example," he explains. "We also do a moving calendar for existing children in the house they are moving to."

Smaller councils, which are less able to benefit from economies of scale, may find it harder to offer effective support.

Webb, who is also director of people at Stockport Council, says some are already addressing this by working collaboratively in both adoption recruitment and support.

Stockport, for example, has such an arrangement in place with nearby Tameside, Cheshire East and Trafford councils, called Four4Adoption.

"Having lots of small agencies is an inefficient way of doing things, so where we can work together we can spread that load between us and improve that level of support," he says.

CHILDREN AND FAMILIES BILL: IMPACT ON ADOPTION

• Councils will be required to consider a "fostering for adoption" placement where appropriate, to ensure looked-after children are swiftly placed with prospective adopters
• There will no longer be a requirement to consider ethnicity when placing a child
• The Secretary of State for Education will have the power to remove the recruitment function from councils that are failing to swiftly recruit and match adopters and children. Failing councils will be required to commission voluntary adoption agencies or other councils to carry out their recruitment
• Prospective adopters and adoptive parents will have a right to information from their council about their entitlement to support
• Adoptive parents will be given the option of a personal budget for support
• Statutory adoption pay will be increased to 90 per cent of a person's average salary for the first six weeks of adoption, to bring it in line with statutory maternity pay. Adoptive parents will also have the right to time off work to attend adoption meetings or when entering into fostering to adopt arrangements
• The bill sets out to strengthen what the government believes are unclear contact arrangements between an adopted child and their birth families. New court orders will be created to govern such contact arrangements, and for the first time "no contact orders" will be available to help adoptive parents prevent contact from a birth family

National Adoption Week runs from 4 to 10 November and features a series of events across the UK, as well as the National Adoption Week Awards

To find out about what's happening in your area, get ideas for activities or learn more about how to become an "adoption champion", go to www.nationaladoptionweek.org.uk