Latest Department for Education figures show the number of looked-after children placed for adoption last year was the lowest this century.
In the year to March 2023, 2,960 children left local authority care under an adoption order. This was a 2% fall from the previous year and continued the long-term decline since the 2015 peak when 5,360 children were adopted.
The DfE blames the decline on two court rulings in 2013 which stated that adoption orders should be made only when there was no other alternative, such as placing a child with birth relatives.
However, the DfE data shows that it now takes longer for a child to be placed for adoption – the average time between a child entering care and being placed was one year and seven months, one month longer than in 2022 – and for adoptions to be completed – on average it took two years and five months for a child to be adopted, two months longer than in 2019.
Last year, there were 3,150 children who had received an assessment that adoption was in their best interest but had not yet been placed, while a further 2,220 had a placement order but had not been placed.
The number of prospective adopters has also fallen recently, partly due to the impact of the cost-of-living crisis. A survey by Adoption UK found nine in 10 prospective adopters said that the cost-of-living crisis has heightened their anxieties about finding the right time to start a family. It has recently launched the You Can Adopt campaign to boost recruitment.
Meanwhile, Adoption England recently launched the National Matching Practice Standards, designed as part of its programme of work to strengthen care planning and matching practices across England.
The standards have been developed to reduce the disparity in matching practice nationally between local authorities and adoption agencies and provide a minimum set of expectations around the core service delivery requirements to consider when placing a child with an adoptive family and encourage a consistent approach.
One of the standards covers the matching process and highlights the importance of creating a high quality and dynamic profile of the child to ensure their personality is fully captured.
An initiative that is doing this is Coram’s Step Up programme. Funded by Adoption England, the programme offers a package of bespoke and intensive family finding support for harder to place children.
An evaluation of the first year of the programme found that three quarters of children who had received the full six months of support had progressed to adoption panel with a potential adoptive family.
- National Matching Practice Standards from www.adoptionengland.co.uk
Expert view: Detailed process helps match priority children with adopters
Stephanie Bentley, Step Up programme social worker (pictured left)
Sisters Poppy* and Grace* were four and five years old when they were referred to the Step Up programme which provides intensive, bespoke matching to speed up family finding for priority children.
The children had some additional needs, developmental uncertainty, and had experienced an adoption disruption.
Over six months, Step Up worked alongside Poppy and Grace’s family finder to facilitate and resource innovative methods to intensify the search for an adoptive family. A video profile was commissioned to give a full picture of the children, alongside profiling using online platforms and at national adoption exchange days.
Step Up arranged for the children to attend an Adoption Activity Day and supported the process of considering prospective families when expressions of interest were made.
In response to an emerging need for Poppy and Grace to develop a closer sibling relationship, to explore their experience of the adoption disruption and to communicate their emotions about moving to a new family, Step Up funded the children’s access to art therapy with Coram’s Creative Therapies service. Not only did this help Poppy and Grace to cope with the impacts of trauma and loss, but it also gave prospective families a more comprehensive understanding of the children’s needs and, as a result, the confidence to consider children with priority characteristics.
Poppy and Grace’s adoptive parents, Nick* and Diane*, were found five months into the Step Up intervention after their written profile was featured at an Adoption Activity Day. Profiling children for adoption in a way that portrays them positively, realistically and sensitively is a complex task but by having a social worker available to speak directly with prospective families, Poppy and Grace’s unique needs and personal histories were conveyed in more detail to give a truer sense of them now.
Nick says that seeing the video and hearing about the girls’ background, including some of the key things they’d been through, directly from the social worker reassured him.
Nick and Diane had a chemistry meeting with the girls before the matching panel, which went well. Since moving in with the couple in January, Nick says that the girls have made rapid progress with the emotional security at home and additional support at school.
Names changed
