Research commissioned by the Department for Education suggests that there is a desire among family courts to push for a placement within the wider family as a result of legal rulings from 2013 calling on local authorities to provide evidence that all alternatives to adoption have been considered.
The report states that SGOs, which are used predominantly to give relatives of a child legal responsibility for their upbringing, are sometimes being granted to carers who are not members of the extended family and who have no existing relationship with the child.
It gives the example of an SGO that was, against the advice of the local authority, made to a woman who was not a relation of the child but sat in the same pew at church as the grandfather.
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