More councils fail to hit adoption timescale targets

Latest adoption scorecards, published by the Department for Education, show that 65 out of 152 top-tier local authorities in England (43 per cent) did not meet both thresholds for how quickly children are adopted over the three-year period between 2010 and 2013.

The government said that while the latest results are “disappointing”, the data does not cover 2013/14, a period in which changes to the adoption system that are expected to deliver improvements, including funding to boost adopter recruitment and the creation of the Adoption Leadership Board, have been made.

The failure rate for the latest period is significantly higher than it was for the period between 2009 and 2012, when 37 authorities failed to meet both thresholds. This could be down to a tightening of the time limit targets introduced between the two sets of figures.

For 2010 to 2013, the target for how long it should take between a child entering care and moving in with its adoptive family was 20 months, compared to 21 months for the period between 2009 and 2012.

And the target for how long it should take a local authority to match a child with an adoptive family after receiving court authority to do so was six months for 2010 to 2013, compared to seven months for the period between 2009 and 2012.

Alongside the latest adoption scorecards, the government has also published “uprated thresholds” that councils will be measured against up to 2016.

By the time councils are rated for their performance between 2013 and 2016, it will be expected that the period between a child entering care and moving in with an adoptive family is no longer than 14 months.

And the time it takes a local authority to decide on a matching an adoptive family after receiving court authority to place a child will be expected to be no longer than four months.