Supply and demand mismatch in adoption

For years, successive administrations have intervened as if adoption were like any other political policy arena: Prime Ministers Tony Blair and David Cameron had a go with their taskforces; while Education Secretary Michael Gove was rarely silent on the issue; and now the current team is weighing in. Over the decades, we have seen investment in both well-meaning and ill-advised initiatives designed to speed up processes and provide much needed support to children and their adopters.

Governments wielded their big stick through adoption scorecards (which became inspection evidence), resulting in ill-informed and ill-equipped intervention teams being sent into “poorly performing” councils. Local authorities were then coerced into establishing Regional Adoption Agencies to boost performance. Yet the headline numbers are going in the wrong direction. There are two distinct issues: first, there are too many children in care who are not in a secure permanent family; and second, there are always adults who wish to adopt to create or complete a family. History shows that neither of the issues will be improved to anybody’s satisfaction simply by conflating them.