Separating siblings: debate starts to rage

The issue of whether or not to separate siblings in the care system is highly emotive.

Last month, the government’s adoption adviser Martin Narey argued that social workers need to strike a better equilibrium between the advantages of putting sibling groups forward for adoption and the resultant disadvantages of keeping children in temporary placements. He issued the warning as he launched two discussion papers calling for views from professionals – one on siblings in care, the other on contact between looked-after children and their birth families.

As it is, around three-quarters of looked-after children are separated from their siblings on entering the care system.

According to the Children Act 1989, siblings should be placed together “so far as is reasonably practicable and consistent with welfare”. But Narey’s discussion paper proposes to end the presumption that brothers and sisters should be kept together, and allow social workers more flexibility to separate them, if it is in the best interests of the children involved. This is partly because siblings have to wait on average a year longer to be adopted than individual children.

“We need to be much more circumspect about separating siblings,” Narey said.

“One of the many sets of remarkable adopters I met described to me in moving terms their difficulties in bringing up a brother and a sister who had been traumatised. The sad reality was that those children only really flourished when eventually they were separated.”

Here, CYP Now asks a social worker and an adoptive parent for their views on the debate.


View of the social worker

Janet Foulds, social work manager, Derby City Council

“Decisions about placing children for adoption are among the most important that social workers ever make. Get it right and ?children can look forward to a lifetime of love, nurturing and achieving potential. Get it wrong and we expose vulnerable children to devastating placement breakdown.

"Children who have suffered abuse and neglect in their birth families will have shared experiences, good and bad, with ?their siblings and will, understandably, have strong bonds.

"They may have needed each other to survive in adverse conditions and may have cared for each other when their parents or carers failed to meet their basic needs or, worse, abused one or all of their children.

"The meaning of these relationships cannot be underestimated. For children suffering loss in their early lives, siblings may provide their only roots. In addition to shared history, siblings reflect physical likeness and help children to form their identity.

"Despite traumatic experiences, children do recall the details of their lives together. They are brothers and sisters who share memories, fun times and difficulties. For these reasons, it is easy to believe that, wherever possible, we should try to place sibling groups together.

"Experience has shown, however, that in placing sibling groups for adoption, we may be failing to meet children’s individual needs, and our wish to preserve sibling bonds may prove harmful to some children. Children placed for adoption have complex needs. They may have experienced multiple placements and have difficulties forming good attachments.

"As we learn more about the impact of abuse on children’s development, we know how early-life experiences significantly ?affect brain development, learning capacity and relationships. Less obvious, perhaps, and overlooked in some assessments is the nature of relationships within the birth family. It is important to understand the roles that children have had to play in order to survive. In abusing families, boundaries are confused or non-existent and children may have been coerced into abusing their siblings. Most children being placed for adoption will have missed out on childhood and some may need a lot of reassurance to let go if they themselves have been playing a parent role.

"Social workers need time to do the sensitive work with children, which informs sound decisions. They also need access to good supervision to test assumptions made about placements for sibling groups.

"The best decisions can only be made by thorough assessment of each child’s needs, the importance of sibling relationships and the capacity of adopters to provide support. Quality contact can be maintained if siblings are separated, but the most important assessment has to be of individual needs.”


View of the parent

Nicola Marshall, adoptive parent of three siblings

“My husband and I adopted a sibling group of three children four years ago. ?I am glad that Martin Narey has opened this debate. He’s raised the fact that there aren’t enough adopters willing to take ?on siblings.

"I would agree with that, although I’ve met lots of adopters who are waiting for siblings, so in terms of the matching ?process, something is not working as well as it should be there.

"Narey has said that children are kept in care too long because they can’t find people to take them. That was the case for our children.

"They were in foster care for two-and-a-half years, and really they were left there by social services, who didn’t think ?they would be able to find anybody willing to take on a group.

"When a sibling group has been together for that amount of time, to then try to split them would be more damaging to the children than would keeping them together.

"If social services had the resources to really assess children individually at the point when they take them into care, ?then they could decide if the best outcome for each individual child was to separate them or keep them together. But the fact is that they don’t have those resources.

"The social workers did not know my children. They had lots of social workers during the time they were in care, none ?of whom understood them really well, so they couldn’t say what the best thing was for them.

"There also needs to be much more support for adopters who are willing to take on sibling groups.

"The support we get from our local authority is not enough. It’s not easy. All of our children have suffered from neglect and abuse.

"The answer here needs to be more support for adoptive parents first and foremost, not just necessarily splitting siblings up.”


See Martin Narey interview