Adoption matchmaker: Andy Leary-May, Link Maker Systems chief executive

Andy Leary-May likes finding solutions to problems. It is a characteristic he picked up in childhood watching his engineer father produce car parts in his workshop, and then went on to nurture through an industrial design degree at Brunel University before more recently applying it to the adoption sector.

"Problem-solving and creating new things, whether products, processes or organisations, is what interests me," says Leary-May, who, after eight years running his own design consultancy from the same east London office his dad built in the 1960s, decided he needed a new challenge.

So in 2006, he handed the design consultancy over to his employees, started building a boat with his partner, with whom he had just entered into a civil partnership, and decided it was the right time to adopt. It was just a couple of years after the introduction of new laws, through the Adoption and Children Act, that allowed same-sex couples to adopt. Once he started researching adoption, it didn't take him long to realise there was a distinct lack of support for same-sex couples going through the process. So, typical of Leary-May, he set up New Family Social (NFS), an online support group - now a charity - for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people who have adopted or are adopting.

"I'd never been involved in adoption or charities up to that point, so it was a big learning curve for me," he says. "I was relatively confident lots of LGBT people were going to adopt and that it was going to grow - and agencies were keen to show they were being inclusive, so the funding for it came from local authorities and voluntary agencies that paid an annual subscription."

Leary-May was a director of NFS until 2013, during which time he and his partner adopted two young sons. It was at that time that the idea for his next venture began to crystalise. Increasingly, he was having conversations about the need to improve the way prospective adopters and children needing permanent homes were matched up - and he recognised that doing this online would be easier.

He explains: "Whatever you're trying to do, there's generally a sophisticated online system that allows you to do it, such as Match.com. The same wasn't around to help children find the right adoptive placements, and it seemed wrong that such a thing didn't exist.

"After a couple of years, we started thinking maybe we should develop that."

One of the people he spoke to about it was the government's adoption adviser Martin Narey. "I told him about my feeling there should be a live online system that adopters should be able to use directly to look at profiles of children. He liked the sound of that and took away part of the idea, which was about adopters being able to access children's profiles online," he says.

As a result, the Department for Education commissioned the Adopter Access Pilot through the Adoption Register. Leary-May bid to run it, but was unsuccessful, the contract instead going to the British Association for Adoption and Fostering.

Pilot system delay

The pilot system, which allows would-be adopters to see photos and videos of children waiting to be adopted as well as find out about their hobbies and interests, was meant to begin across 29 councils and voluntary adoption agencies in April 2014, but is yet to start due to issues around data security.

"We know there are very high security thresholds to meet," says Leary-May. Despite the knock back, he decided to push ahead with his own, more ambitious, plans to create a system that allowed social workers as well as prospective adopters to search for children.

"The pilot didn't allow social workers to proactively spot adopters they think will be good for their children, and approach them. That was why we pressed ahead with developing our own system and we've had complete freedom to grow it as we see fit."

So after stepping down from NFS, he and a former colleague set up Link Maker Systems and, in April 2014, Adoption Link was launched. In the space of a year, it has grown to a team of eight and contains profiles of 546 children currently looking for matches and has 2,300 prospective adopters registered with it. In addition, 80 per cent of local authorities are using the system to find families for children, 285 children were matched as a result of links made through the system in the 12 months up until the end of June and there were 350,000 visitors to the website in the first half of 2015.

The system works by allowing adopters or social workers to search the databases to find the best match for their requirements. "It is all driven by profiles," explains Leary-May. "What the system does is allow the adopter or social worker to put in their preferences or needs and the system can then make a reasonable guess which profiles will be of interest. It orders the profiles so that it ranks them based on meeting preferences."

There is no identifying information in the profiles, but adopters or social workers can email an enquiry and "if both parties are interested, we say it is at that point that a link has been made and you can carry on the discussion".

Leary-May says the aim of the system is to encourage agencies and social workers to look as widely as necessary to make a match. "You don't necessarily need to search widely straight away," he says. "You can widen the net gradually, although you can go from in-house to national in the space of a week, because if you're going to get a response, you'll get it within a space of days."

On Adoption Link, half of the matches made have been between neighbouring regions; and up to a third have been further away than that.

"If so many children are having to go that far to find the right family, they're going to be the ones that have the most complex needs," he says, adding that 60 per cent of children matched through Adoption Link are in sibling groups.

"Team managers say it is changing attitudes in practice in the willingness to engage in the market of adopters and children being exchanged between agencies. All the talk at the moment is to stop the localisation of adoption - that's our main aim."

The government's move to force local authorities to form regional adoption agencies with neighbouring councils and voluntary agencies is also driven by ministers' desire to boost the number of adoptions by casting the net wider. Leary-May says the move could help "a lot of children", but warns that in his experience, it is the larger authorities that prefer to find matches for all their children "in-house".

"The bigger you make the areas, potentially, the more likely they are to rely on their own resources."

Another potential barrier to inter-agency matching is the £27,000 fee charged when a child is placed with an adoptive family from another local authority or voluntary agency. In an effort to overcome this, the government has committed to spending £30m to pay the cost of inter-agency fees over the next year.

Leary-May welcomes the move as a "shot in the arm for voluntary agencies", but remains unconvinced it will solve the underlying problem.

"The £30m will only cover around 1,000 placements and we don't know what will happen when it runs out. I think there are other ways you could tackle the problem, such as creating a central fund that removes the need for agencies to exchange the fee."

He is also concerned that the government support could act as a disincentive for councils to recruit new adopters. "As a local authority, you'll now have the option of using someone else's adopters because it's costing you nothing. Financially, it's going to make sense not to recruit your own adopters and just use others from elsewhere."

National approach needed

And Leary-May warns that finding homes for the thousands of children that wait more than six months for adoption will require a national approach to matching.

"There are a lot of children who have complex needs and are hard to place - there are not the right families for them. It's got to be very specific recruitment for the right sorts of parents."

Better post adoption support, and a legal requirement for local authorities to provide it, could help find parents prepared to take on children with the complex needs, he adds.

"There is such a huge gulf between adoption and fostering in terms of what that means for the council: shedding all parental responsibilities and no legal requirement to provide support, compared to paying the cost of foster care for the child until they grow up. If you have a child in that situation, the authority ought to promise a package of support. Hopefully that would give the adopter confidence to take on that child's needs."

However, he admits that for many children, adoption will not be an option, and so the organisation will shortly be opening Placement Link, a sister site to Adoption Link aimed at foster carers. Leary-May says the need to find the right carer for a fostered child is just as acute as finding adopters.

"It's not nearly as child-centred as it could or should be," he says of fostering. "Children move around the foster system too much - if they are put in a placement because it's the cheapest, and it turns out not to last and so they move on, it does a lot of damage."

Andy Leary-May CV

• 2013 Co-founder and chief executive, Link Maker Systems
• 2007-2013 Founder and director, New Family Social
• 1998-2006 Co-founder and director, Hyphen Design