More councils fail to hit adoption timescale targets
Neil Puffett
Wednesday, January 15, 2014
The number of local authorities failing to meet government targets for the time it takes children to be adopted nearly doubled in the space of a year.
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.
Children’s minister Edward Timpson has written to local authorities stating that meeting the thresholds will require an “increasingly sharp focus”.
Since they were introduced in 2012, adoption scorecards have come in for criticism from the sector, with the Local Government Association (LGA), the Association of Directors of Children's Services and the Society of Local Authority Chief Executives all having spoken out against them.
Commenting on the latest scorecards, David Simmonds, chair of the LGA's children and young people’s board, said the spotlight should not be solely on local authorities.
“It’s not just about councils, it is about what is happening in the courts, as well as national action to recruit more adopters,” he said.
“Adoption scorecards are very much about how the whole system is performing, not just councils.
“They are also based on information that is three years behind.”