Councils told to set up regional agencies to increase adoptions

The Conservative government has wasted no time in unveiling reforms of the adoption system that it hopes will increase the number of children adopted.

The Education and Adoption Bill, published last week, contains provisions that will allow the government to force councils to merge or outsource their adoption services into regional agencies.

The government has said authorities will be given two years to forge new regional arrangements themselves, or be forced to do so if they fail to act.

It is hoped the creation of "regional adoption agencies" will give councils a greater pool of approved adopters to match children with, as well as making it easier to provide support services, and will allow better targeting in the recruitment of adopters for specific groups of children.

With nearly 5,000 children who have a plan to be adopted on the waiting list, ministers hope the reforms will increase their chances of finding permanent homes as it will cast the net wider.

How will it work in practice?

Councils are already free to work together, and some authorities have for more than a decade been teaming up with each other and voluntary sector adoption agencies to form consortia. But many of these tend to concentrate their efforts on recruitment and placement locally.

Andy Elvin, chief executive of The Adolescent and Children's Trust (Tact), says the difference between existing consortia and the proposed regional agencies is that the new system will be on a statutory basis.

"There's no statutory underpinning at the moment," he says, adding that some existing consortia work together well, while others do not.

"Consortia of local authorities at the moment are based on the idea of sharing expertise around recruitment and post-adoption support services.

"Across many things - not just children's social care - the effectiveness of local authorities working together is patchy and it's no different for adoption than it is for anything else.

"They are all beholden to Ofsted, the government and their own chief executives, so it's very difficult for them to join up in an ad-hoc way."

Elvin says that given the fact there are not a huge number of adoptions each year - only about 5,000 in total - there is no need for 152 authorities and numerous voluntary adoption agencies to work in isolation.

He says the proposed regional agencies will have a number of benefits. "There is certainly an advantage to bringing together post-adoption support on a regional basis," he says.

"You are commissioning on a larger scale, so you can have a broader range of options available to families.

"Because of the numbers, it is more economically viable.

"It has to be viable for the provider of the service in order to keep staff and keep training them.

"If you have nine local authorities together, it is easier than each commissioning services on an individual basis.

"It will help develop the market."

However, Elvin is keen for the government to go further with its reforms and consider introducing a requirement that all permanency options, including foster care, residential care and special guardianships, rather than simply adoption, be dealt with through regional agencies.

"There are more than 65,000 children in the care system at the moment and adoption is the permanency option for 5,000 a year.

"On that basis, why are we only bringing together regional agencies for adoption?

"I hope this (regional adoption agencies) is a stepping stone towards that, but I don't see the need for a stepping stone.

"You could bring together permanency services as a distinct part of social care.

"You can have child protection services at the front door and if a decision is taken that a child cannot live with their parents, you would involve permanency services and have those social work teams look into permanency options as soon as possible."

Elvin says the move could also result in significant savings for local authorities.

Blueprint for agencies

It is unclear exactly how many regional adoption agencies could emerge once the government's legislation is passed.

When the government introduced an Adoption Leadership Board to monitor and drive reform in the sector, a total of nine regional adoption boards were created.

Elvin says it is feasible that these could provide a blueprint for large regional adoption agencies, but thinks it is more likely that existing consortia could form the basis of future statutory arrangements.

There are currently four consortia covering London - which represents one regional adoption board area - meaning there could potentially be dozens of regional agencies across the whole of England in the future.

Alison O'Sullivan, president of the Association of Directors of Children's Services (ADCS), says there will be different starting points in the process in different parts of the country - pointing to Warrington, Wigan and St Helens (see box), which have had single arrangements since 2011.

She says that while her organisation is "broadly in favour of the direction of travel", it is keen that local solutions are able to emerge.

"What is an appropriate bringing together of services in one place might not be appropriate for another," she says.

"We think it is important this is decided from the bottom-up.

"What might work for rural populations may not work in urban conurbations.

"In parts of the country, there are good collaborations for things like recruitment and matching days. They could be the basis of stronger working together that would vary from place to place. It is important there is the flexibility to design what is best for local contexts.

"There has to be a professional debate about the scale that is going to make sense - there is a lot of variability at the moment.

"Some agencies in the voluntary sector are large - and some are very small and specialist. It's a very mixed picture. It is important we understand what the benefits are before decisions are made."

O'Sullivan says she is concerned that services might lose the ability to connect with local circumstances.

"We need to make sure it is right for the children. We wouldn't want services to be removed from local communities," she adds.

According to Hugh Thornbery, chief executive of Adoption UK, the reforms have been motivated by a "frustration" within the government that despite measures implemented over the past five years, there has not been a huge transformation of services on the ground.

"There is some evidence that despite the equalisation of the inter-agency fee (the fees charged when adopters approved by one agency are matched with a child in the care of another), local authorities still aren't looking broadly enough for those children waiting for a long period of time."

Support for councils

The government has pledged that it will provide financial and practical support for councils and adoption agencies to enable them to bring services together.

Thornbery says it is likely that one or two areas will be encouraged to trailblaze the idea.

"If you look at what's happening at the moment, we have a consortium in Yorkshire and Humberside that is doing some quite interesting stuff.

"It has moved from being a consortium to thinking of itself as a regional commissioning body.

"It is thinking about recruitment and adoption support in a much more strategic way. At the moment, different places are at different stages of development and one wouldn't want to stifle progress people are making on this.

"Trying to impose a blueprint of how it should be is the wrong way of doing it."

He points to the fact that one of the main motivators for people in choosing an adoption agency is that it is local.

"Inevitably, there has to be a local aspect to this. Prospective adopters want to be able to engage with the agency locally.

"We need to retain that local focus while taking advantage of different arrangements at regional or sub-regional level.

"I would hope we would see an uplift in the quality of services. I think it will allow for an aggregation and concentration of expertise. There is a brilliant opportunity to tap into what the voluntary sector can provide."

DELAYS IN NUMBERS

4,820 children had an adoption decision but were not yet placed at 30 September 2014

2,320 approved adopters were waiting to be matched with children at 30 September 2014

540 days (18 months) was the average time between a child entering care and moving in with their adopted family, for those who have been adopted, in the first half of 2014-15

LOCAL AUTHORITIES JOIN FORCES TO BOOST THE NUMBER OF ADOPTIONS

Warrington, Wigan and St Helens councils merged their adoption services to create WWiSH in March 2012.

The main motivation behind the merger was a shortage of adopters - the gap between the number of children needing a home and the number of adopters had been widening in each of the local authorities.

In the first year of the service alone, a total of 58 children were adopted, an increase on combined totals of the three authorities for previous years.

The service has also been able to cut the length of time children have to wait before being placed with an adoptive family.

Meanwhile, a successful marketing and publicity campaign to recruit potential adopters resulted in an increase in the number of people coming forward to adopt. After 12 months in operation, the service had approved 34 prospective adopters and had a further 42 in the process of being assessed.

The Department for Education has already cited WWiSH as a good example of local authorities working together.

Alongside WWiSH, the London tri-borough of Kensington and Chelsea, Westminster, and Hammersmith & Fulham councils, is the only other area to have completely merged services.

Other areas that have taken steps include Harrow, Kent and Cambridgeshire, which have all contracted elements of their adoption service to the voluntary adoption agency Coram.

Meanwhile, Oxfordshire has brought in the Core Assets Group to run its adopter assessment process.