1. INTRODUCTION
David Holmes CEO British Association For Adoption and Fostering:
Every child needs to be a part of a loving family committed to them for life. Adoption
has succeeded in providing that for thousands of children. But the system as a whole
is under severe strain and too often that directly impacts on children. The courts,
local authorities and the voluntary sector need to bear in mind that whatever
difficulties they encounter that it is the future life and prospects of a child that is at
stake.
Anne Marie Carrie, CEO Barnardo’s:
Adoption is one of the most profound interventions we can make in a child’s life and
there is overwhelming evidence to show how positive an experience it can be.
Dame Clare Tickell, CEO Action For Children:
Of all the options available to children who cannot stay with their birth families, we
know that adoption holds the greatest hope in giving them the stability and security
they need, offering them the best chance to thrive and flourish.
Andrew Flanagan, CEO The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to
Children:
When children have been abused or neglected there is simply nothing more important
to aid their recovery than being cared for in a secure and loving family. As a society
we should never underestimate its importance, acting quickly will turn young lives
around.
Bob Reitemeier, CEO The Church of England Children’s Society:
Because there exists the sad reality in our society that some children should not
remain with their birth parents, adoption is a hugely important and vital service.
Anne Longfield, CEO 4Children:
For too many loving and caring families the dream of adoption sadly comes to
nothing. Families tell of a system which is off putting and inflexible which too often
feels that it is actively working against the very people that it was created to support.
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2. Meanwhile children are denied the opportunities that we know a secure and
nurturing home environment bring. We have to get a grip on the adoption system to
put children and families first.
Dr Chris Hanvey, CEO The Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health
(writing in a personal capacity):
How have we, in the UK, got ourselves into a position where children languish in
care, prospective adoptive parents are sometimes perceived as an administrative
inconvenience and the system is driven by untried theory, rather than evidence based
practice?
Carol Homden, CEO Coram:
Adoption is the single most effective intervention for deprived and traumatised
children who cannot remain in their birth families. However valuable and caring
other forms of placement are, it is the legal status of adoption which underpins the
sense of belonging which can last a lifetime.
How can it be, when there is such unanimity about the transformational
impact of adoption, that numbers of adoptions in England are, historically
modest and, rather than growing, beginning to fall in number?
This report attempts to answer that question and identify why and how we
should seek radically to increase the number of adoptions in England and in
the rest of the United Kingdom.
Through most of my working life, both in working with offenders and then in
the children’s voluntary sector I have striven to defend interventions which
might, to some extent, repair the multiple disadvantages which face deeply
disadvantaged children who, in terms of their life chances, are at the bottom
of the pile. I have argued passionately for the cost effectiveness of
interventions which generally make a modest but significant contribution:
drug treatment and literacy training for offenders would be two examples
from my first career. Sure Start is an example from my time at Barnardo’s. But
none of these interventions, important as they are (and cost effective as they
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3. are) have the potential utterly to transform the life chances of a neglected
child in the way adoption can and does.
I knew a little of adoption when I arrived at Barnardo’s in 2005. Five of my
nephews and nieces were adopted and I was of course aware of how
successful adoption had been there, as the five grew up into adults who made
their fathers – my brothers – and their mothers, extremely proud. But in 2005 I
had little idea that this success could be replicated over and again,
particularly if adoptions took place while the child was very young.
What I discovered, first in parts of Barnardo’s, and then elsewhere, was an
approach to adoption which was at worst dismissive (one of the earliest
services I closed at Barnardo’s was one which helped to unite adopted
children in adulthood with their natural mothers but in a way which
suggested that the adoption – however successful – had been regrettable) and
at best apologetic. Much of the latter attitude persists today. One Chief
Executive of a major children’s charity, and someone whom I admire a great
deal, offered me a positive quotation about adoption but prefaced it with a
couple of sentences emphasizing the trauma of the child leaving their birth
family when, in so many cases, we are talking about something entirely
positive, rescuing children from abject neglect and giving them a family who
will love and value them.
Abject neglect is the sad reality for so many of the children we take into care. I
cannot emphasise that enough. Euphemisms like “chaotic” in social workers’
language so often mask the reality of the squalor and abuse which steadily
erodes children’s life chances. In just one London Borough, one third of the
children in care have been born to crack addicted parents. Are these children
to pay the price for that? We used to tolerate neglect and abuse much less and
intervene much more. The number of children in care in the eighties was
more than thirty percent higher than it is today. Does anyone believe that
better parenting has produced that fall?
The Times asked me to spend about eight weeks looking intensively at this
subject and I am extremely grateful to them for giving me this opportunity. In
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4. just two months and in a limited space I have not been able to look into all the
issues with the detail I might have liked and some issues, like adoption from
abroad, I have not been able to cover at all. But I am absolutely clear in my
conclusion, which is that we need to see many more adoptions and of much
younger children in the UK. At the moment we are denying far too many
children the loving and stable childhood which they need and deserve.
In preparing this analysis I have received invaluable help and advice or
support from a large number of organisations. Barnardo’s, and Jonathan
Ewen , Puja Darbari and Anne Goymer particularly so. David Holmes and
John Simmonds at The British Association For Adoption and Fostering
(BAAF) were extremely supportive and both helpful and patient as they filled
gaps in my knowledge and Carol Homden and Jeanne Kaniuk at Coram, who
are leading such innovative work, gave me great encouragement. Dr Chris
Hanvey at The Royal College of Paediatrics provided a guiding hand and
Action For Children, 4Children, The Children’s Society, the NSPCC, and the
Association of Directors of Children’s Services also contributed. Needless to
say however, all opinions here are my own and are not necessarily shared by
those who so generously gave their time.
I have made twenty recommendations which I believe are both pragmatic and
deliverable. But I do not minimize the challenge of their implementation.
There will need to be a sustained drive from government if we are to see a
dramatic increase in adoptions, and I am optimistic that we shall see just that.
In no small part that is because in thirty years in public service (which
included a decade at the most senior levels of the Civil Service) and then five
years leading Barnardo’s, I have rarely come across a Minister with such a
grasp of his brief as the current Children’s Minister, Tim Loughton MP. Over
the years he and I have sometimes disagreed as much as we have agreed. But
his encouragement of me in researching this report and his determination,
indeed passion, for increasing the lot of neglected children gives me great
hope that adoptions will grow significantly. As a consequence, we shall
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5. transform the lives of some of the UK’s most disadvantaged and neglected
children.
Martin Narey
July 2011
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6. CHAPTER ONE
TAKING CHILDREN INTO CARE
Adoption is the ultimate intervention in the life of a child and one that, we
know, can and does transform lives, particularly when the adoption is made
at an early age. But adoption generally only becomes a possibility when a
child has been taken into care, that is, removed from his or her birth parents.
And that process can often begin too late and then take far too long,
endangering the chances of a successful adoption (if that is what is best for
the child) or in some cases preventing adoption. Central to this report is my
belief that there is a very strong case for radically increasing the number of
adoptions in England and in the rest of the UK. But to do so will require us to
intervene earlier in the lives of large numbers of deeply neglected children
and to resolve their permanent future much more quickly. Delay in
intervention and then delay in achieving permanency for children is deeply
damaging.
The Family Justice Review, chaired by David Norgrove, reported in March.
This is what they had to say about the reality of delay for a child:
Delay really matters. All our understanding of child development shows the
critical importance of a stable environment and of children’s needs to develop firm
attachments to caring adults. Yet our court processes lead to children living with
uncertainty for months and years….
A baby can spend their first year or much longer living with foster parents, being
shipped around town for contact with their parent or parents, while courts resolve
their future. This represents a shocking failure, with damaging consequences for
children and for society that will last for decades.
The Family Justice Review’s concern is not new. But putting this right is not
simply about streamlining administrative and court processes. Frequently a
child is living in observed neglect for many months, years sometimes, before
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7. being first removed to care. One explanation for this, from my own
observations in running Barnardo’s for five years, is that many social work
practitioners and managers have significant objections about the propriety of
care. There seem to be three reservations of particular prominence:
• First, as The Times highlighted in April, we have interpretations of
attachment theory that encourages a view that, at almost any cost, the
relationship between birth mother and child must be maintained.
• Second, there is the issue of parents’ rights. Some practitioners and
academics believe passionately that in considering whether a child
should be taken into care there is a need to balance the interests of the
child with those of its parents.
• Thirdly, many practitioners, managers and politicians as well as parts
of the media have strongly held views about the negative
consequences of a decision to take a child into care: best summarised as
a belief that however bad things are at home, local authority care
makes things worse.
I believe all three reservations are misconceived and I address each in turn
below. But their cumulative effect in delaying early intervention in a
neglected child’s life in the UK means that when it does take place it may be
too late to achieve the stability a child needs. This is illustrated most strikingly
by the reality of the long-term outcomes for children taken into care at
different ages. As a highly regarded study by York University has confirmed,
very few children who first enter care under two are still in care at sixteen.
They have either returned home or become adopted. But children older than
two when first entering care are more likely to be in care at sixteen and those
entering care after the age of five are commonly still looked after when they
are aged ten to fifteen. Late entry into care has an extremely damaging effect
on the prospects of adoption. This is demonstrated by the depressingly stark
reality that fewer than half of one percent of children first taken into care after
their fifth birthday later become adopted.
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8. Attachment Theory
The evidence for the need for a child to form a close relationship with at least
one carer is not disputed. As The Royal College of Paediatrics teach:
• Babies and children raised in loving homes with at least one responsive parent
are likely to be securely attached. They are more likely to be resilient to the
ups and downs of life, be psychologically and physically healthy, do better at
school, make and sustain mutually-satisfying relationships, make a positive
contribution to society and be good parents themselves.
• Insecurely attached children may achieve such good outcomes but life may be
much more of a struggle.
• Those with disorganised attachments are most at risk and are more likely to
have mental health problems, misuse drugs and alcohol, become teenage
parents and be involved in anti-social behaviour and criminal activity.
Accounts of disordered attachment first appeared in the 1930s and 1940s
when a number of scholars observed the unhealthy consequences of raising
children in institutions. A psychiatrist, John Bowlby, emerged in the fifties as
very much the father of attachment theory calling attention to the acute
distress of young children separated from their primary caregivers
Bowlby asserted that a close mother–infant relationship was essential, saying
What is believed to be essential for mental health is that the infant and young
child should experience a warm, intimate, and continuous relationship with
his mother.
Bowlby’s work is not infrequently taken as the basis for the belief that the
natural mother and child must not be separated. In fact, that may be unfair to
Bowlby, who recognised the potential of an alternative, permanent carer to
build a bonding relationship. But in any case, certainly, by the 70’s, the
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9. interpretation of Bowlby’s work as stressing the unique bond between child
and birth mother was being re-examined. In 1972, Rutter demonstrated that
the main attachment between a baby and carer was not always with the
mother (in a third of cases it was with the father) and a warm bond with a
mother substitute could succeed.
Crucially, Rutter demonstrated that the baby’s attachment to a specific person
begins at about seven months and that successful attachments do not develop
simply because the baby spends a lot of time with one individual, the
intensity and the warmth of the interaction being more important than its
duration.
So, while attachment theory certainly points to the need for a loving bond
with one individual to be allowed to flower before a child reaches his or her
first birthday it does not support notions – held by many - that such a bond
can only be achieved between the child and his or her natural mother. What is
vital is stability.
In 1970, Professor John Rowe, an expert on attachment theory, demonstrated
the long term effects of a child having a number of carers before they were
aged four and the correlation between the number of different carers and the
emergence of problems such as sleeping difficulties, demanding attention,
eating difficulties, lack of concentration, temper tantrums and withdrawal.
In short, the evidence around attachment suggests that with an adoptive
placement a child’s physical, social, cognitive and emotional development
will compare favourably with children in the “normal” population,
particularly when the adoptive placement starts early.
The rights of parents
In 2010 the Institute of Public Policy Research published a paper of mine that
made the case for taking more neglected children into care. The Daily
Telegraph summarised the report. This prompted some correspondence from
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10. front line social workers – most of which was positive – but some criticism
from academics, including one Senior Lecturer teaching a Social Work Degree
course. She told me that I did not understand that a social worker always had
to balance what was best for the child with that child’s parents’ rights. This
was not a lone view. Some correspondents to the Daily Telegraph were
supportive of the academic’s stance. I believe they are mistaken and that
legislation is absolutely clear about this.
The 1989 Children’s Act first established what is known as the paramountcy
principle, that is that the child’s welfare is the paramount consideration.
Furthermore, the so called welfare check list – a key tool used during the
process - says that the child’s wishes and feelings must be considered whereas
the parent’s wishes and feelings are not a primary issue.
The academic who chastised me quoted the need to abide by Article 8 of the
Human Rights Act.
Article 8 says:
• Everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and
his correspondence.
• There shall be no interference by a public authority with the exercise of this
right except such as is in accordance with the law and is necessary in a
democratic society in the interests of national security, public safety or the
economic well-being of the country, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for
the protection of health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and
freedoms of others.
But, as Liberty make clear:
Separation of family members will normally constitute an interference with
the right to respect for family life, although such interference may be justified,
for example where a child is taken into care for his or her own protection.
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11. Paramountcy has not been challenged either by the European Court of
Human Rights or by the UK Courts. Indeed in recent family law cases at the
House of Lords it has been found that the paramountcy principle and Article
8 are consistent.
Legislation and case law therefore sends a clear message that the job of social
workers, the courts and all those involved in the child protection process is to
be unequivocally the champion of what is best for the child. But I believe that
doubts about this will continue to linger and need to be removed by a firm
Ministerial direction.
Care Makes Things Worse?
When I left the management of the Prison and Probation Services to join
Barnardo’s in 2005 I was seized with a conviction that being taken into care
was damaging to children. In my defence, I had met so many prisoners who
had spent time in care that I might have been forgiven for concluding –
however erroneously – that their care experience is what had propelled them
to prison. Nevertheless, saying, as I did in August 2006, that the state, as a
parent, fails [children in care] terribly was both wrong and unfair. But I was
hardly out of step with general opinion. That view had been long established
and it has changed relatively little since. As recently as April of 2009, Barry
Sheerman, then Chair of the Select Committee on Children Schools and
Families talked of:
the perception that entering the care system is catastrophic for a child’s future
prospects.
Certainly when I added my voice to those making this simplistic and
fundamentally misconceived assertion, it brought only praise and an
invitation from Alan Johnson, then Secretary of State at Education to lead an
independent working group to examine the scope for reducing the numbers
of those in care. I was delighted to do so and confident that the significant
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12. drop in the numbers in care, which started in the eighties, could be given
extra impetus.
A brief history of the numbers in care
The fall in the numbers of children in care in the eighties was not the first fall
in recent decades. After the Second World War the number of children in care
fell steadily, dropping to a little over 50,000 in the mid fifties and stayed at a
relatively low figure into the sixties. But, in the seventies, the numbers began
to climb steadily as the reality of child neglect and abuse began to take hold in
the UK. By 1981 there were 92,000 children in care in England an increase of
almost 50% or 30,000 children on the figure just twenty-five years previously.
Of this 92,000, almost two thirds, about 58,000, lived in residential homes.
So there were almost as many children in children’s homes in 1981 as there
are in all forms of care now (that needs to be remembered when it is argued
that the current care population is too large). Inevitably, the costs of almost
60,000 children in residential care were seen as unsustainable and in any case,
a number of high-profile abuse scandals brought the residential sector into
disrepute. The large institutions began to close as the voluntary sector rapidly
abandoned its orphanages.
In the working group I led for Alan Johnson I was keen to help further drive
down the numbers in care seeing that reduction, incontrovertibly, as a good
thing. No one suggested otherwise, at least not publicly. But, sometimes, in
the margins of consultation events or at conferences, front line social workers
would sidle up to me to whisper their anxiety that the direction of travel was
not as clear as I thought. The whispers grew, I became nervous about my
initial certainty, and eventually my working group concluded, almost
certainly to Ministerial disappointment, that we should not have targets for
further reducing the numbers in care.
At about this time I started to see a little more of Barnardo’s own work in this
area. I recall a particularly fascinating day in one of our services talking to
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13. parents – or more specifically mothers – who were seeking the return of their
children from care. Our job was to assess their readiness to re-assume their
parenting responsibilities. What I saw made me uneasy.
My practice whenever I visited a Barnardo’s service was to reflect for a day or
two on what I had seen and then to share my thoughts with senior colleagues
and Trustees. After this visit I wrote:
[I was worried that staff] seemed to be working in a context which required them
not to do what was unequivocally the best for the child, but instead one which
tasked them, whenever possible, with keeping children with their mothers. One
family was described to me as being guilty of the most abject neglect of their
children who were filthy, suffered exceptionally serious dental decay and were not
attending school. Now fostered, the children, 10 and 14, were doing reasonably
well and were both at school. Meanwhile we seemed to see success in this case as
eventually returning the children to a mother who, I was told, had very limited
awareness of the inadequacy of her care for her children. I wondered why on earth
we would contemplate taking such a risk and the answer that “blood was thicker
than water” certainly did not convince me.
I went on to observe:
Part of the problem is, I fear, that these seem such illiberal things to think, much
less write. But I left this visit seriously perturbed that staff were working in a
context, overly influenced by considerations of what a Court might opine, in
which the interests of the child were not the overwhelming consideration they
should be.
As I began – tentatively at first – to utter publicly the view that we might have
to think about taking more, not fewer children into care, my motives were
attacked. Some correspondents said I was drumming up trade for Barnardo’s
Children’s Homes (ignoring the fact that the last one had been shut two
decades earlier). John Hemming MP dismissed my view without debate
blogging, simply, ‘Martin Narey is wrong’ and there was a great deal of
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14. offensive comment on the internet. Meanwhile, at successive presentations to
staff from Children’s Services Departments in two northern counties, each
host Director referred to my views, respectively as unorthodox and challenging.
But amongst the abuse, letters I received convinced me that this was a debate
worth having.
Meg, a Social Worker with decades of experience wrote to say:
I am 57 and started my career as a child care social worker but I found myself
unable to tolerate the incredibly low standards that were tolerable within the
childcare services...Thank Goodness someone is speaking up for all those children
whose lives are witnessed and about whom nothing is done.
I did not know it at the time but there was no shortage of very sound research
to back up my anxieties about the children we leave in neglectful and abusive
homes.
The reality is that care can be much improved and the current Children’s
Minister is right to be impatient about achieving such improvements. But,
even as it is, care is much to be preferred to leaving a child in neglect. As
Professor Mike Stein from the University of York has said:
The simplistic view of care as failing 60,000 young people should be confined
to the dustbin.
Extensive research, much of it commissioned by the Department for
Education confirm the Stein view. Very recently, in 2010, DEMOS were
commissioned by Barnardo’s to take a comprehensive look at the evidence.
DEMOS confirmed that:
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15. • Stigmatisation of the care system, combined with concern about the
upfront costs to the state, means that some children who might benefit
from the care system do not do so.
• When the care system is used effectively in this way it can be a powerful
tool for improving the lives of vulnerable children and young people.
• The mistaken belief that care consigns all looked-after children to a lifetime
of underachievement and poor outcomes, creates a culture of uncertainty,
increasing delay and leading to instability later on.
• There is now a substantial body of academic evidence that provides a
longer-term and more nuanced perspective on looked- after children’s
lives, taking into account the nature of their pre- care experiences and
comparing them with more appropriate control groups. This evidence
shows that care can be a positive intervention for many groups of children.
• Some groups of children whose entry to care is delayed by indecision or
drift are at risk of experiencing a longer exposure to pre-care adversity;
higher emotional and behavioural problems; placement disruption and
instability
More recently, and more vividly, Becky Hope’s All In A Day’s Work, published
in April of this year offers a frequently moving record of the experiences of a
social worker who has spent twenty years working in child protection. Her
preface could not be more stark when she says:
Children whose basic needs for responsive loving care are not met, and who are
left to flounder, have been found to suffer clear detrimental effects to their brain
development long before they reach anywhere near their first birthday. It has also
been found that children who have experienced severe neglect as tiny babies, but
are placed in long term adoptive homes before the age of six months are able to
make far greater progress overall than a child placed after that age.
[But} at present this research is not infiltrating social work practice in a way that
best supports the children who depend on us. To allow these research findings to
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16. change our practice will require a change in the mind-set of all involved in the
process of child protection.
She captures the sad reality that too often we wait too long before removing a
child from parental neglect, sometimes because of an unjustified optimism
about the capacity of parents to improve. As Jonathan Ewen the Director who
leads for adoption for Barnardo’s told me:
Speeding up the decision making after a child first comes to the attention of
the authorities is key; research shows that most parents who are going to
significantly improve their ability to look after their child do so in the first six
months of the child’s life. If that doesn’t happen, then we need to be bolder –
and quicker - in making the decision to remove that child permanently.
It needs to be stressed here that I am not talking about cases where there is
room for doubt over whether or not a child has been neglected or the capacity
of the mother to become an adequate parent. This is not to deny that mistakes
are not sometimes made and that, however occasionally, decent and loving
parents suffer the horror of having their children taken from them without
justification. But front line practitioners know that those cases, however
regrettable, are overshadowed by a much larger number of cases where we
leave children too long and until neglect turns into abuse. I believe that most
lay people, most parents, would be deeply shocked both at the conditions in
which we routinely leave children and at our continued consideration of
returning a neglected child to the circumstances which led to his or her abuse.
In All In A Day’s Work, Hope describes her experience with a typical case
where a child had been physically abused, was in care, but seeing her mother
regularly (known as contact) with the possibility of a future reunion. The
child is Sarah and the mother, Julia:
Over the weeks since Sarah had been taken into care, Julia was often very late for
contact meetings and a couple of times she forgot to come altogether. Sometimes it
was suspected that she was high on something, at other times there was a
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17. suspicious smell of alcohol about her person. It was a frequent event for it to be
reported that she had spent her time reading a women’s magazine at contact and
often had very little time for Sarah at all, just making the very barest attempts to
interact. Sarah said little after these contact sessions but reacted silently with the
inevitable wet beds, disturbed sleep and very difficult behaviour at school.
Before her birthday Sarah was getting very excited about the prospect of a party
and presents and, during contact the week before, her mother had made repeated
promises in terms of presents, building up Sarah’s hopes. Sadly, when the pre-
birthday meeting with the mother took place, nothing appeared, her mother
arrived both an hour late and empty-handed. The long promised bike, the puzzle
and the skipping rope – all evaporated in vague excuses. Not even a card. Sarah’s
behaviour at the remainder of this contact session was of hesitation and confused
silence, but later her hurt came out in tremendously angry outbursts and
terrifying nightmares, plus some fights at school. This was the culmination of
months of disappointment with her mother’s disinterested behavior.
Why do we allow children to be damaged in this way? Sometimes it is
because sustained changes in parenting capacity can be and are achieved. But
the current system is gripped by an unrealistic optimism about the capacity of
deeply inadequate parents to change. Making the birth family successful
should be our first option, and I am not arguing that mothers should not be
given a second or even a third chance, just not a fourth, fifth and sixth.
This unjustified optimism in the capacity of deeply inadequate and
sometimes uncaring parents to change condemns children to a childhood of
neglect and sometimes abuse and damages their chances of leading a
successful life in adulthood. We should and do help parents to change and
when that is successful that is a great achievement. But we have to tackle the
naïve optimism that paralyses the system. And we have to stop letting
children down by returning them to parents only for them to be neglected
once again. This is not simply my view. Research supports it. In Case
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18. management and outcomes for neglected children returned to their parents: a five
year follow-up study (2010), Professor Elaine Farmer followed the fortunes of
138 children who had been taken into care and then returned to their parents.
She discovered that:
• [There was] a tendency over time for abuse and neglect to be
minimised so that referrals about harm to children [did] not lead to
sufficient action to protect them.
• Plans made during care proceedings did not work out in three fifths of
cases, often when children were returned to parents because of an over-
optimistic view of the possibility of parental change by guardians and
expert assessors, in the face of long histories suggesting the contrary.
And, most troublingly, she found that two years after those children had been
returned to their parents three in every five (59%) had been abused or
neglected once again. We cannot let children down in this way.
Findings from a University of York study (Jim Wade, Nina Biehal, Nicola
Farrelly and Ian Sinclair) also published last year echo Professor Farmer’s
findings. This study compared the progress and outcomes of a sample of
maltreated children some of whom were returned home from care with those
who remained in care. It was found that outcomes for the children who
remained looked after were better than for those who went home with respect
both to stability and well-being.
Judicial opinion
We shall not see many more adoptions, and significantly we shall not see
more of the most successful adoptions, until we begin, as a society, including
social work professionals, the courts, the media and politicians, to accept that,
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19. however well intentioned, we leave some children, too long in neglect. As I
have argued here, a frequent reason for this is this strongly held but
misconceived belief that however bad things are at home, care will make
things worse. It is vital that Judges appreciate that this is not so. But in two
presentations to Family Court Judges last year there was bemusement at my
suggestion that care made things better, not worse, for neglected children.
This is hardly surprising when shortly after his appointment as President of
The Family Division, the most senior Family Law Judge, the much respected
Lord Justice Wall said:
What social workers do not appear to understand is that the public perception
of their role in care proceedings is not a happy one. They are perceived by
many as arrogant and enthusiastic removers of children from their parents
into an unsatisfactory care system
Social workers may sometimes get it wrong. I accept entirely that there may
be cases where intervention is inappropriate and unnecessary (although
sometimes, those who are concerned about such cases jump to the conclusion
that such errors mean all interventions are unnecessary). But it is very clear
that generally children are not removed from their parental home unless there
is the clearest evidence of their abuse and neglect. Even in the wake of Baby
Peter when applications for care increased significantly and there was some
speculation about social worker over reaction, research from CAFCASS found
that none of the additional interventions were premature.
The reality of care is best captured in an article published in the Journal of
Social Policy in 2009. Forrester, Goodman, Cocker, Binnie and Jensch
reviewed all British research since 1991. Their conclusion was that:
The studies consistently found that children entering care tended to have
serious problems but that in general their welfare improved over time. This
finding is consistent with international literature. It has important policy
implications. Most significantly it suggests that attempts to reduce the use of
public care are misguided and may place more children at risk of serious harm.
Judges must understand the truth of those simple sentences.
19

20. Recommendations:
I recommend that the Children’s Minister
- takes an early opportunity to advise local authorities of his,
Parliament’s and the Courts’ view on the absolute primacy of the
child’s interests when deciding whether a child should be taken into
care.
- ensures that the overwhelming evidence that care improves life for
neglected and abused children be communicated to Local Authority
and Voluntary Sector Children’s staff.
- ensures that the research evidence on the positive effect of care is
effectively communicated to Family Court Judges.
.
20

21. CHAPTER TWO
ADOPTION: A BRIEF HISTORY OF ADOPTION AND CHANGING
ATTITUDES
Adoption has been in existence for centuries and has generally taken place
without state supervision or interference. It was only in the 1920s that
adoption became legally recognised in Britain and then adoptions were seen,
primarily, as a way of providing security for war orphans and for raising - in
respectable circumstances - children born to unmarried mothers.
Pressure for legislation began after the First World War, influenced in part by
the concerns about war orphans, but also to discourage the advertising of
babies for financial gain: sometimes known as baby farming. At the same time
there was a growing concern about the suitability of some adoptive parents
but also about the need to give them some rights. Before legislation, biological
parents could, and did, appear at any time to demand the custody of a child
which they might not have seen for years and to whose upbringing they had
not contributed.
Despite the recommendations of a 1921 Committee on Adoption which
concluded unequivocally that adoption should be put on a legislative footing
there was significant government resistance. Eventually the 1926 Adoption
Act was a modest affair intended to allow adoptions which had already taken
place to be regulated and not intended to encourage a flood of new adoptions.
But, in fact, when the backlog of old cases had been cleared, the number of
new adoptions began to rise steadily, reaching 5,000 a year by 1936.
After 1926 political attention turned toward the regulating of the adoption
societies. A few of these were suspected of less than rigorous checks on
potential adopters with some of the smaller societies coming under huge
criticism and being seen as largely disreputable. Concerns about baby
farming re-surfaced.
21

22. In response the Departmental Committee on Adoption Agencies (the
Horsbrugh Committee) was appointed in 1936. The Committee’s work
covered not only legalised child adoption and the societies which organized
them but also the continuing and large number of informal adoptions which
continued to take place outside the jurisdiction of the 1926 Act.
The recommendations of this Committee led to the 1939 Adoption of Children
(Regulation) Act, which required a local authority to be notified of any
informal adoption of any child under nine years and made it illegal for
adoption agencies to advertise children for financial reward. The outbreak of
war meant that the implementation of this Act was delayed. Some believed
that this suited the Home Office, which continued to be unenthusiastic about
adoption legislation and regulation. But concerns in the early forties,
particularly in the media, that the abuses identified by the Horsbrugh
committee were on the rise led to the Act’s implementation in 1943 and from
that point Local Authorities were able to withhold registration from adoption
societies whose standards were not satisfactory.
Between the wars therefore, adoption had developed from being an entirely
informal process, standing outside the law to a reasonably regulated process
intended to ensure adoptive parents were of sufficient capability and
commitment and to afford them parental rights over their adopted child. The
1939 Act was of particular significance, establishing for the first time the
primacy of the child’s interests in adoption, something to be made emphatic
fifty years later by the 1989 Children’s Act.
Babies adopted from unmarried mothers
After the Second World War and until well into the seventies the emphasis in
adoption was in finding homes for a steady supply of babies born to mothers
unable to care for them. These included, very sadly, many babies born to
unmarried mothers who might desperately have wished to bring up their
child but for whom societal stigma made that impossible. But the extent to
which this was the case as we entered the modern era is sometimes
22

23. exaggerated. Many people believe that almost all the babies given up for
adoption in the seventies were born to unmarried mothers. But in 1974, for
example, of the 22,000 children given up for adoption, nearly half were born
within marriage.
Whether born within or without marriage the number of children placed for
adoption by their mothers meant there was a steady supply of babies who
were seen as very adoptable because they were newborn, developmentally
normal and white. The availability of such babies meant, shamefully, that
many children not seen as perfect, including black and mixed race children,
were classed as unadoptable. At the same time there was no shortage of
prospective adoptive parents and, in consequence it became possible to
restrict adoption by age, marital status, professional status and even wealth.
But from the mid seventies as abortions increased, steadily fewer children
were given up for adoption, and the availability of newly born white babies
rapidly diminished. The decline however was not a direct and immediate
consequence of the 1967 Abortion Act. There were more than twenty
thousand adoptions a year until the mid seventies and numbers did not fall
below 10,000 until 1983.
Attitudes to adoption as an option
Pregnant women in the UK are mostly seen to have a choice between giving
birth and bringing up their child or aborting the pregnancy. What seems to
have disappeared in the UK - certainly in comparison to the USA - is
consciousness about a third option: of going to term but allowing the child to
be adopted. Planned Parenthood, an American organisation that provides
reproductive health care and advice, which has recently and unfairly been
severely criticised for promoting abortion and whose funding has been under
attack in a number of US States, offers an entirely neutral view to those who
seek their advice:
23

24. Millions of women face unplanned pregnancies every year. If you are deciding
what to do about an unplanned pregnancy, you have a lot to think about. You
have three options — abortion, adoption, and parenting.
By contrast, and in the UK, any young woman approaching a range of
advisory services and local authorities is unlikely to find much
encouragement even to consider adoption as an option
A Times reporter, posing as a woman with a pregnancy she didn’t want,
contacted Marie Stopes to ask about her options and was immediately sent
material on abortion procedures. When the reporter asked whether there was
any other way, perhaps adoption, she was urged to come in and see a nurse
about the “treatment options” Only when she pressed about exploring the
adoption route was she told that they could “help with some phone
numbers.”
To their credit Brook For Young People did mention adoption as an option
and the Times reporter was told that it was completely up to her what
decision to take. But an advisor at the British Pregnancy Advisory Service,
when pressed about adoption hesitated before telling the reporter that their
specialist area was abortion, that she didn’t know much about adoption, and
that the reporter would have to approach other agencies.
Local authorities approached by phone referred the reporter to voluntary
organisations. On line, local authorities are, at best, silent about adoption. At
worst they dismiss it. This deeply unbalanced reference is on the website of
one large local authority :
A parent who is considering placing their baby for adoption must be offered
counselling and must be given time after the baby is born to reflect on their
decision. Many are sad about not being able to raise or have a relationship
with their child. Some have said that they eventually adjusted to the loss of the
child, but that the pain and grief lasted a very long time. Others have said that
life was never the same after placing the child.
24

25. Again, Planned Parenthood, while not denying the possible hurt after
relinquishing a child are more balanced. They say:
Many women who make this choice are happy knowing that their children are
loved and living in good homes. And they feel empowered in their role as birth
mother. But some women find that the sense of loss is deeper than they
expected. You may feel some grief after the adoption is complete. Or you may
be reassured by knowing that your child is in good hands. A range of emotions
is normal. And your feelings may be complicated for a while.
I believe that a woman with an unwanted pregnancy should be able to
consider all three options, including going to term and giving up her baby for
adoption. Pregnancy advisory charities, children’s charities and local
authorities need to highlight that third option better. I have hesitated to
express this view, so easy is it for it to be caricatured as an attack on abortion.
So I need to stress that I am, emphatically, in the pro-choice camp when it
comes to abortion. But a woman with an unwanted pregnancy, who at least
wants to explore the adoption option, should not be discouraged from doing
so.
Professional antipathy to adoption
The relative marginalisation of adoption in the UK reflects a growing
antipathy on the part of an increasing number of practitioners and academics.
Misunderstandings about the effect of state intervention, Human Rights
legislation and attachment theory (which I discuss in chapter one) have
contributed to that. But these misconceptions do not explain an antipathy
towards adoption which has reached the point where, in the eyes of many
practitioners and academics, it is seen as appropriate in only the most
exceptional circumstances. As one practitioner put it to me, adoption is now
viewed as a failure, a failure to make the birth mother’s parenting a success.
25

26. And there is sometimes a marked unwillingness to view the adoptive parents
as the parents. One local authority says this on its website:
It is an important part of an adoptive parent's role… to help a child or young
person deal with their feelings about being part of two families and it is
essential that efforts are made to keep a child's birth family "alive" for that
child.
This view of the adoptive child as having two families, the adoptive and the
real family, even when adopted as a baby or tiny child, is not uncommon but
must offend and hurt those who raise adoptive children unequivocally as
their own as well as sometimes confusing and distressing the child.
This view that adoptive parents can never be the real and only parents has
been given academic and practitioner credibility through the work of various
writers, most notably, Nancy Verrier, author of The Primal Wound (1994).
Verrier, herself a mother of an adopted child has written an undoubtedly
moving book. But its conclusions about adoption are wholly negative. She
talks of the primal wound:
As having been caused by the separation of the child from his or her biological
mother, the connection to whom seems mystical, mysterious, spiritual and
everlasting.
She is dismissive of any notion that adoption can have a happy outcome and
the adopted child being content with his new parents, saying:
Adoption is a traumatic experience for the adoptee. It begins with the
separation from his biological mother and ends with his living with strangers.
Most of his life he may have denied or repressed his feelings about this
26

27. experience, having had no sense that they would be acknowledged or
validated… He is wounded as a result of having suffered a devastating loss.
This is sharply at odds with the experience of many adopted children who
feel entirely secure in their acquired family. Verrier dismisses this as denial on
the part of the adoptee. And a mother contacted by her birth child in
adulthood but continuing not to want a relationship doesn’t know her own
feelings according to Verrier. The birth mother may be:
in a state of denial about her pain or she has some fear about other members of
the family rejecting her. Often the birth mother negates the importance of the
birth bond and convinces herself that the child had a good upbringing and
doesn’t need her. This is rationalization.
I accept that this book has had a profound effect on some adoptees and
adoptive parents but it offers an almost entirely bleak view. Some US
adoptees have been brave enough to say so. For example, the following two
entries were on an online discussion board where Verrier’s book was being
reviewed:
I was very disappointed to see how one-sided this book was, and I don't believe
in the philosophy that every adopted child has this primal wound. Making
such a broad generalization like this is very harmful to those who are learning
about adoption, and for the many adoptees who do not feel this way. This book
pigeonholes adoptees into being victims regardless of their situation.
Or:
As an adoptee myself, there was absolutely nothing in this book that I related
to. I never felt wounded or rejected because I was adopted, and after reading
and talking with women who have placed children for adoption, I can only say
27

28. that I look on it as an act made for the benefit of their babies and for the loving
parents out there who cannot biologically have children.
But in the adoption world in the UK I found an unwillingness to speak out –
at least on the record - against the bleak conclusions of this influential book
which is quoted extensively on anti adoption websites. BAAF might be
commended for publishing The Primal Wound in the UK but, I would suggest,
they need to be a little less generous in their praise of it (they refer to it as the
adoptees Bible). Rather, and in considering its effect on prospective adoptees,
who will find this book through the BAAF website, they need to make plain
that Verrier’s is one view and does not remotely reflect the experience of all
adopted children and parents.
Legislative interpretation
The interpretation of some key legislation does not help here and encourages
the view of adoption as something only to be considered when all else has
failed. Government guidance on Family and Friends care, issued this year is
very clear about the steps to be taken in accommodating a looked after child.
It says that where a child cannot be returned home the local authority
must “give preference to” a placement with a person who is a relative, friend
or other person connected with the child.
If family and friends OR? carers can offer loving and stable care (as they often
can) this is entirely proper But, as BAAF told me, this has sometimes
encouraged countless assessments of family and friends carers who are
patently inadequate. In one case where adoption was being recommended by
the local authority, the Court ordered six separate viability assessments of
28

29. family members. In another, the Court ordered an assessment of a homeless
relative. I address Special Guardianship, (the status often achieved by family
and friends carers who take over the parenting of a child) in chapter six. It is
clear that it can sometimes offer the stability a child needs. But it is vital that
local authorities and the courts do not search fruitlessly – and often
consecutively - for family carers and unnecessarily delay the eventual
adoption.
Recommendations
While in no way seeking to limit or discourage any woman’s access to
abortion, I recommend that local authorities, pregnancy advisory services and
children’s charities reflect on how going to term and allowing adoption might
be presented as a valid option for a woman with an unwanted pregnancy.
I recommend that the Children’s Minister ensures that where the best
interests of the child are clear and adoption seems to offer the best prospects
of permanency that it should not be delayed by the assessment of family and
friends OR? carers when there is clear evidence of their unsuitability.
29

30. CHAPTER THREE
WHAT’S HAPPENED TO ADOPTION RECENTLY? NUMBERS AND
DELAY
Although when compared to numbers in the seventies, adoptions are now
relatively few in number there has been a measurable recovery since 1999
when Tony Blair made increasing adoptions a personal priority.
In 1999, there were about 2,200 adoptions from care and this number rose
steadily, reaching about 3,500 by 2002. But as the sense of this being a Prime
Ministerial priority began to waver, so too did the rise in numbers. Very
modest growth continued until 2004 and then began to flat line and from 2006
numbers began to fall, dropping by about ten percent in two years. A modest
recovery in 2008 has not been maintained and, in the view of the Department
For Education, numbers “may have plateaued” at around 3200.
At the same time Special Guardianship orders (which I review in chapter six)
have grown and since 2005 when they were established increased in number
to more than a thousand a year. But these too have since fallen back a little.
Local Authority differences
There are striking differences in the number of adoptions completed by local
authorities. Although 9,600 children have left care for adoption in England
during the last three years, more than 300 have left care from some authorities
and fewer than ten in others. Even allowing for differences in authority size
these differences are hard to explain. Moreover, while some authorities have
been cautious about Special Guardianship (fourteen local authorities had no
such orders in 2009 -10 and four had none in any of the last three years) some
authorities have seized upon this new option and in eleven of them
Guardianship is as well used or more used than adoption. That may be
troubling as I explain in chapter six.
30

31. There are similar and inexplicable differences in the ratio of children adopted
in each authority relative to the number of looked after children. This varies
from one percent to ten percent. Why is it that, in the North East, Hartlepool
consistently finds adoptions for more than twenty percent of children leaving
care (23% in 2010), but in nearby Middlesbrough the figure is only around
eleven percent (7% in 2010)? In the North West why does Bury consistently
find adoptions for more than twenty percent of its children leaving care (30%
in 2010) while Warrington does so for only around 13% (9% in 2010)? And in
the West Midlands, why does Walsall find adoptions for around a quarter of
children leaving care (27% in 2010) while Coventry can only do so for around
ten percent of their children (8% in 2010)?
What seems very clear is that these contrasts cannot be explained by
differences between the type of children in care in different local authorities.
On the contrary, according to DfE the explanation is that:
Decisions about adoption must have been influenced by local policy and
practice and different views about which looked after children might benefit
from adoption
Delay
At the same time the length of time taken to complete adoptions bears little
resemblance to the time limits laid down in national guidance. One reason
why there were only seventy babies under 12 months adopted last year in
England is that the process takes so long. As BAAF told me, even when
adoption is identified as the best option at birth, and when the mother makes
no opposition, that adoption may not be completed until the child is well past
their first birthday.
After a child has entered care (and, as I argue in chapter one, there may have
been considerable and unnecessary delay before that happens) the decision
about whether or not a child should be adopted is required to be taken within
31

32. six months. But as The Times revealed in May, only one England and Wales
local authority managed that on a consistent basis last year. Once the
decision to move for adoption is taken, local authorities are required to place
a child with adoptive parents within 12 months. But fewer than 28% of local
authorities managed that in 2010.
This is not simply the fault of the Courts. But there is an urgent need to
address delay there and the recent Family Justice Review, chaired by David
Norgrove provides a brilliant analysis of the problems. As he says in the
introduction to the interim report published in March:
Cases now take a length of time that is little short of scandalous.
Reducing delay at court both for care proceedings and for adoptions and
moving quickly on David Norgrove’s recommendations needs to be pursued
with urgency by The Ministry of Justice. But even with court processes
streamlined there would still be unnecessary delay caused by a failure in local
authorities initially to pursue adoption and through time consuming
processes which are later duplicated at court.
One experienced practitioner told me that immediately a child is taken into
care, his or her case should be treated as an emergency with every and
immediate effort made to achieve stability and permanence. Instead, the
child, once in care, is considered “safe” and any sense of urgency in arriving
at permanence is lost. This view is supported by the fact that the average time
taken between a child being taken into care and being adopted is now two
years and seven months. And this despite the very clear evidence that the
chances of effecting a successful adoption are reduced for every month of
delay. The contrast with the USA is distinct. There the system is driven by the
imperative of preventing foster care drift and this is reflected in federal time
limits for the amount of time a child can languish in the care system. Our
32

33. failure to grip this as the Americans do has troubling consequences. As
Barnardo’s told me:
The key is doing everything faster. The younger the child, the more likely they
can be adopted successfully, the easier it is to find carers and the less likely it
will be that their plan will change and will cease to be for adoption. At the
moment it is believed that 25% of children’s plans change from adoption
because it is thought that they become too old and difficult.
Targets?
There is an argument in favour of the government re-introducing targets for
adoptions and such a re-introduction was a key recommendation from the
recent DEMOS report In Loco Parentis. Claudia Wood one of the authors of the
report argues:
Without a push from central government we will continue to lose adoption
numbers. There was a significant increase in adoption orders following Blair’s
targets.
But targets are not without their problems in such a complex area. The post
Tony Blair targets included financial inducements for local authorities and
this led to some suspicion that decisions on adoption were being taken
inappropriately. My sense is that what matters here is leadership. Targets for
local authorities should not be necessary if there is a clear steer from Michael
Gove and Tim Loughton, or better still the Prime Minister, that adoptions are
a priority. If Ministers (as I recommend in Chapter one) remind local
authorities about the absolute primacy of the child’s interests and that taking
a child into care should not be delayed or avoided because of misconceptions
about the effect of care or the Human Rights Act. And if adoption is promoted
as an option which should be considered much earlier for children in care I
33

34. am confident that we would quickly see the beginning of a sustained
recovery.
But that does not mean that local authority performance should not be
measured. My experience in senior public and voluntary sector management
roles is that comparative performance information, including league tables,
has a dramatic effect on improving overall performance. I recommend that
DfE regularly produce comparative information for local authorities
identifying rolling totals of adoptions finalised along with the time taken to
complete those adoptions. The recently DfE publication of a data pack on
adoptions has provided a good basis on which to build.
I am instinctively cautious about calling for organisational change. My
experience is that it can divert attention and resources and can delay
improvements when a concentrated grip on an issue through existing
organisational structures can succeed relatively quickly. But there is an
argument in favour of changing the way we manage adoption and ceasing to
rely on the sometimes limited enthusiasm of local authorities. Dr Chris
Hanvey, currently Chief Executive of The Royal College of Paediatrics and
Child Health, an ex Deputy Chief Executive at Barnardo’s, and CEO of Coram,
but writing in a personal capacity makes the argument well:
Adoption is the supreme expression of Richard Titmuss’ gift relationship. It is
driven by altruistic acts, which give new life to children in need while also
enriching the “donors”. How, then, have we, in the UK, got ourselves into a
position where children languish in care, prospective adoptive parents are
sometimes perceived as an administrative inconvenience and the system is
driven more by untried theory, rather than evidence based practice?
Three actions are now necessary. Firstly, the establishment of a National
Adoption Agency that takes over the responsibility of local authorities.
Despite the attempts by former Prime Minister Tony Blair to breathe new life
34

35. into local authorities, the evidence is that they have failed to provide high
quality services over many years.
The Agency should have two elements. To begin with, national adoption
targets which are annually reported to the Secretary of State with the freedom
to work across all local authority boundaries. Secondly, a vastly speeded up
process from the assessment of potential carers to the placement of children.
There is no reason why an assessment should take six to nine months to
complete. A new model, based on the American practice of recording tangible
facts, rather than subjective judgements, should be introduced. The Agency
should have a very focused research arm, evaluating trends, informing
adoption workers and promoting best practice based on research.
The second major action needed is the total replacement of local authority
adoption panels with regional boards that are part of the new National
Adoption Agency. They should not only be responsible for approval and
matching, but also progress chasing, measuring trends and ensuring that
annual targets are met. And, of course, the big advantage of a National
Agency will be the ability to match adoptive parents with children – in
whatever part of the country. This would resolve the current postcode lottery
of matching.
Thirdly, the family court system and legal processes need streamlining, in
order to speed up the time scales, reduce legal barriers and provide another
check on regional adoption boards. The current tragedy of a child’s chance of
adoption being reduced due to the length of time they languish in care must no
longer be tolerated.
Ministers need to keep this option open and make it plain to local authorities
that it will receive serious consideration unless, across the board - not just in a
few large local authorities whose improved performance might boost the
35

36. national average - there is a step change in the numbers of children adopted
and the speed at which those adoptions are completed.
Recommendations
I recommend that the Children’s Minister
- look at how pre court processes might be shortened, with particular
reference to removing duplication with the work of the Courts.
- regularly produce comparative information for local authorities
identifying rolling totals of adoptions finalised along with the time
taken to complete those adoptions.
- make it plain to local authorities that the option of a national adoption
agency will be pursued unless there is an across the board increase in
adoptions and the speed of those adoptions (and not just in a few large
local authorities whose improved performance might boost the
national average)
36

37. CHAPTER FOUR
ADOPTION BREAKDOWN AND THE CASE FOR MORE ADOPTION
SUPPORT
Sometimes even those sympathetic to adoption express caution because of
what they see as a worryingly high level of adoption breakdown. They are
right to be concerned: a breakdown in adoption simply adds to the instability
which can be so damaging to a child.
I would not advocate adoption for many more children if I believed that
amongst the additional number there would be a high proportion of
breakdowns. But the truth is that when adoption takes place early in a child’s
life the chances of breakdown are genuinely minimal. But even adoptions
taking place when a child is older break down less frequently than is often
believed.
Sometimes the competitiveness of the voluntary adoption agencies can be
unhelpful. Action For Children, for example, claim on their website that the
breakdown rate for AFC adoptions is just 3% but they compare that with an
average breakdown figure of between 25% and 30%. The Guardian recently
estimated adoption breakdowns as running at 20%. In Adopting A Child, a key
BAAF publication and just re-printed, the 20% figure is quoted. I believe there
is significant evidence that estimates of 20% and more may exaggerate the
reality of adoption breakdown.
Evidence from Romanian adoptions
The reality is that we do not know, with any certainty, what proportions of
adoptions break down, and, as with so much debate around adoption,
37

38. anecdote sometimes dominates discussion. However, two recent studies of
long term outcomes following the adoptions of highly challenging children
suggest that the breakdown rate may be lower than traditionally quoted.
Over some years and as Chief Executive of Barnardo’s I was told frequently of
the tragic experiences of children adopted from Romanian orphanages and
the very high breakdown rates as damaged children wore out parents unable
to compensate for the harshness of the treatment experienced by these babies
and young children while in public care in Romania.
These children’s treatment in Romania was certainly harsh. As Professor
Michael Rutter described in 1998, this was the experience of children in
Romanian orphanages which was exposed by the fall of Ceausescu in 1989:
In most instances the children were mainly confined to cots; there were very
few toys or playthings ,and sometimes none at all; there was very little talk
from caregivers; no personalised caregiving; children were fed gruel by bottles
using teats with large holes, often left propped up without any caregiver being
involved; and there was a variable, but sometimes harsh, physical
environment. The children were often washed down by being hosed with cold
water.
Professor Rutter followed the fortunes of 165 of these children adopted into
the UK and aged up to three and a half years of age but concentrated on those
(98 of the sample) who had lived in these appalling conditions until at least
the age of six months. They were followed until they reached their fourteenth
birthday.
It is significant to point out that at the time these adoptions took place that
their failure was widely predicted. Many local authorities did all they could
to prevent them taking place and in the event some of these children,
immensely challenging as they were, became adopted by parents who would
not have been approved for the adoption of a UK child, perhaps because they
38

39. were too old or they had children already. This encouraged the dire
predictions of catastrophe and – as I experienced subsequently – confident
assertions that the predicted breakdowns had indeed occurred.
When arriving in the UK the children provided an immense challenge. Rutter
described the children as having a developmental level which was severely
impaired. But while other studies followed the fortunes of those children who
remained in Romanian institutions and whose psychological impairment did
continue, Rutter found that in all cases the children adopted into the UK
caught up developmentally and of the 165 children studied there were only
two breakdowns. That is not to say that some of the adoptions had not been
difficult, particularly for children who experienced the emotional poverty of
Romanian care for more than six months, half of whom experienced
psychological problems as they grew up in the UK. But contrary to popular
opinion their parents had not given up and those problems had been
managed. Very significantly for wider adoption policy, Rutter found
psychological problems in children who left the orphanages before they were
six months were negligible, leading him to conclude that psychological
deficits are uncommon even after profound institutional deprivation, as long
as that deprivation lasts only some months.
UK breakdowns after older adoption
The second study which places some doubt on estimates of up to 30% for
adoption breakdown was of older and more challenging children placed for
adoption in the UK. If a general adoption breakdown rate of 20% or 30% were
accurate we might expect the breakdown rate for this group to be much
higher, perhaps 60%. But in 2006 Rushton and Dance published research into
a group of children, all adopted between the ages of five and eleven, a very
39

40. high risk group. The children were followed until their fourteenth birthday
by which time only 23% of adoptions had broken down.
This suggests that the overall adoption breakdown rate may be rather lower
than the 20% to 30% figure which is quoted so often. It may be much nearer to
10%. I found BAAF’s consideration of this thoughtful and convincing and
they suggested that the breakdown rate for the over five group might be
generally around the 23% figure discovered by Rushton and Dance. But they
believe that the figure for those adopted between one and five might be
nearer to ten percent and for those adopted under 12 months just three
percent. All this reinforces the point that adoption, compared to almost any
other sort of social work intervention is dramatically successful. Even for
those adopted after five, success is achieved in nearly 80% of cases. For
younger children and babies the chances of disruption are genuinely minimal.
Post Adoption Support For Older and/or Particularly Challenging
Adoptions
The learning point when looking at the correlation between the age of
adoption and breakdown is to ensure that more adoptions are completed
early: that completion is seen as a matter of urgency on a par with the way we
view the importance of prompt medical treatment for a child’s illness. Some
adoptions take place so late as to put the adoption in increased peril of break
down. And then, when breakdown does occur, that failure is used to discredit
adoption generally. As Coram put it to me:
Adoptions take place too late and then, when they break down, this is taken as
proof that adoption doesn’t work.
In an ideal world there might be post adoption support for all adoptive
parents. But to make such a recommendation here would be unnecessary,
when adoptions of babies and young children overwhelmingly proceed well,
40

41. and self indulgent, when public spending is under such pressure as to make
universal support impossible. But there is a case for exploring the cost
effectiveness of post adoption support for the adoption of older and
challenging children where the likely break down rate is higher.
A recent cooperation by The Cass Business School and the Accountants Baker
Tilly and led by Baker Tilly’s Head of Charity and Education Advisory
Services, Jim Clifford, has made a compelling case for greater support for
such adoptions.
The study looked at twenty adoptions of difficult to place children arranged
by Parents and Children Together (PACT) which has for some years now
specialised in finding adoptive families for children with exceptional needs.
PACT’s preparation of adoptive parents pre adoption and support afterward
is impressively comprehensive. Post adoption support includes:
24 hour phone support;
regular one day workshops focusing on issues of interest to adoptive
families;
linking adoptive families who have had previous experience;
advocacy work where parents are requesting a service from another
agency;
access to a play therapist;
local groups and a fathers’ group;
training on specific issues; and
informal “buddying”
Baker Tilly and Cass looked at the social return on investment, broadly
speaking the value of benefits achieved after taking into account any
additional upfront costs. Their methodology is widely used and entirely
credible.
41

42. In looking at just twenty PACT placements which have a very low disruption
rate and after taking account of the costs incurred by local authorities in
buying in support from the voluntary sector and then calculating longer term
savings to the state (from, for example, the costs of a child remaining in care
and then after care, reduced levels of state support than had they left care at
adulthood, better educational attainment and greater employability) the
study concluded that the twenty adoptions would save the state more than
£20 million.
Almost everyone I spoke to about post adoption support singled this out as
something which might make an immense difference, particularly for some
children who, because of their age, are seen as increasingly hard to place. The
Children’s Minister told me that his instincts were to prioritise investment in
this area as soon as resources allow. The problem in the short term however is
that resources do not allow, certainly not in local authorities. However, those
resources are often available now in voluntary sector organisations and there
may be a role for them in carrying the burden of the initial costs, being
refunded by local authorities when the adoptions are stable. This Social
Impact Bond approach is something I also recommend so as to allow the
spread of concurrent planning adoptions (see chapter five)
In the shorter term it is vital that the provision of post adoption support does
not get worse as financial pressures on local authorities encourage short term
economies. As Jonathan Ewen at Barnardo’s told me:
The 2002 Adoption & Children Act gave a clear message about the need to
provide adoption support, to whom it was to be provided and a framework for
assessment and planning. The awareness of and commitment to this is
extremely variable even at the placement stage. At a time of financial cut backs
it is the area most vulnerable to being jettisoned. The Social Return on
Investment calculations of offering support to adoptive families is very clear
but short term budgetary concerns take precedence in many cases.
42

43. Any retreat on post adoption support would put at risk the success of more
adoptions and would be exactly the opposite of what I know the Children’s
Minister wants. He needs to ensure this does not happen
Recommendations
I recommend that the Children’s Minister
- ensure that the evidence of the success of adoption – particularly early
adoption - (including low breakdown rates) be communicated to local
authorities, the voluntary sector, the press, the courts and the public.
- explore with the voluntary and private sector the scope for applying
the principles of social impact bonds to adoption support for older and
particularly challenging children.
- engages with the Association Of Directors of Children’s Services to
ensure – whether or not as a consequence of spending pressures - there
is no short term retreat on post adoption support.
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44. CHAPTER FIVE
CONCURRENT PLANNING AND A GREATER ROLE FOR THE
VOLUNTARY SECTOR
From almost the moment I arrived at Barnardo’s in 2005 colleagues spoke to
me enthusiastically about concurrent planning, a practice whereby a child in
care is placed as soon as possible with foster carers, who, in the event of
adoption becoming necessary, will adopt the child. The family provides foster
care for about a year during which time the birth parents have contact with
the child and are helped to make themselves suitable to reassume the care of
their son or daughter. But, at the end of the twelve month period, if the birth
parents are deemed not able to care for the child, formal adoption by the same
foster carers takes place. It is a model of practice first developed in the 1980s
in the USA. Its import into the UK was in the belief that it would lead to
speedier resolution of legal procedures and achieve earlier permanency for a
child in care in place of the drift which characterizes most pre adoption
processes. Putting a child in the foster care of the family who might
eventually adopt it does not assume adoption is the only way forward.
Prospective adopters are required, during the fostering period, to work with
the birth parents and where possible facilitate the child’s return to those
parents. That does sometimes happen and concurrent planning provides an
emotional challenge for would be adopters who may have to give up a child
they have cared for over many months. But, in most cases, adoption follows
and the child experiences the security, stability and attachment to one set of
carers: its future parents.
Evidence for the effectiveness of concurrent planning in the UK has been
emerging over the last ten years. It has been successfully championed in the
UK by the excellent voluntary adoption agency Coram who have worked with
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45. five London Boroughs (Harrow, Camden, Hammersmith and Fulham,
Islington and Waltham Forest) Coram have now placed 56 children, most of
them aged under 12 months, into concurrent planning placements. Many of
the babies had been exposed to alcohol and addictive substances pre birth
and to poor ante natal care. All but three of the babies were subsequently
adopted by the parents who had fostered them.
This is a recent case study from Coram:
Chloe and Daisy’s Story
Chloe and Daisy are twins who were adopted in July 2010 at the age of 15 months.
They were born 3 weeks premature and on their discharge from hospital were placed
with concurrent carers Millie and Jack. They only had to contend with that one
move from hospital to their carers who later adopted them, so although the court
process was prolonged, they have benefited from placement at the earliest opportunity,
providing the optimum possibility for the development of secure attachments.
Chloe and Daisy’s birth mother is Jill. It is not known who their birth father is.
The decision to place the twins with concurrent carers was made because Jill and her
previous partner Darren had not been able to look after their two older children Jacky
(4) and Ben (2). Both children had been removed from Jill and Darren’s care a year
previously having been severely neglected, both parents had alcohol problems and
there had been serious domestic violence in the household. These children were placed
for adoption with another of Coram’s adoptive families, and all the children have
contact with their siblings several times per year. The older children not only came
into care later, but also experienced several changes of foster carers.
By the time Chloe and Daisy were born, Jill, had made some changes in her life: she
had terminated her relationship with Darren and had attended a programme for
alcohol misuse. However despite some progress, Jill remained very isolated in society
and did not have a model of ‘good parenting’ from her own childhood, having been
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46. brought up by drug using parents and suffering serious neglect. The prognosis of her
being able to meet the twins’ needs was poor from the outset, given her history.
For the concurrent carers, Millie and Jack, the period of fostering whilst care
proceedings were under way was stressful. The care of baby twins was demanding
and they also brought Chloe and Daisy for contact with Jill three times per week,
which disrupted the ordinary routines that babies need. In addition they had to
manage the uncertainty of not knowing whether the twins would stay with them.
In the event Jill found it difficult to maintain her abstinence, and her former partner
reappeared, which resulted in further instances of domestic violence. By the time the
final hearing arrived, Jill could see how settled the twins were, and how well their
concurrent carers looked after them. She also felt confidence that they understood
how difficult it had been for her, and that they would help the children to understand
that she loved them and wanted the best for them. She therefore did not oppose the
final hearing.
(Names and some details have been altered to preserve anonymity)
Coram’s partnership with Harrow
Local Authorities have been generally been cautious about giving a wider role
to voluntary adoption agencies (believing, wrongly, they are more expensive)
and even more nervous about embracing concurrent planning, some
accepting that the results are impressive but believing the process is too
expensive and that they would need to employ more social workers at a time
of extreme budgetary restraint. Harrow Council deserve great credit for
taking the first step in both giving a greater role to the voluntary sector and in
trialling concurrent planning by, in 2006, inviting Coram to provide the
Borough’s adoption service, working alongside local authority staff.
This has involved the management of all adoptions, not simply introducing
concurrent planning placements. The results have been impressive. Since the
establishment of the partnership the proportion of children leaving care in
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47. Harrow, either for adoption or special guardianship has increased nearly
seven fold (from 3% to 20%). And because children were leaving care at a
faster rate – and almost uniquely - Harrow has not seen an increase in the
overall number of children in its care. Like all other local authorities, and in
the wake of Baby Peter, they saw an increase in children coming into care but
children were leaving care just as quickly.
As well as the process working faster the Coram approach had 100% success
in finding adoptive parents for all Harrow children for whom adoption had
been identified as the likely way forward. This included children considered
difficult to place. Up to now the disruption rate for Coram adoptions at
Harrow is zero. Seven of these successful placements have followed the
concurrent planning approach.
There were some additional costs for Harrow when bringing Coram into the
authority. Coram imported additional staff to work alongside the Local
authority social workers. But the medium and longer term savings as
fostering and residential home costs were reduced cannot be in doubt and
have been validated by KPMG.
KPMG looked at the 38 children adopted between 2006 and 2010 and
estimated the likely costs falling to Harrow had accelerated adoption not
taken place. Overall and taking account of the costs of the partnership with
Coram, Harrow avoided expenditure of £440,000 in 2010/11 alone.
Coram are now on the verge of replicating the Harrow partnership with two
other local authorities. That will almost certainly benefit adoption work in the
round and it will give a boost to concurrent planning.
But concurrent planning needs to be rolled out much faster than this. Despite
the emerging evidence of effectiveness, there remains a distinct lack of
enthusiasm for this approach. At one point Coram’s partnership with the five
London authorities to provide concurrent planning placements was on the
verge of failing due to a lack of referrals and concurrent planning was tried in
Brighton but has not flourished, in part I was told, because of judicial
antipathy and concerns on the part of judges and social work professionals
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48. that a concurrent planning placement was a fait accompli. One Director of
Children’s Services, otherwise very committed to adoption, told me that he
saw concurrent planning as having limited scope.
There seem to be two obstacles to a much faster expansion of concurrent
planning. The first is the negative shift in attitudes toward adoption which I
discuss in chapter two.. The second obstacle is financial. A typical voluntary
adoption agency fee in London is in the region of £30,000. The Coram
concurrent planning fee is between £38,000 and £42,000 and may increase.
Local authorities will often find such fees hard to swallow even when this
expenditure will deliver longer term savings for the local authority. (I was
told of one local authority that had postponed adoptions toward the end of
one financial year, because the dedicated adoption budget was spent even
though this meant expenditure in care and fostering costs would rise more
substantially).
Voluntary Adoption Agency Costs
Greater use of voluntary adoption agencies (VAAs) by local authorities -
whether to boost concurrent planning or more generally - has been resisted
primarily because of a consistent local authority view that VAAs – however
good they might be - are too expensive (this was one of the first things I was
told by a local authority colleague when I arrived at Barnardo’s in 2005).
VAAs have often been sceptical about this believing that in comparing a fee
from a VAA to the cost of an adoption provided in house, local authorities fail
to take account of their own, often considerable on costs, not least the costs of
pension schemes which are now generally much lower in the voluntary and
private sector.
This has been substantially resolved by research in 2009 at the University of
Bristol (Julie Selwyn and others) which, using 2008 figures, compared local
authority costs (the fee for an adoptive family provided by another local
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49. authority, at about £12,600) with a VAA fee (of around £20,000 with an
additional sum of around £3,000 for post adoption services). Selwyn found
that local authorities belief that LA costs were smaller than VAA’s was
misconceived and that the true cost of an adoption placement whether
provided in house or by a VAA was around £36,000 (meaning that most
VAAs save significant money for local authorities).
This demonstrates the value for money of using voluntary adoption agencies.
But it does not remove the challenge for many local authorities, right now, to
find the additional upfront cash. The answer here is for local authorities to
allow voluntary organisations like Coram to provide adoptive parents but for
the voluntary organisation to pay the upfront costs, being later compensated
by the local authority – with interest - when the adoption is secure. Not all
VAAs may be able to do this. But many have significant reserves which –
entirely properly – they invest to protect their future. Some of that investment
could be directed toward adoption and the return on investment could at
least match financial market returns. This needs further exploration and the
return on the VAA investment might need to be varied dependent on the age
of the child and the likelihood of breakdown. A return on a VAA fee of, say,
£30,000 might be as high as 30% a year for a hard to place child, meaning a
payment to the VAA, two years after the adoption of around £50,000. This
form of Social Impact Bond for adoptions would provide very significant
savings for local authorities while boosting the role of VAAs. It needs further
exploration but the informal reaction of two VAAs, both leading players in
the voluntary sector, when I put this to them was positive. I make a similar
recommendation in chapter four on the application of an SIB approach to post
adoption support.
Recommendation
I recommend that the potential to apply the principles of social impact bonds
to adoptions but with an emphasis on boosting concurrent planning
placements be explored by the Children’s Minister.
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50. CHAPTER SIX
SPECIAL GUARDIANSHIP
Adoption is not the only means of obtaining greater stability for a looked after
child.
Long term fostering can often achieve that. But it does not always allow the
child or young person to feel a sense of security and belonging. And however
long term the fostering arrangement, the foster parent does not have parental
responsibility and therefore has no legal right to have a say in the decisions
involving the child or young person they are raising.
A residence order provides greater security for the young person and gives
parental responsibility to the person holding the residence order. But the
parental responsibility is only equal to that of the birth parent(s) and therefore
agreement between the holder of the residence order and the birth parents
has to be obtained for all decisions affecting the child. And residence orders
generally terminate when the young person reaches 16
An important option which falls short of adoption is Special Guardianship.
The Adoption and Children Act 2002 introduced special guardianship and
special guardianship orders both of which came into existence in 2005. Special
Guardianship is an order made by the court that allows the Special Guardian
to exercise parental responsibility to the exclusion of all others. At the same
time the child retains links with his or her natural parents. The order expires
when the child reaches their eighteenth birthday. Crucially, the making of an
order means that the child is no longer in the care of the local authority and
that authority withdraws from the child’s life.
Special Guardians are able to make all the day to day decisions regarding the
child although for decisions of significance they need to consult the birth
parents. But for most decisions, even if the birth parents object, the guardian
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51. has primacy (in for example deciding which school the child attends).
However, a special guardian cannot, for example, override a parent’s refusal
to consent to the adoption of the child.
There is no doubt that, in some cases, special guardianship may be more
appropriate than adoption, for example when an older child would struggle
to deal with the status of being adopted – or as frequently happens – there is a
close relationship between the carers and the parents, when, for example, the
carers are the child’s grandparents, and contact with the birth parents is likely
to be frequent.
In many cases, special guardianship is an ideal arrangement. But there are
two principal worries. The first is that it may be significantly disadvantageous
for carers to become Special Guardians because their new status may lead to a
withdrawal of financial and other support. If this anomaly were fixed we
might see a significant increase in special guardianship arrangements.
But an increase in special guardianship, and perhaps the increase we have
seen in recent years, is not necessarily a good thing. We need to be sure that
special guardianship arrangements are not put in place when adoption might
provide significantly improved prospects for the looked after child. Special
Guardianship should not be seen as a compromise and one in which the best
interests of the child are relegated.
Withdrawal of financial support
Under the Special Guardianship Regulations 2005, local authorities may
remunerate Special Guardians who were formerly foster carers for two years
after the granting of the order. But after the end of the two year period
support is likely to be withdrawn.
Malcolm Phillips, the manager of Fosterline told Community Care last year:
We believe there are hundreds of cases where special guardians are saying ‘this
is not working out the way I wanted. We are struggling to cope.
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52. When financial support is given it is often significantly less than the fostering
allowance. In Islington, according to Community Care, a foster carer is paid
£337 a week for one child aged 0 to 10 years. The special guardianship
allowance for a single child is a maximum of £134.
Grandparents, and others, willing to become parents for a second time, and
when their income may be modest should not be penalised for relieving local
authorities of their legal and heavy financial responsibilities. The extent to
which these arrangements are limiting the effective use of Guardianship
needs to be explored.
Special Guardianship as an unhappy compromise
A glance at the most recent adoption statistics shows us that Special
Guardianships seem to have replaced what would have once been adoptions.
In many cases that can be welcomed achieving as it can the essential stability
needed by children.
But we need to be confident that Special Guardianship is not being used
when adoption might be in the better interests of the child. Some
professionals believe that is happening. Last year, one adoption team
manager told Community Care
In many cases, SGOs work well, but there is dispute about when they are
appropriate. In my authority we’re seeing increasing numbers of children
under four being looked after by relatives, often grandparents, even though we
recommended adoption.
Often a family or friend carer will come forward and an SGO might seem
cheaper, easier and more pragmatic. But too often this decision is made
without thinking through the long-term implications of placing a child back
into a dysfunctional environment for 18 years.
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53. There aren’t always enough checks to ensure family and friends, particularly
grandparents, haven’t been pressured into applying for an SGO, and that
children are being kept away from the negative influences that led to the care
application. I expect to see large numbers of children coming back into care in
my authority because of disrupted SGOs.
And as one senior official in the Department For Education told me:
Special guardianship may simply mean that the child ends up in a different
branch of an essentially dysfunctional family
The same official shares the view of the adoption team manager quoted above
and believes that the number of special guardianship breakdowns are high.
But, troublingly, no one knows. Such information is not collected. As BAAF
told me:
We do not have any reliable data on this…. and there really should be. Part of the
difficulty with special guardianship is that the greater majority of these orders are
to family and friends carers. [So} if for instance a child moves back to mum or dad
or to another family member permanently or temporarily, there is no requirement
to notify anybody.
Essentially, this means that a child who has previously been abused or
neglected by his or her parents can be returned to their care without anyone
knowing.
This is very troubling when one considers the number of babies being subject
to guardianship orders. When Special Guardianship was introduced it was
intended, primarily, for older children, including those considering
themselves too old to be adopted. But the number of orders for older children
has been much smaller than anticipated. Of those aged between five and
seventeen and leaving care in the three years to March 2010, only about five
53