First Ever Post-Adoption Contact Appeal Confirms Adopters Have Final Say

12 Tuesday Mar 2019

Posted by Natasha in Adoption, forced adoption, Researching Reform

A couple asking for post-adoption contact with their daughter have lost their appeal.

Judges in the Court of Appeal concluded that a refusal to accommodate contact by the child’s adoptive parents trumped the toddler’s right to stay in direct contact with her birth family.

The case is believed to be the first of its kind to reach the Court of Appeal since the implementation of s.51A in the Adoption and Children Act 2002 (ACA 2002). The legislation allows for contact with family members and other significant individuals in a child’s life, after adoption.

The judges hearing the case dismissed the challenge after the adopters in the case refused to accommodate meaningful contact between the toddler and her birth parents.

The judgment reinforces the current legal position that post-adoption contact will only be granted in rare cases and usually only where adopters agree to such an arrangement.

The birth parents who have learning difficulties were unable to cope with their daughter’s day-to-day care, and after an assessment the local authority began care proceedings. The local authority then asked the court to grant an adoption order.

Prior to the adoption order being made, the toddler and her birth parents had contact at regular intervals. That contact was reduced, and eventually stopped.

The biological parents applied for post-adoption contact at the same time as the adopters issued their application to adopt the birth parents’ daughter. The application for post-adoption contact was refused. The birth parents then sought permission to appeal the refusal, which they were granted.

The Court of Appeal heard the birth parents’ challenge on 30th January and the judgment published on BAILII is very much worth a read, for an explanation of the law as it stands since the new legislation on post-adoption contact came into force – and for everything that is wrong with the way our family courts work today.

The judgment outlines a discussion on post-adoption contact which looks at whether the current legislation should be interpreted to mean that courts must now lean in favour of post-adoption contact or stick to the old position, which does not create a presumption for or against post-adoption contact but does in most cases give adopters the final say in relation to contact between birth parents and their children.

The judges concluded that the old position was correct when considering post-adoption contact and that “Parliament’s intention in enacting s.51A was aimed at enhancing the position of adopters rather than the contrary.”

The underlying reasons for this position are not at all geared towards the welfare of children in these cases and are clearly designed to protect adoptions while ensuring that adopters are not put off by the inconvenience of having to accommodate post-adoption contact arrangements.

The barrister for the local authority offers the following arguments to bolster this position, which are included in the judgment at paragraph 44:

“Mr. Goodwin supports the maintenance of the current law, as stated in Re R, on the basis that there are sound policy reasons for not imposing direct contact upon unwilling adopters, save in exceptional cases. It is submitted that if adopters are led to believe one thing, but forced to accept another, the pool of potential adopters may shrink.”

And it gets even more ridiculous. The court found that while there was a clear and growing body of work which supported and even insisted upon post-adoption contact, the research was not considered appropriate to the case because navigating that data would require the case to turn upon child welfare based concepts, rather than legal ones.

This really is one of our biggest bug bears at Researching Reform. What on earth is the point of having a family court system that is required by law to act in the best interest of every child that comes before it, if that court cannot respond and react rationally and in real time to the latest scientific evidence in order to ensure those best interests are met?

Stark. Raving. Mad.

The idea that adopters’ rights trump everyone else’s, including the adoptee child’s, is also utterly wrong. Adopters should be viewed as enablers, not dictators, in cases where children have a very real and important need to know their birth parents. That need is rooted in their psychological and emotional development and should not be obstructed unless the birth parents present a real danger to the child.

On that basis, allowing post-adoption contact to be blocked by adoptive parents is clearly a breach of an adoptee child’s human right to know his or her birth family.

We are going to have a cup of tea to cool off.

Government U-Turns on No Contact for Birth Parents Post Adoption But Clamps Down on Contact “Without Clear Purpose”

11 Monday Feb 2013

Posted by Natasha in Children, Family Law

≈ 30 Comments

Clear Purpose – It’s a definition only a sleepy civil servant with no life experience or perhaps less common sense could have made up, but an excellent article in Community Care today explains how the government’s recent decision to end all contact for birth parents after adoption has been revoked, and in its place, a plethora of regulations have been outlined, designed to keep families bouncing in and out of court for decades.

Having written about the decision (which has now been reversed) with more than a little concern, we’re glad to see that the starting point for this type of contact has shifted, but we are still worried about the implications of the new regulations, which have been outlined in the Children and Families Bill.

The article in Community Care goes on to explain that social workers will now need to ensure that any contact arrangements have “a clear purpose” (which we think is a little awkward given that contact is quite obviously a purpose in itself and where children are involved is self-explanatory), and that they will also be able to ask the court for a “no contact order” when they apply for an adoption order (which would become effective once the adoption order has been made). Birth parents will then need to go back to court to apply for an order, but will have to meet tough criteria to ensure a contact order in their favour.

This latest measure has been designed to tackle what is being termed ‘unregulated contact’, through social media sites like Twitter and Facebook. The article is a very interesting read, not least of all for Director of policy, research and development at the British Association of Adoption and Fostering’s John Simmonds’ comments, on how this kind of activity can be monitored.

A must read. Thought-provoking and quite one of the most explicit examples today of why these dilemmas should really be tackled from the inside out, and not the other way around.

Impact of Adoption in Complex Cases Can Only Be Assessed By An Expert

18 Monday May 2020

Posted by Natasha in Family Law Cases, Researching Reform

≈ 2 Comments

Family judges should not accept assessments from social workers on the impact of adoption in cases where children have experienced complex trauma, the Court of Appeal has confirmed.

The ruling stems from a tragic case in which a fire destroyed the family home, killing all but one child and his parents.

The family had been known to social services prior to the fire for alleged child neglect. The children had been placed on the Child Protection Register for suspected neglect, poor home conditions, inadequate supervision and an incident between the parents in 2017.

After the fire – the cause of which has not yet been determined – the local authority started care proceedings for the parents’ remaining child.

The boy was placed into foster care, but the carers, who had spent several months with the child developing a relationship with him, then decided they could not look after the boy long term. To the appeal judge’s credit, he mentions how this might impact the boy, at the end of the judgment.

The mother had been assessed, and was found to have mild to moderate learning difficulties, which the court said had become worse from the Post Traumatic Stress Disorder she suffered after the fire.

It is not clear from the judgment who assessed the mother’s cognitive abilities, diagnosed her with PTSD and came to the conclusion that her cognitive functions were significantly impaired by the stress she felt. It is also not clear from the judgment how those impairments impacted the mother’s ability to look after her son.

The mother was then given an Official Solicitor to act on her behalf.

At the pre-trial review in January, the Official Solicitor for the mother applied for a child psychiatric assessment to be produced, to report on the impact of a placement for adoption on the boy. The application was supported by the father, but not the local authority or the child’s guardian.

The paternal grandparents, who initially felt unable to look after the boy, came forward and said they would like to be put forward as long term carers for their grandson. The local authority agreed to undertake a viability assessment of the grandparents to see if they were suitable carers for their grandson.

The judge went on to refuse the request to have a child psychiatric assessment on the grounds that assessments provided by the social worker and the child’s guardian were adequate in determining, “the role of his birth parents in his care moving forwards and in particular whether A [the boy], given his loss and trauma would be able to attach positively to prospective adopters; whether given the trauma he has suffered, which may be triggered at different points in the future, there is an increased risk of adoption breakdown, with the detrimental impact that would have on A, and whether the importance for A of preserving his birth parent relationships is magnified or enhanced in this case given the experience he already has of the significant loss of his siblings.”

The judge also took the view that an expert opinion on the effect of the boy of this “double loss”, was “highly speculative” or “academic”.

The mother decided to put in an appeal.

On appeal, Lord Justice Baker confirmed that while the judge in the lower court had set out the correct tests and case law for the hearing, she had come to the wrong conclusions in her reasoning.

Lord Justice Baker explained that in cases like these, where complex trauma was clearly present, a child psychiatrist was the only expert able to offer informed opinion and that the judge had been wrong to call such an opinion, speculative or academic.

He also says this, which is worth reproducing in full, for its awareness around the impact of foster care and adoption:

“There are three, possibly four, options for A’s future placement. Rehabilitation to the parents has not been completely ruled out, although it is seemingly unlikely. The realistic options appear to be placement with the paternal grandparents, a move to a long term fostering placement, or placement for adoption. A’s tragic experiences are almost certain to have a profound effect on him as he grows up and throughout his adult life.

I accept Mr Rowley’s analysis that this is likely to include the impact or effect of direct trauma having experienced the fire, the indirect trauma of witnessing the aftermath, the impact of the loss of his siblings, the possible impact of realising that his parents were to a greater or lesser extent responsible for the fire and therefore for the death of his siblings, and very possibly survivor’s guilt.

All these strands of loss and trauma are likely to have a significant psychological impact on A for the rest of his life. They will influence all the attachments he forms with carers and with others and will impinge on the consequences of every break of those attachments, for example, when he leaves his current carers, or, if adopted, he ceases to have direct contact with members of his birth family.

All these matters are plainly relevant to the court’s decision about future placement. In this difficult case, the court needs to have the best possible expert evidence of the likely effect of this complex web of trauma on his future placement.

The social worker and guardian are plainly well-qualified and highly-trained professionals, but their expertise manifestly does not extend to expressing a professional opinion as to the impact of loss and trauma of this degree and complexity. In my judgement, only an experienced child psychiatrist can advise on such matters.”

Lord Justice Baker and Lord Justice Popplewell allowed the mother’s appeal, and the instruction of the requested expert.

You can read the judgment in full here.

Family Law Cases RR

Poll Finds Public Want to Scrap the UK’s Adoption Policies

20 Monday Jan 2020

Posted by Natasha in Adoption, Researching Reform

≈ 9 Comments

A Facebook poll has revealed that 93% of those surveyed are in favour of scrapping the UK’s full, forced adoption policy and replacing the model with simple adoptions.

Simple adoptions allow children and their birth families to remain legally connected, and encourage meaningful, child-focused contact with biological parents while in the care of adoptive parents, wherever possible. Adopted children are able to keep their original surnames and can inherit from both families.

Under the UK’s current adoption policies, which feature a full adoption process, all ties between birth families and their children are severed when an adoption order is made.

While post adoption contact is possible under existing legislation, the policy behind the law is weighted heavily in favour of the adoptive parents’ wishes and wants, making physical contact almost unheard of in adoption cases.

France uses a two-tier system which features both full and simple adoptions, but since the 1990s, the number of simple adoptions have far exceeded the country’s full adoptions, making simple adoptions the most common form of adoption in France today.

Luxembourg, which also uses simple adoptions, only allows a simple adoption to take place where there are strong grounds, and if it offers advantages for the adoptee. Interestingly, the law in Luxembourg also requires that the adoptive parent must be at least 15 years older than the child, unless there are compelling reasons to permit otherwise.

The survey, which this site ran on Facebook, gathered 445 votes and found that 93% of those polled wanted to see the UK’s current adoption policies removed and replaced with a simple adoption process, while just 7% did not want to see the current full adoption policy scrapped and replaced with a simple adoption framework.

One poster commenting on the poll said, “I Don’t think adoption should exist. I think working with families so much better for the kids overall health wellbeing.”

Another poster said, “Adoption should only happen with the consent of everyone involved.”

And another commentator responding to the survey wrote, “In cases where the parents are either dead or doing life in jail and NO ONE else could have the child, I don’t see it as a bad thing. However, we all know it is being abused…. It’s horrific how something that I am sure was devised with good intentions, is being used to target the ‘lower classes’.”

Adoption, by law, should always be the last consideration in any child protection case but in rare instances where it is an appropriate course of action for a child, adoptions should be fully transparent.

In practice, that means each adoption plan must be highly tailored to each child to ensure birth family ties remain, and should be reviewed regularly and updated to reflect a child’s developmental needs.

Screenshot 2020-01-20 at 10.13.56

Ground-Breaking Public Consultation on Open Adoptions

13 Monday May 2019

Posted by Natasha in Adoption, Researching Reform

≈ 5 Comments

Ireland has just launched a public consultation on open and semi-open adoptions which could pave the way for biological families to participate more fully in the adoption process and stay in contact with their children after adoption.

The country’s department for Children and Youth Affairs is holding an open debate today which will include adoption experts, service providers and groups focused on children’s rights and their perspectives on welfare issues which affect them.

England and Wales currently practice a form of open adoption though contact between birth parents and their biological children usually ends after an adoption order is made.

The Children and Families Act 2014 in England and Wales allows post-adoption contact with birth parents, but it is heavily tilted in favour of the wishes and feelings of the adoptive parents, rather than the best interests of the adopted child.

A growing body of research produced by social workers and child welfare experts is also starting to challenge what are increasingly being seen as damaging and restrictive policies around child contact with birth parents within the adoption process in England and Wales.

While the terms set down for open and semi-open adoptions can vary, the consultation page offers these definitions and examples of open and semi-open adoptions:

“‘Open adoption’ is most commonly understood to refer to arrangements involving post-adoption contact between members of birth and adoptive families of adopted children under 18.

‘Semi-open adoption’ usually means arrangements for indirect contact such as the sharing of information and or items between members of birth and adoptive families, usually facilitated or mediated by social workers. In practice, open adoption and semi-open adoption may take on many different forms, including:

Birth parents providing information to social workers about themselves and their lives, such as their medical histories or family background, so that these details can be shared with the adopted child;
The adoptive parents writing to the birth parents by regular arrangement to let them know how the adopted child is getting on, in school, for instance;
Face to face meetings or visits between the adopted child and his or her birth parent;
Birth parents sending birthday cards to the adopted child; or
Arrangements for the adopted child to meet up with his or her birth siblings or grandparents.”

The questionnaire contains sections which ask for your views on open and semi-open adoptions.

Ireland’s Children and Youth Affairs minister Katharine Zappone is concerned about the impact of current adoption policies on children’s health and wellbeing.

Zappone told the Law Society Gazette Ireland, “Understandings of what is meant by open or semi-open adoption vary but these terms usually refer to arrangements for information sharing between adoptive and birth families as well as an option for contact.

“This is a complex and sensitive issue. As we are in the early stages of having this discussion in Ireland, it is vital that we gain the views of those affected by adoption as well as other key stakeholders in order to find out what works best for children and families.”

She added, “Adoption is a hugely significant event in the life of a child,” Zappone said.

“When considering any proposed change to adoption policy, we must be guided by what is in the child’s best interests.”

You can respond to the survey here.

Further reading on the subject can be found in these Researching Reform posts.

open-adoption-with-biological-family-contact-word-vector-12639619.jpg

Adoption Agency Marketing Children On Facebook Sparks Public Fury

03 Monday Dec 2018

Posted by Natasha in Adoption, child welfare, Researching Reform

≈ 16 Comments

Facebook users were left furious last week after discovering that a local authority had been advertising children for adoption on the social media site. The page offers full length descriptions and links to photos of the children.

Suffolk Fostering and Adoption Agency, which is run by Suffolk County Council, is advertising children for adoption on Facebook through its business page Suffolk Adoption Agency. The move prompted Facebook users to leave negative reviews on the page, which has a rating of 2.3 stars out of 5.

Families were shocked by Suffolk Council’s Facebook page, calling the strategy deeply insensitive to parents who had had their children removed through care proceedings. Many of these parents are active on the social media platform. Seeing children being marketed online by Suffolk Council led to one mother leaving a scathing review on the page:

“This page is disgusting, sharing children like animals… how do you think their birth parents would feel? It’s wrong and disgusting…. If I ever see my children on here all hell will break loose… disgusting the lot of you…. children… are human beings and deserve better than this.”

Reacting to an advert featuring a newborn baby on the Facebook page, a family law activist said, “Hang your head in shame Britain… up for sale like puppy farming, except these babies are worth £33,000 once they find adopters, #SS you disgust me.”

Another poster left a plea for help on the review section, asking the council to give her parents a second chance.

The adoption agency’s Facebook page was shared by Facebook users over the weekend, with dozens of private comments left under the shared content.

Concerns over a child trafficking epidemic in the UK do not seem to have stopped adoption agencies from marketing children online, despite the level of detail being offered by these agencies which is visible to everyone around the world. Pages and sites offer the names of councils and the whereabouts of agencies, making it easy for offending paedophiles to locate and target children, placing not only those children advertised at risk, but every child within the agency’s location. The ability to like and subscribe to Suffolk County’s adoption page also means that offending paedophiles could be tracking the adverts without the council knowing.

Allowing councils – who are responsible for assessing parents in child protection proceedings – to run adoption and fostering agencies creates a sharp conflict of interest. The dual role gives councils every incentive to remove children from parents so that the government can take advantage of adoption and fostering placements, which are big business inside the sector.

Suffolk Council’s Facebook page has over 800 likes, though it is not clear whether the engagement is organic, or has been paid for by the council. The page also mentions that the agency received an Outstanding rating from Ofsted in 2011. In 2016, the agency was rated Good, by the inspection body.

The current policy of protecting children’s identities during child welfare proceedings and then making their identities public to secure adoption and fostering placements is also ineffective, and in several instances, illegal. Parents are being contacted by friends who are seeing their children being advertised online, causing the families even greater distress. There is also no evidence to suggest that the strategy of advertising children online is working – a significant percentage of placements break down, and in January 2018, it was revealed that placement breakdown was on the rise.

Councils also do not have a legal right to advertise children where parents still have parental responsibility, which is the position in the vast majority of cases where a child has been placed in foster care.

Very many thanks to the wonderful Michele Simmons and the very generous posters who gave Researching Reform permission to quote them.

SFA

Top Social Work Professor: Adoption Works For A Minority Of Children.

23 Tuesday Oct 2018

Posted by Natasha in forced adoption, Researching Reform

≈ 15 Comments

One of the authors of the UK’s Adoption Enquiry has told a BBC programme investigating forced adoptions, that adoption is not a suitable alternative for most children.

Anna Gupta, a professor of social work at Royal Holloway University and co-author of the Adoption Enquiry report also told BBC Sounds that while parents are able to challenge adoptions, the process is so expensive that in practice mounting a legal challenge to an adoption is not available to most families.

The programme aired on 18th October and covered a range of topics, including forced adoption.

The segment on forced adoption began with a call from a grandmother whose daughter had died, after her grandchildren were taken into care. The grandmother explained that her daughter had been a victim of domestic violence, but was aware of the need to step away from her partner and focus on rebuilding her life, which the grandmother said she did with a good deal of success.

The grandmother then told the BBC presenter that the children’s father asked the mother for contact, and when the mother refused, the father went to social services. It was at that point that the children were taken away from the family. The grandmother told the programme that her daughter had given the children to her to look after whilst she got herself back up on her feet, and that this arrangement was working well. She went on to say that the social workers were unwilling to consider her as a carer for the children. The grandmother told BBC Sounds that she believed her daughter had died as a result of the social workers’ involvement in their case. No details were given about how the mother lost her life.

Anna then came on to the programme to speak. She began by telling the presenter that forced adoption was an unhelpful term because it implied that social workers had the right to remove children from parents when they did not, and that judges were the only professionals with the power to remove children from their current families. This is unfortunately not an accurate explanation of the term forced adoption.

Forced adoption refers to a policy which allows the state to remove a child from his or her parents with a view to putting that child up for adoption, without parental consent. As the term focuses on state powers, we can include the roles both social workers and judges have to play, in implementing the policy.

While Anna is right to suggest that only a judge can make an adoption order, legal powers are given to both social workers and judges to forcibly remove a child from his or her parents where a child is considered to be at risk of immediate, or future harm. If parents are considered to be unable to look after their children, long term arrangements to place children in other homes are then discussed by child protection teams.

This order of events, which is set out in our law and policy on child protection, means that the initial call for a child to be adopted is usually always made by a social worker.

The forced element of child removal is a key feature at almost every stage of the process. As social workers are often tasked with the initial removal, which can involve a child going to a care home or to stay with foster carers, removal in the early stages and the end result of that removal, which is often adoption, are interlinked.

Judges rely heavily on social workers’ reports in court, reports which judges expect will contain advice on what should happen to a child. Most of the time, if a social worker suggests that a child should be adopted, a judge will endorse and enforce that recommendation. This is partly because a judge has no other way of assessing the needs of a child in the case. That reliance places social workers in a position of considerable power, with the ability to not only suggest adoption as an option, but to influence the likelihood of an adoption as well. Without social workers’ reports, and expert evidence when it’s used, a judge is almost completely blind. In this way, the deeply integrated nature of the UK’s forced adoption model makes an attempt at separating social workers’ and judges’ roles within forced adoption, pointless.

Anna then goes on to say that whilst some European countries have the ability to use forced adoptions, none of these countries use that power to the same extent as the UK. She also talks about the need to look at the current adoption model in the UK, and the struggle parents face when trying to access support. She blames budget cuts alone for this difficulty, however the truth is more complicated. A defensive attitude towards child protection in the wake of high profile legal cases leading to substantial payouts, as well as a workforce which hasn’t been given robust enough training, all contribute to a tendency to remove children from parents rather than offer support.

Anna then discusses the issue of post adoption contact. She tells BBC Sounds that post adoption contact for original, or biological families, is not the norm and that the system in relation to that kind of contact is closed. Contact for these families after adoption is rare, but the idea that the system is closed in this context is not right and misrepresents the legal position around post adoption contact. Active legislation offers provisions which not only enable contact, but make it compulsory for the court to consider it.

The Adoption and Children Act 2002, tells us that:

“Pursuant to s.46(6), before making an adoption order, the court must consider whether there should be arrangements for allowing any person contact with the child; and for that purpose the court must consider any existing or proposed arrangements and obtain any views of the parties to the proceedings.”

Added to this, sections 51A and 51B, which were inserted into the Adoption and Children Act 2002, by s.9 of the Children and Families Act 2014, give family judges the power to order contact, both before and after an adoption order is made.

What is also noteworthy, is that there is debate about whether or not the current law makes it harder for parents to apply for that contact. One of the issues with the legislation, is that the right to ask for contact is limited by virtue of who can apply. The law as it stands at the moment means that adopted parents and the children in question have an automatic right to make an application, but everyone else needs permission from the court to do so. The implications of that, when we look at legal costs and court bias, are enormous. Although Anna was not referring to this complication when she spoke, and of course holds different views to our own about the sector, we are grateful to her, and BBC Sounds for offering our campaign exposure and further opening up debate on forced adoption.

You can listen to the segment on forced adoption, on BBC Sounds’ webpage. The conversation runs for seven minutes and starts at 1:35:00.

If you’d like to sign our petition calling on the government to end forced adoption, you can do so here.

Many thanks to Kellie Cottam for sharing this programme with us.

BBC Sounds 2

The End Of Forced Adoption In The UK? Meet The Social Workers Challenging The System.

15 Wednesday Nov 2017

Posted by Natasha in Adoption, Researching Reform, social work

≈ 91 Comments

A new piece of research written by social workers predicts that forced adoption will come to an end in the UK. The document also offers new research on the impact of adoptions on birth parents and asks whether it is right for the government to pursue adoption at any cost.

The report, entitled, “The End of Non-Consensual Adoption? Promoting the Wellbeing of Children in Care,” has been co-written by Joe Smeeton, Director of Social Work Education at the University of Salford and Jo Ward, a Principal Lecturer in the Division of Social Work and Professional Practice at Nottingham Trent University.

It’s a brave piece of research which in part goes against the grain in a country where removing vulnerable children without parental consent is seen as an acceptable practice.

The paper predicts that non consensual adoption will eventually come to an end in the UK, largely due to fierce opposition of the practice, and because fewer and fewer countries are engaging in forced adoptions, preferring instead to get parental consent first before an adoption can take place.

The research itself is balanced and fair. Jo and Joe look at the history behind adoption, the relative benefits it can sometimes offer children, particularly very young children who may not have suffered neglect or abuse for a long period of time, and the arguments against removing children from parents without consent.

They explain the paradoxes inside the world of adoption, for example, the long held view that adoption is part of our social fabric and a priority in child protection, as set against an emerging view that it must now be a method of last resort. They look too, at the guidelines shortening the time care proceedings must take and by contrast the need to move slowly in some cases. Interestingly, they pinpoint the forced element of adoptions in the UK as an underlying driver for many of these paradoxes.

The researchers also mention the tension between what they perceive to be a child rights versus parental rights paradox – and here, we would disagree with them. Whilst they explain, quite rightly, that sometimes harmful delays inside the system are down to parents trying desperately to exercise their rights with a view to halting an adoption, the research doesn’t fully explore the importance of a child needing a connection with its biological family.

We have spoken with many adoptees over the years, and several have told us that even when placed with the most loving families they carry a deep hole in their hearts not knowing who their birth parents are, and that this has left them feeling angry, a feeling which they have spent their entire lives trying to manage. It is this important connection which the research doesn’t delve into, and so we warmly invite Jo and Joe to look at this element.

The research also touches briefly upon post adoption contact, which has now become possible since the introduction of a new clause inside the Adoption and Children Act (2002). This section allows the court to make an order in favour of post adoption contact either during the making of the adoption order or any time afterwards. The contact may be in favour of:

(a) any person who (but for the child’s adoption) would be related to the child by blood (including half-blood), marriage or civil partnership;

(b) any former guardian of the child;

(d) any person who was entitled to make an application for an order under section26 in respect of the child (contact with children placed or to be placed for adoption) by virtue of subsection (3)(c), (d) or (e) of that section;

(e) any person with whom the child has lived for a period of at least one year.

There is also a deeply sensitive and insightful discussion on the ethics of adoption, how it affects already vulnerable people, both mothers and fathers, and completely ignores the impact it has on families, to the point where no after-care is offered to the grieving parents or extended family members.

Ultimately, the paper asks us to rethink the ways in which we care for vulnerable children, and invites a discussion on what permanence should look like in the twenty first century.

For their courageous effort and their determination to start a positive discussion about more humane ways forward in child protection, we would highly recommend reading Joe and Jo’s research. Do also take a look at a paper by Joe which he co wrote with Kathy Boxall, called “Birth parents’ perceptions of professional practice in childcare and adoption proceedings: implications for practice.”

We’d love to hear what you think.

Contact After Adoption

14 Tuesday Mar 2017

Posted by Natasha in Adoption, Researching Reform

≈ 3 Comments

Whatever you think of Independent Reviewing Officers, the National IRO Managers Partnership website offers some really interesting articles and resources on all sorts of things and their latest share focuses on contact after adoption.

The site talks about another platform called Research In Practice (RIP) and it is their website that features information about contact after adoption and covers topics like reviewing contact plans and listening to children. We haven’t had the chance to read these materials yet but we would be very interested to hear your views.

Th RIP Home Page says:

“This website supports practitioners working on making positive post-adoption contact plans and supporting birth relatives and adopters through contact planning for their child.

The materials on this website bring together knowledge from research and practice. They draw on research by Professor Beth Neil at University of East Anglia. Research in Practice has worked with Beth and practitioners across England to share expertise and produce accessible and practical resources for professionals involved in this work.”

Here are some links from the posts:

Planning and reviewing contact plans
Supporting birth relatives
Supporting adopters
Listening to children
Letterbox contact
Film clips of interviews with children and their families

This effort reminds us of the brilliant Family And Children’s Resource Programme over in America, which offers videos on best practice social work. We’d love to see RIP develop their content to include these kinds of videos, too.

Applying For Contact After An Adoption Order Is Made

26 Tuesday Jan 2016

Posted by Natasha in child welfare, Researching Reform

≈ 8 Comments

Along with whether or not a parent can record a child protection meeting, the question mark over whether a biological parent can apply for contact after an adoption order has been made, is one we are asked often. This very helpful summary from Suspicious Minds gives a good breakdown of the provision for this, which came into force with the Children and Families Act 2014.

Essentially, the law now allows biological parents to make an application for contact after an adoption order has been made, although pre 2014 any contact arrangements would have been dealt with before the order was completed. Today, biological parents can apply for contact either before or after an adoption order. Noteworthy too is that this power to apply does not just extend to orders made after 2014, it includes all adoption orders prior to 2014, also.

The summary over at Suspicious Minds is worth a read, as he goes into the nuance of this particular contact provision, explains the mechanics behind leave to apply to make such an order, and describes some of the issues stemming from this provision. And whilst he is sensitive to biological parents, and the adoptive parent and their anxieties over the impact of this provision, and we understand why, over at Researching Reform our emphasis is on the importance of keeping biological ties alive wherever possible and if the child so wishes and is able to express that wish. Because whilst unconditional love, if you’re lucky enough to find it as a child, can come in many forms not always rooted in biology, we are acutely aware that children need a connection to their roots to develop a sense of self. This of course opens up another area of debate which we are passionate about, namely adoption reform, but that is another discussion for another day (at least in this post, commenters are more than welcome to talk about this in the comment box below).

Going back to the summary above on contact after a child is adopted, there are as you might imagine thresholds to cross before anyone will consider a biological parent’s right to contact. It is also worth noting that the right to apply for contact after adoption does not just include biological parents but a list of other ‘eligible’ people, like former guardians, other blood relatives and more. However, the provision is there.

Many thanks to Dana for sharing this item with us.

Adoption

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