Adoption was once viewed as the best solution for children in care, but research has proven that the only winners are councils and companies investing in the process.

While the world has become familiar with the UK government’s misguided practices when it comes to adoption – from financial incentives and targets for placing children, to taking children from birth parents without their consent – the phenomenon of disrupted adoptions has been kept quiet by agencies and local authorities with a vested interested in child placements.

This secrecy also validates the myth that adoptions are permanent, and are never undone. But adoptive families can give children back, and they are doing so at an alarming rate.

The technical term for this is adoption disruption, and happens when an adoption falls through, or adoptive parents decide to give their adopted children back to the agencies which hosted them.

Whether by omission or design, stats on adoption disruption are sketchy and there is currently no legal requirement on adoption services to keep a record of how many adoptions fall through or fail.

A Freedom of Information request in 2018 found that adoption disruption had been on the rise since 2012, peaking at 2016 and included breakdowns which happened after an initial placement was made.

Across all 152 local authorities the request revealed that there had been 87 breakdowns in 2012-13, increasing to 160 in 2015-16 and 132 in 2016-17. The figures offered are likely to be conservative estimates, according to Children and Young People Now Magazine which made the request.

However, some experts say at least one in five adoptions (20%) in the UK fail.

The latest stats, which haven’t been collected for 2018-2019 are likely to show a spike in disrupted adoptions, after several parents who spoke to the BBC said they had given back their adopted children because they were unable to cope with their needs.

It’s a heartbreaking scenario, and one which councils and adoption agencies must shoulder a large portion of the blame.

Adoption is a much cheaper option when compared to foster care and family support, as it allows councils to shed themselves of children, and the associated and often significant costs that go with fostering and social care.

Placing children in adoptive families means councils and agencies no longer have to bear the financial costs of child care, which are transferred, often in full, to the adoptive parents.

To enable these placements, social services teams and independent adoption agencies are not being honest with adoptive families about the children on their books.

Poor data collection and an at times wilful failure to produce proper Life Story Books – which are supposed to chronicle a child’s life fully before, during and after adoption – allows adoption bodies to present piecemeal information about a child’s complex needs.

Adoption agents gloss over details, ‘forget’ to mention a child’s complicated history and tell adoptive families whatever they want to hear to secure an adoption.

The end result: even more adoption disruption, as adoptive parents overwhelmed and un-prepared to look after a child with sophisticated needs find they can’t cope, and give their adopted children back.

Speaking to the Yorkshire Press in 2018, a woman who gave back her adopted children said she felt social services “placed the children with us and ran for the hills. I felt abandoned. None of it was the children’s fault. Their behaviour is a result of their life experience. They are not responsible for anything to do with the breakdown.”

She went on to say, “There is a lack of support, energy and finance to do anything to help. I was spinning into a point of total despair and all the social workers would say was: ‘don’t worry, you are doing a fantastic job’. There was no recognition, no offer of support. What me and the children needed was just dismissed.”

And it’s not just adoptive parents who get short changed in the process. Birth parents are also abandoned, as councils prioritise cost-cutting over genuine care.

Birth families who need support and assistance have for a long time accused local authorities of removing children from them when they’ve approached their local councils for help.

Councils can see the costs coming a mile away, and the temptation to remove children and place them in adoptive homes is enormous. Adoption is much easier and more cost-effective than providing birth families with therapeutic services or specialist support.

And when an adoption order is made, birth families lose all legal rights to their children, so that when adoption disruption takes place there is no onus on the adoptive family or the agency to notify the birth parents of the change.

This oversight also limits the ability of councils to place children back with their birth parents, who may have turned their lives around or may now be able to demonstrate meaningful changes in their lives which would allow reunification.

But what about the children? By far the most important people in this process, they are reduced to numbers, data and failed policy, rather than highlighted and held up as our central priority, which of course, they should be.

We already know that an unprecedented number of children are being bounced around the care system, and research shows this is damaging children and their development. 

We also know that adoption only works for a minority of children, and that quality of life is far more important than securing an adoption placement with families who are clearly not appropriate.

The myth that adoption is permanent, and offers a fairytale ending to a child’s difficult life journey, falls far short of the truth.

Links:

• Judge slams ‘outstanding’ council for breaches of law and guidance in ‘biased’ adoption application
• Disruption of Adoptive Placements – Nottingham City Council Guidelines

Image by Hans Kretzmann

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.

The acting Children’s Minister, Michelle Donelan, who is filling in for Kemi Badenoch while she is on maternity leave, has told children’s services directors that adoptions must be a priority in child welfare cases.

The request was communicated in a letter, which also urged the child protection sector not to turn away prospective adopters based on factors like income, while confirming additional funds for agencies to “recruit” more adopters.

Startlingly, the Minister appears to have asked councils to ignore court judgments which have prioritised other forms of care.

In the letter, Donelan says, “We understand that some local authority decisions may be influenced by local court responses to previous applications, and this could mean some children missing out on the benefits of adoption.”

A recent shift in understanding around adoptions has seen the child welfare sector start to prioritise birth family support and temporary care arrangements with a view to reuniting children with their biological families, wherever possible.

The letter has been heavily criticised by sector bosses, who feel the Minister’s demands are short-sighted and overly simplistic.

Not unsurprisingly, adoption agencies in the UK welcomed the move, while fostering agencies threw temper tantrums over the declaration.

Shortly after the letter was shared, the hashtag #ambitiousforadoption was used by the Chief Executive for Coram, Carol Homden. Ambitious For Adoption is an initiative Coram has launched to try to secure more adoptions through collaborations with local authorities in London. (At the time of publication, this was the only tweet we could find using the hashtag).

Coram has been criticised in the past for being both a children’s charity and running what it calls “one of the largest and most successful independent adoption agencies in the UK.” Social workers, charities and campaigners believe Coram’s portfolio creates a conflict of interest.

The more significant issue here though, is not the battle for market share between adoption and fostering agencies, but the fact that this decision is plainly wrong in law.

We wouldn’t expect a politician to imagine this might be important, so we’ll explain it for Michelle, here.

In what is now considered to be one of the most prominent judgments in family law, made in 2013 and which also set a precedent, Lord Neuberger confirmed that care orders must be “a last resort, because the interests of a child would self-evidently require her relationship with her natural parents to be maintained unless no other course was possible in her interests.”

This comment was made to explain the intent behind clauses in the Children Act 1989 and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. These are both pieces of legislation ratified by the UK, which bind all of us here in England and Wales, including politicians.

Baroness Hale, the former head of the Supreme Court, who was also involved in this case, offered additional guidance, saying that a care order should take place, “only in exceptional circumstances and when motivated by overriding requirements pertaining to the child’s welfare, in short, when nothing else will do. In many cases and particularly where the feared harm has not yet materialised and may never do so, it will be necessary to explore and attempt alternative solutions.”

Fast forward to 2015, and the then President of the Family Division, Sir James Munby warned councils in another case that adoptions with strangers must only ever be made after engaging with every available relative of the child, to see if they might be able to look after him or her.

This warning was rooted in existing legislation (the Children Act 1989), which makes it very clear that adoption should never be the first port of call, and if it is eventually considered, every effort must be made to try to place a child with appropriate members of their birth family.

The judgment led to a sharp decline in adoptions, as councils began to understand the implications of the law and the emphasis on doing what was genuinely in every child’s best interest.

And in 2017, the current President of the Family Division, Andrew McFarlane, who was acting as a High Court judge, raised serious concerns around the use of adoption in a speech he gave at a Family Justice Council event. McFarlane said, “Magistrates and judges up and down the country on every day of the week are making these highly intrusive draconian orders removing children permanently from their natural families on the basis that to do so is better for the child and that ‘nothing else will do’. But, I ask rhetorically: ‘How do we know this is so?’”

What we do know is that adoption does not work for a vast number of children, and that placements break down far too often. This site has written about these issues a lot, and much of the research in this area is available on Researching Reform to read.

We very much hope that others will join us in pointing out the Minister’s misunderstanding of the law on adoptions.

You can access more RR articles on adoption and the impact it has on children, here. 

Many thanks to Dana for alerting us to the hashtag.

Michelle Donelan, acting Children’s Minister.