Kent's adoption parties mean more children have the chance of a loving home

Cllr Jenny Whittle, the Cabinet Member for Specialist Children's Services on Kent County Council, says remembering the human factor can help more children in the care system have the chance of adoption

The Government’s drive for councils to increase the number of adoptions, recruit more adopters, and eradicate delay in getting children adopted is absolutely right. Last year Kent County Council entered into an innovative partnership with children’s charity, Coram. We have doubled the number of information days for prospective adopters, worked with voluntary agencies to widen our pool of adopters, substantially grown our family finding team, and streamlined a process for recruiting adopters which candidly had been deterring some would-be adopters from pursuing a vital cause.

This has resulted in the number of children placed with adoptive families by Kent County Council increasing from 68 to 143 over a year.

But however much councils try, some children remain harder to place, particularly older children, siblings and those with disabilities. The adoption process in the country centres on social workers seeking to identify matches between adopters and children. It doesn’t enable adopters to consider a child who on paper may not fit what may have been their ideal. Paper and DVD profiles miss a fundamental factor: the chemistry and warmth that can evolve between adults and children when they meet.

Sandwell Council's Children's Services is inadequate - but so is Ofsted

An Ofsted report has found Sandwell Council's Children's Services Department to be "inadequate."

The trouble with the report is that it is concerned with process rather than outcomes. None of the warped ideological bigotry, which constitutes orthodox opinion in children's services departments,  is really challenged.  Instead we discover that the social workers are hopeless with their paperwork.

For example:

Records can be held in three places and leads to delays in some important documents not being placed on the correct part of the system and therefore not being readily accessible. Gaps in recording were identified by inspectors tracking cases.

Also:

Examples were seen by inspectors where children had been allocated to a substantive social worker for a prolonged period, yet this Sandwell Council Inspection of looked after children services had not resulted in the completion of a care or pathway plan, despite the case having been reviewed sometimes more than once, and the social worker being regularly supervised.

There is a shortage of adopters: The trouble is that the "adoption myths" are still often the reality

TheTimes reports (£) this morning that councils are increasing the number of children in care being offered for adoption and speeding up the process. However it adds that there has not been an equivalent effort to attract more couples to offer to adopt.

The report says:

More than 6,000 children are going through the adoption process with only 1,800 prospective parents approved and waiting to look after them at the end of it.

Official statistics show that slow recruitment of new parents is threatening to scupper a series of reforms that have greatly speeded up all other parts of the process.

I expect that many councils will respond with an advertising campaign to encourage more prospective adopters to come forward. That would be welcome.

I would also suggest that they write to those who made previous enquiries - say over the last five years - but did not pursue their application. What put them off? Writing to them might encourage some to reapply. However they should also be offered to the chance to could explain to someone in authority if they still wanted to adopt but felt they faced unreasonable obstruction. This meeting could be offered with someone in authority - perhaps the local councillor who serves as the Cabinet Member for Children's Services or the Director of Children's Services. Or an independent person who could offer a synopsis of the reasons given for applicants dropping out.

The Children and Families Bill must be only the first step in boosting adoption

I would hope and expect that the Children and Families Bill will come into law and help to reduce the number of children in care by increasing the number adopted.

However it is a very modest, polite piece of legislation. It doesn't banish political correctness. But it means that social workers who apply a practical, common sense approach won't actually be prohibited. The current law says that "due consideration" should be given to race when placing children for adoption, while the interests of the child is supposed to be paramount. Astonishingly the current law is routinely interpreted as not allowing, or very seldom allowing, transracial adoption. The reality has meant black children remaining stuck in the care system rather than being placed with a white couple.

This remained the reality despite new guidance being brought in by Tim Loughton in 2011 that ethnicity should not trump other concerns.

Pleas to social workers that children would be better off in loving families than institutional care do not seem to have an impact. Although the new law will help good social workers to apply common sense and and get children adopted, I fear it will do little in constraining the ideological social workers who seek to thwart this.

Adoption and Fostering Panels should be scrapped

Reducing the number of children in care and securing a higher adoption rate partly involves preventing social workers from imposing ideological barriers. This is the controversial area, the battle against political correctness.

But there are also plenty of cases where social workers are trying to get on with the task of placing children for adoption. The social workers find that they are being blocked or delayed by the system. I have spoken to plenty of them. They are as frustrated and angry as anyone else at the damage caused by the current arrangements.

One reform that would be positive would be the abolition of Adoption Panels. Also the Fostering Panels which have an equivalent role in wasting time and money.

I used to sit on an Adoption Panel. I do not regret doing so as I found it a fascinating, albeit emotionally draining, experience. Yet I have come to the conclusion that their role is flawed. The only scope these panels can have is negative. It's there to rubber stamp three types of decision - proposals from social workers for a child to be adopted, for a couple to be approved as suitable to adopt or for a particular child to be matched with a particular couple.

The cost of adoption is too high

Some of the obstacles to adoption are controversial. Others are dull. The Government has made a usfeul start in attacking both kinds. They need to go much further. There is still acceptance of the lazy, defeatist assertion of the social work establishment that adoption must only be the destination for a minority of children in care. However the reforms being brought in are much to be welcomed - they are individually modest but cumulatively significant.

The latest matter to be addressed is mismatch with some councils having a shortage or prospective adopters and some with a surplus. Some councils might have couples approved as ready to adopt kept waiting with no children available. Others might have children approved as suitable for adoption waiting for couples to be placed with.

In their consultation the Government says:

One major barrier to effective collaboration between local authorities in relation to adopter recruitment is the inter-authority fee. It is currently set at £13,000, while Julie Selwyn’s independent research suggests the actual cost to a local authority of recruiting and assessing an adopter is over £30,000. This places a strong financial incentive on local authorities to avoid recruiting more adopters than are needed for its children, and allowing other local authorities to place children with them. 

By all means let the inter-authority fee reflect the real cost and thus free up the market in prospective adopters. However the underlying assumptions should also be challenged.

Couple seeking to adopt asked: "How many times a week do you have sex?"

Birmingham City Council have published a survey of adoption applicants. There are some sensible recommendations on some of the criticisms raised. So it is an interesting document and it is to the credit of the council that the research was undertaken and that it was published. Let's hope that action indicates a desire to change. Many of the concerns raised will not be unique to Birmingham.

But I'm afraid it does show the most widespread and horrendous prejudice in the council against adoption - at least hitherto. Those wishing to adopt a child seek to provide that child with a permanent loving home rather than being shunted around the care system. Those offering to adopt should be given every possible welcome and encouragement. Their applications should be pursued as a matter of urgency. I fear, to put it mildly, this has not been the experience in Birmingham.

As the Daily Mail has highlighted the report says:

There were several reports of adopters being told they would need to give up work. One participant left the process because of this.

Dudley Council spends £233,000 a month on taxis taking children to school

Dudley Council is holding a consultation with its residents on a range of Council Tax increases. Those who oppose a Council Tax increase are only allowed to have their views registered if they say they support cutting "key services." They are given a strong message that such an option would inflict terrible harm on residents.

Rather than waste time on such a rigged exercise I suggest the people of Dudley look at another section of their Council's website. Let's look through their procurement spending for October. Then let's look at just one category of spending from one department. Children's and Education Services spent £233,342 on taxis - (totting up the items I could spot.) That went on taking children to and from school. Some was for disabled children but substantial amounts (marked "mainstream") was for able bodied children. Usually these will be children in care known as "Looked After Children."

If you talk to children in care you find they don't regard having a taxi to pick them up from school as a treat. It marks them out as different. It creates a stigma. Their school mates ask why a taxi picks them up from school.

Policy Exchange calls for 1,000 more children in care to go to boarding schools

An interesting paper from Policy Exchange calls for a big increase in the number of children in care attending boarding school. At present only 1% of "Looked After Children" attend boarding school. Most of those are with a disability in a specialist school (560 out of the 970 children.) There are 14 local authorities that don't place any children in boarding schools and a further 58 that place less than five. The report recommends that the "aim" should be an increase of 1,000 by 2015/16. Pretty modest.

The report says:

There are a range of potential advantages to using residential schooling as part of a care package. Not least is the fact that it can provide children with two types of stability – that of home and that of school. Importantly, by providing respite and the opportunity of support for foster carers or birth parents, these approaches provide the opportunity of more families staying together, potentially reducing the need for the care system and the likelihood of placement breakdown for those moving into care.

The approach may also be notably cheaper than foster care. Whereas the cost of fostering a child is approximately £400 a week or £20,800 a year, the annual cost of sending a young person in foster care to boarding school would be about £14,800 in a state boarding school. Even in an independent boarding school, the cost might not exceed £25,000. 

Birmingham to close five of its 20 children's homes

There has rightly been increasing focus on the dramatically better outcomes for children being adopted rather than kept in care. It has also become increasingly untenable for people to claim that it is "impossible" for most children in care to be adopted. Increasingly, the extent of the scandal is there for all to see. Children who could be adopted are being kept in care for ideological reasons. The number of children in care is not an inevitable force of nature like the weather. It is a policy decision for which responsibility must be taken.

Another aspect is that for some children in care, the prospects are much worse than for others. Those in long term fostering are better off than those shunted back and forth between a biological parent and an array of different foster carers. Those with the worst prospect are the ones in institutional children homes rather than a family home environment.

Of the children in care, so-called "Looked After Children", 10% are in children's homes nationally. But the ratio varies a lot. In my borough it is 5%. In Birmingham it is 13%. (See Table LAA3.) We can see how the proportion of children taken into care might vary from one district to another - a deprived area would have more than an affluent areas. It is less obvious why there should be such variation in the proportion of children in care who are in children's homes. It is apparent that some councils are failing to keep the numbers to a minimum.