My speech on adoption to Comm Care Live, May 2012

1. COMMUNITY CARE LIVE
MAY 16 2012
I’m delighted to be here today to speak to you, professionals
involved and interested in adoption and those at the real front line
of the care of children who cannot live with their birth parents: the
adopters, the foster carers and the kinship carers who are here
today.
Some of you will know that I am the, so called, Adoption Czar. A
silly title – and not one which appears anywhere in my contract –
but one loved by the Press. But my interest in adoption did not
start last year when Tim Loughton and Michael Gove asked me to
become their advisor on adoption.
So I want this afternoon, if I may, to speak a little about my history
and why, over the last few years, I have become troubled by the
demise of adoption and convinced of the urgent need for numbers
to increase and for adoptions to be completed more speedily.
I am not,and never have been a Social Worker. But you cannot
work with offenders, and particularly offenders in prison, and for
twenty-three years, without absorbing a great deal about the
reality of disadvantage in the UK and of the consequences of
neglect in early childhood specifically.
So, when I left the Home Office in 2005, after having led the Prison
Service for seven years, I carried with me the reality I faced every
time I visited a prison about the link between being in care and
ending up inside.
My time at Barnardo’s: not perhaps the most important but
certainly the six happiest years of my working life – and where I
worked with five thousand outstanding social workers – led me to
understand: from meeting families; talking to staff; and reading
the research – not least by Julie Selwyn who speaks next - that the
thousands of young people I met in prison had not been propelled
there by their experience of being in care but by the neglect they

2. suffered before care. My time at Barnardo’s led me to understand
that we have a system which has been too optimistic about the
capacity of inadequate parents to become good enough parents;
that we have left children in neglect too long; and we have too
often returned children home from care to suffer further neglect.
These were the factsat the core of my growing conviction at
Barnardo’s that more of those children needed the permanence
that adoption brings and the reason for my dismay at seeing
adoption numbers declining by almost a fifth over the last decade.
A Few Myths
But, I think I shall start today with puncturing a few myths. In the
last few months I have become somewhat resigned to having to
deal with comments and debate in the Press about things I have
neither said, nor believe. I know that my report on adoption for
The Times last year was published behind the so-called pay wall.
But having to pay the princely sum of £1 to access it is not really
any excuse for those who opine so authoritatively, and often so
angrily, about things I have not said.
So, for the record, and just to deal with inaccuracies in the
Guardian alone, I have never suggested that mothers should be
persuaded to go to term and give up babies for adoption. Simply
that adoption should be presented, entirely neutrally, as an option
for a mother.
I am not opposed to the need for post adoption support, as the
Guardian said just a few weeks ago – a particularly ludicrous
claim - and I don’t think that adoptions are all entirely sunny.
Indeed I know just how challenging they can be which is why, of
course, I argued the cost benefit case of adoption support in my
Times report.
I’m particularly irritated by suggestions that I have not listened
and do not listen to Social Workers. My views about care and my
anxiety about the demise of adoption were forged by Social
Workers with whom it was my privilege to work at Barnardo’s
and those I met from local authorities.

3. But most frustrating of all is the suggestion that I am opposed to
Kinship Care. Frankly, that is absurd. It would suggest there must
be a different Martin Narey who, in his Times report, wrote a
chapter on Special Guardianship, which started with the sentence:
Adoption is not the only means of obtaining greater stability for a looked
after child.
andwhich went on to say:
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 this is limiting the effective use of
Guardianship needs to be explored.
That is not to say that I believe that Special Guardianship
arrangements are always the best thing for every child. Very often
they are. But, sometimes, when we are talking about a child
neglected at home – and I’m aware that there are many kinship
care arrangements when there has been no such neglect –special
guardianship may be compromising the interests of a child. In my
report I quoted one Social Worker who, a few months previously,
told Community Care:
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.
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.
Because of that view, which I heard not infrequently, I
recommended to Ministers that we needed urgently to
commission research into special guardianship breakdowns – as I

4. recommended the need for further research into adoption
breakdowns.
So, it is right that I am cautious about the extent to which some
special guardianship arrangements might take place when
adoption might be the better option for the child. Additionally, I
continue to be troubled by the way the system consecutively
reviews the eligibility of increasingly unlikely and distant relatives
to assume Special Guardianship. In one case which I heard of
recently in a visit to a local authority, a court required the
authority to commission international social workers to review the
eligibility, as special guardian, of someone living in Somalia. But
that concern should not be mischeviously translated into a
suggestion that I am opposed to – for example – grandparents or
aunts and uncles being considered for guardianship. Indeed, in
one large County I have urged them – and they have agreed – to
stop allowing the birth mother a veto on who is invited to family
group conferences. Because it was clear to me that, as a result of
that misguided policy, grandparents on the father’s side were
being frozen out of early consideration for guardianship.
But, in case of any continued confusion, let me state in the simplest
terms:
I believe that when a child cannot be adequately cared for by his or
her birth parents we should first, see what support might be made
to make birth parenting adequate. If that can’t be done, and in a
reasonable timeframe, then the first place we should look to place
the child permanently should be with a close relative. And such
arrangements should not penalise those relatives financially.
I’m genuinely puzzled why some of those who support Kinship
Care see adoption as being in competition. This is not about
competition, or about which grows faster, special guardianships or
adoptions. It’s simply about what is best for each individual child.
So I am disappointedwhen I see some of those who promote
Kinship care trying to undermine adoption by publishing terribly
exaggerated estimates of adoption disruption. I want to see as
many grandparents as can adequately care for their grandchild

5. assume special guardianship. But I don’t want those who believe
that such a challenge is beyond them, to be frightened by dire and
inaccurate predictions of adoption failure.
Julie Selwyn may say more about this. But it is important that I
stress that suggestions of overall adoption breakdowns in the
region of 20%, 30% or even 50% are fanciful.
When I researched adoption for The Times, Action For Children
and PACT told me their disruption rate was only 3%. BAAF
suggested to me that the overall disruption rate for the over five
group might be around 20% but for those adopted between one
and five might the figure might be nearer to ten percent – and that
age group covers 75% of adoptions in England. For those adopted
under 12 months,BAAF estimated the disruption rate at just three
percent.
Fostering v Adoption
Let me also say something about fostering because, here too, I’m
puzzled as to why a determination to increase adoption numbers
is seen as an attack on fostering. As the Minister has just stressed,
adoption will always only be the right option for a minority of
children in care.
Achieving permanence with new parents is either impossible or
inappropriate for many children in care, particularly those over
the age of 11.Fostering is often the right option for themand
frequently it succeeds where adoption could not. But for younger
children, and where it is very clear that they cannot go home, and
that there is not a relative who can care for them permanently, we
cannot duck the reality from research that adoption offers a
greater likelihood of permanence and one which lasts for ever.
Julie Selwyn’s study of non-infant adoptions found that fostering
breakdowns at 46% were much higher than adoption breakdowns
of 17% and other research has reached similar conclusions.
There are about 65,000 children in care in England. Last year there
were only 3,000 adoptions. Even if adoptions were to increase next
year by 50% there would still be about eleven children in foster

6. placements in England for every child adopted.So why is there
such anxiety about a government determination to reverse a fall in
adoption numbers?
The Reform Programme
Let me turn to the reform programme. A lot has happened. We
now have performance scorecards so that every local authority can
compare its performance with others. I am unapologetic about
scorecards and performance data as a tool to improve
performance. Of course, scorecards can only tell one part of a story
and those who rush to conclusions about an individual local
authority’s management of adoption, based only on last week’s
performance data, would be very unwise. That’s why we use the
term performance indicator. It’s an indicator of performance, a
prompt to take a closer look.
The scorecards need some more work yet but they represent a
significant step forward. One of the things that most pleased me
about the data when I saw it last weekwas that it gave a lie to the
proposition that there has to be a choice between faster adoptions
and successful adoptions. Some of the local authorities I have
visited which have most impressed me, where disruption rates are
extremely low, where post adoption support is visible, and where
adopters speak most highly of their experiences, are amongst the
fastest authorities in concluding adoptions. That’s because the
significance of delay in achieving permanence is not lost on the
best authorities.
The Adoption Action Plan
The performance scorecards were trailed in the Adoption Action
Plan published a few weeks ago. That document also made plain
that the government will do a number of other things, including:
First, compelling swifter use of the national Adoption
Register to ensure that we can find the right adopters for a
child wherever they might live. I still hear of cases where the
right match doesn’t proceed because one local authority

7. doesn’t want to pay another local authority or a voluntary
adoption agency for its adopters.
Second, ensuring that more local authorities seek to place
children with their potential adopters in anticipation of the
court's placement order, something I’ve seen done to great
effect and which takes the principles behind concurrent
planning for babies and applies it to older children as well;
Third, introducing a “fast-track” process for those who have
adopted before, or who are foster carers, wanting to adopt a
child in their care. I am dealing right now with the successful
adopters of four disabled children, who, wanting to adopt
another disabled child, have beenbrusquely turned away
from ten local authorities – because their approval as
adopters has lapsed.
Fourth, no longer allowing an adoption to be delayed in
order to achieve a perfect or near ethnic or cultural or
religious match between adoptive parents and the adoptive
child. Again, in this last week, I have been offering advice to
a Jewish couple, willing to adopt a child of any or no
religion, but who have been turned away from local
authorities because they have no Jewish children waiting for
adoption.
But the most important reform of all will be the radical speeding
up the adopter assessment process. This is not intended, in any
way, to reduce the rigour of assessment. It is certainly not
intended to let unsuitable people adopt. Indeed one of the
attractions of the new system for me is that it will more quickly
identify those who are unsuitablerather than drag them through a
process for months and sometimes years before they are turned
away.
I have visited twenty or so local authorities and voluntary
adoption agencies in the past nine months. No one has yet to
disagree with the proposition that the current process is repetitive
and lacking in analysis. The new system, designed by practitioners
and managers from local authorities and VAAs, will now

8. generally involve two months spent in training and information
gathering – a pre-qualification phase - followed by four months of
preparation and training. There will be some adopters who need
longer – and that’s fine. But too many adopters now are terribly
frustrated by the process and too many of them give up.
We need to build on a new assessment process with much
improved recruitment of adopters. We need to reach out to people
who have never previously thought of adopting. We need to frame
adoption as sometimes an alternative to IVF treatment, not
something which is turned to only after successive failures with
IVF. But, I am also clear, and Ministers are sympathetic to this, that
potentialadopters need to be much more confident than they can
be now about the post adoption support which will be available to
them, if and when they meet difficulties.
The adoption backlog
The need for better and swifter recruitment of adopters is now a
matter of real urgency. That is because, in considerable part, the
argument on adoption has been won and many more children are
now being cleared for adoption.
So, although the Courts might be responsible for some of the delay
in the adoption process (I’m afraid local authorities are sometimes
too quick to use that fact as a justification for not addressing delay
in their processes) we now have a large number of children who
have cleared the court processes – however long that might have
taken – and are awaiting adoption, but with no-one to adopt them.
The number of children on the Adoption Register, at the beginning
of this month was 2,212. That is the highest number ever recorded
by BAAF. The number of adopters on the register, meanwhile, is
just311: the lowest ever recorded. We know that both registers
may be incomplete and because of this, I’m afraid that I believe
that the gap between approved adopters and children with
placement orders may be much larger than the 1900 suggested by
the Register. If Local Authority returns for the recent scorecards
are correct we now have more than four thousand children
approved for adoption. I doubt we have more than six or seven

9. hundred approved adopters. That amounts to a crisis, and that is
why Ministers have responded so vigorously, and made a re-
design of adopter recruitment their first priority. We now need to
move urgently to introduction of the new system.
Conclusion
Let me conclude. Adoption is the right option for only a minority
of children in care. But for a bigger minority than the number who
currently get this new start in life.
Adoption today is not remotely as straightforward as it used to be,
when my adopted nephews and nieces came to live with my older
brothers. Adoption now is much more likely to follow neglect or
abuse at home, sometimes abuse in the womb, and then one or
more episodes of fostering. That makes adoption today much
more challenging. That is why we need new processes which will
more quickly identify those needing adoption and then, more
swiftly, unite them with the people: couples and singles; straight
and gay; and from all ethnic backgrounds, who are willing to step
forward, despite the challenges, to give a neglected child a new
beginning.