Written evidence from the Chair of the Potato Group (CFA0046)
HOUSE OF LORDS CHILDREN AND FAMILIES ACT 2014 SELECT COMMITTEE INQURY
Evidence of the Potato Group to the Select Committee in the House of Lords on the Children and Families Act 2014.
Parents of traumatised adopted teens organisation ( known as the Potato group throughout this submission) is a peer to peer group of over 450 adoptive parents, run by a group of adoptive parents via an entirely voluntary committee.
The Potato group formed in 2013. Almost all of our current members adopted their children from the UK care system over the past 25 years. During the last eight and a half years we have supported over 600 members who have parented over 2,000 of the most vulnerable children and young adults. ‘Our’ children (‘our’ because our children have two sets of parents – their first parents and us) were removed from their first families, due to a combination of maltreatment and or neglect – or so we were all led to believe by the Local Authorities that prepared, approved and placed our children with us for adoption.
Therefore, as an organisation, we believe that our submission to the Select Committee is overwhelmingly of interest to you in terms of your central question about whether the Children and Families Act 2014 has achieved its aim of improving the lives of children and families, particularly the most vulnerable children and young people in society.
Our general feeling is that YES, the Act has partially achieved its aim of improving the lives of children and families BUT not necessarily the most vulnerable children, throughout their lives and those of us, their families.
Our submission relates to the extent that the Act has not achieved its aims, due to its implementation and challenges which subsequently emerge, long after we adopt our children, especially when the most traumatised adopted young people become teenagers and into their early adult years.
For ease of reading, we have changed the order of the questions you ask.
Is the Act enabling faster, more secure and stable adoptions which are in the best interests of the child?
The majority of our members adopted ‘our’ children between 1995 and 2010. Therefore we are not best placed to comment on the first part of the question. However, anecdotally, we are starting to get members who did adopt older children post 2014 and whilst they may have adopted their children more quickly, the information they give about their need to join us, leads us to believe that the adoptions are no more secure and stable than those of us who adopted prior to the Act in 2014.
We are in the unenviable position to comment on the question of whether the right information, budgets and support to assist us post adoption is good enough. The answer is NO.
When our children were placed, we find that as the years pass by, the information given about our child’s early life history is often found to have been inaccurate, incomplete and on rare occasions, complete fabrication.
When we seek financial support if we are unable to work due to the needs of our traumatised adopted children, we are refused (Adoption Allowances). Information we need to get to fully inform Education (re EHCPs), CAMHS, our GP’s and other agencies seeking to help our young people is often protracted or denied to us.
Post adoption support has been haphazard and a post code lottery exists, even with the much needed and used Adoption Support Fund and setting up of Regional Adoption Agencies. An example being that when our much loved but damaged children (by their adverse childhood experiences) re enter care, they were denied access to the Adoption Support Fund. Only in March this year did this change. Long overdue and probably because of the evidence given by the Potato Group to the All Party Parliamentary Group on Adoption and Permanence in the summer of 2021. As an organisation we have spoken to past leaders of the Adoption and Leadership Board since 2014 and our repeated requests to change the criteria were ignored.
Have the reforms to the family justice system succeeded in making the system faster, simpler and less adversarial? How has the Act interacted with other reforms to the family justice system…….
We believe that the speed of proceedings when our children are removed from their first families is wholly justified. The longer children are in the system, the greater their trauma. However, children’s social care teams seem to be under resourced and are often unable to reach decisions to be out before the Court that reassures us that the right decisions for their futures are made correctly.
Our concern around the 26 week limit relates to our children. You may or may not know (SSDA 903) – some 200 children RE ENTER the care system each year from adoptive homes. These are the same children that arrived on our doorsteps over a decade ago. The same children, albeit with different surnames, different addresses and with different parents but suffering from the aftermath of their early adversity.Most re enter care due to the long term sequalae of that early adversity, which tends to be expressed through child to parent violence and abuse. The abuse comes from our children to us and not the other way round. When this happens, our much loved children re enter care for our families safety. However, their re entry to care is more often than not, viewed by Children’s Social Care child protection teams as being at risk of harm from us, their adoptive families. These professionals are unable to see that the very reasons that ‘our’ children were removed from their first families are the reasons that they are unable to regulate their emotions in the teenage years – many of our children having had years of therapy to address their early adversity and trauma, specialist schooling in SEMH provision or at the very least having special educational needs.
Due to the 26 week limit on care and placement proceedings many of our members are unnecessarily taken into the Family Court arena for care proceedings when our families need the support of services to remain a family, albeit not living together in the same home. Section 20 is an entirely legitimate voluntary order for our children and us to remain under. Our children cannot be re adopted, they remain our children legally and we parent at a distance even when unknowledgeable social workers try (mostly in vain) to put a wedge between us. When all the professionals vanish into thin air, when our loved but damaged children reach 18 (or 16 in some cases), we are the people that will support, care for and love them. We are the people that will support our young adults with finding homes, supporting them when they enter the criminal justice system, have our grandchildren live with us as their Special Guardians and hopefully support them to live their lives as ok adults. Our commitment to them remains firmly intact.
The present system is ADVERSERIAL for adoptive families, where it is unsafe for our vulnerable children to live in our homes.
In Conclusion, the answer to the following question -
If there were to be a Children and Families Act 2022, what should it include and what might be the barriers to implementation?
Legislate that the 26 week limit should be removed from Statue for children (especially for teenagers) that re enter care from previous permeance. Find a way for adopters and much more importantly, already traumatised children (due to their maltreatment, neglect or separation from their first families before they were placed with us) to not be dragged through the adversarial Family Court system for the second time in their lives. It damages our families, sometimes beyond repair, is totally unjust (except for very rare cases), is expensive (when resources would be better spent on maintaining or re building family relationships) and it seems to us – simply a way to keep some professionals in work. Such a waste of public money, the Family Courts time and our children’s and families emotional, mental health and wellbeing.
As far as expert witnesses are concerned when LA’s initiate care proceeding when they believe they have to due to the 26 week limit - given that many professionals involved with children are not trauma informed and have no understanding at all about the difficulties that adoptive families face throughout ‘our’ children’s lives, we believe that restricting expert witnesses disadvantage our members during proceedings.
The Potato groups members experience of parenting the very vulnerable children that the Act sort to protect is immense. We have dealt with almost every part of the Children and Families Act (the exception being mediation and separating parents). We are very happy to give oral evidence to the Select committee and to be contacted if you wish to hear anything further from us,
The committee may wish to see the evidence given to the APPG on Adoption and Permanence last summer. As we published our evidence to the APPG on our website we understand that it cannot be used in this submission. Please let us know if you wish to see it. Alternatively it can be viewed on our website Thepotatogroup.org.uk
April 2022