Written evidence from Consortium of Voluntary Adoption Agencies (CFA0127)

 

HOUSE OF LORDS CHILDREN AND FAMILIES ACT 2014 SELECT COMMITTEE INQURY

 

 

 

CVAA submission to the Children and Families Act 2014 Committee

 

About the Consortium of Voluntary Adoption Agencies (CVAA)

The Consortium of Voluntary Adoption Agencies (CVAA) champions and supports voluntary adoption agencies in their life-changing work by using their expertise to achieve positive change for children, advocating for them in national forums and drawing on their vast experience of adoption to facilitate the development and sharing of best practice across the adoption system.

Voluntary adoption agencies (VAAs) tend to specialise in finding homes for children with a plan for adoption who usually wait longest, such as children with complex additional needs, older children, those in sibling groups and of an ethnic minority. They therefore hold significant expertise in providing adoption support for families, with an interest in ensuring that children receive early intervention which is associated with better outcomes.

 

 

CVAA evidence submission

This submission largely relates to Part 1 of the Children and Families Act 2014 on Adoption and Contact. Part 1 of the Act was established to speed up the adoption process and enable more children to be placed in stable, loving homes with less delay and disruption. This principle of the Act remains as relevant as it was in 2014, if not more so. The number of children being adopted has almost halved since the Act was brought in, from 5360 Adoption Orders granted in 2014/15 to 2860 in 2020/21. Children are also waiting longer for permanence – an average of 645 days (in 2020/21), around 21 months. Children from ethnic minorities, with disabilities, and in sibling groups are increasingly waiting longer when compared with children without these characteristics.1

It is evident that many children with a plan for adoption continue to face significant delays and disruption, often during their formative early years, having serious repercussions for their futures. Many children who would have been adopted in the past are today growing up in different forms of care, despite no clear research supporting that this is better for them. On the contrary, international research consistently highlights the better outcomes for adopted children compared to children in other forms of care, including in the groundbreaking April 2022 study by Ward et al. in Australia which found considerable differences between outcomes.2 These facts tell us that the Act in its current form is not fulfilling its stated aims, despite those aims still being highly pertinent. Reform is needed in legislation, but also statutory guidance, policy, resourcing, and practice to deliver for children with a plan for adoption.

Repeal of the requirement to give due consideration to ethnicity (Part 1, Section 3)

The 2014 Act removed the explicit legal wording around a child’s ethnicity so that Black and minority ethnic children are not left waiting in care longer than necessary because local authorities (LAs) are

 


1 Coram-i - ASGLB Q4 2020/21 Headline Measures

2 Abused children who were adopted did ‘significantly better’ than those brought up in care – research | University of Oxford


 

seeking a perfect or partial ethnic match. We believe that wording should be re-introduced which

gives regard to a child’s ethnicity when matching them with adopters, to recognise the links between children’s positive emotional, cultural and identity development and the cultural identity of the adults supporting them. The strategic ambition of the national strategy3 for adoption to recruit adopters from more diverse backgrounds exemplifies this need to match children, as far as possible, with adopters with similar cultural backgrounds. Making sure that more adopters from diverse backgrounds are recruited is an absolute priority. The National Adoption Recruitment campaign has demonstrated that Black and minority ethnic prospective adopters will respond to the correct messaging and campaigning and come forward to apply to adopt.

Research (although there are limited UK-specific studies) also tells us that transracial adoptions can be successful, especially when they are managed well, and when the children grow up with a solid understanding about their heritage culture, close contact with people from their background, and open discussions about this part of their identity.4 However getting this right can require significant professional input and a radical lifestyle change for adopters if they are to get it right. It is important that legislation reflects children’s needs to have their ethnic cultures positively and actively promoted by their adopters, and therefore the vital support that adopters need to make a transracial placement work.

We would hope that greater recognition in legislation impacts upon decision-making in policy. As it stands, there is very little national funding for specialist support workers or training to support adoptive families in this respect, nor for specialist post adoption support and therapy that is mindful and insightful about cultural issues. As a result, legislation and policy are trailing behind practice, as agencies are rightly giving close consideration to children’s ethnicities when matching them with adopters, and when exploring adopters’ understanding of children’s cultural identity needs during the assessment process. As a sector, we have learned a lot from adopted adults who have told us what has worked and not, when they were placed transracially and we also now know a lot more about identity formation.

The Act and its guidance could also be strengthened by acknowledging the spectrum of transracial adoption and complexities this presents for practitioners. For example, a White British family adopting a Black African child will involve different considerations to a Black Caribbean family adopting a Black African child, although both are transracial adoptions.

Provisions allowing approved prospective adopters a more active role in identifying possible matches with children (Part 1, Section 7)

The 2014 Act gave approved prospective adopters a more active role in identifying possible matches with children with a plan for adoption, by allowing adopters to access the Adoption and Children Act Register directly. Additionally, the Register brought a requirement that local authorities refer children to it within 3 months of the Agency Decision Maker approving the plan of adoption. Data confirms a positive correlation between the speed of a referral and the likelihood of a child being matched with a family, regardless of whether a child had characteristics associated with longer waiting times.5 However this Register was closed in March 2019, and the average time children wait to be matched is rising. In 2020/21 the average time between an LA receiving court authority to

 

 


3 Adoption strategy (publishing.service.gov.uk)

4 A good overview of the research is available here: The Transracial Adoption Paradox - PMC (nih.gov)

5  https://coram-i.org.uk/adoption-register-impact/


 

place a child and deciding on a match to an adoptive family was 206 days, an increase of 16 days from 2019/20.6

The original intention of this provision has therefore been lost, with visible consequences for children. Although Link Maker has emerged in place of the Register and also allows adopters direct access, this is not often not translating into adopters feeling like active participants in the process. There is no duty on LAs to have children’s profiles on Link Maker or expand the number of adopters they are visible to within a certain time period, despite Link Maker working in various ways to reduce delays on its platform. CVAA’s members accept the need for LAs to restrict some children’s profiles, for example when it is likely the child will be placed internally, to avoid misleading a wider pool of prospective adopters. However, VAAs are concerned that current family finding practice makes certain children waiting invisible to the best adopters for them, particularly when it comes to matching children with highly complex needs with the most appropriate adopters. It is the reality that for certain children, there may only be a few families in the UK who are able to adopt them, meaning that the likelihood of them being visible to each other in a restricted local search is low.

The Act therefore needs to be updated to reflect the absence of a Register today. We believe there should be replacement provisions addressing the issue of matching timescales, to foster greater urgency when it comes to matching children with adopters, particularly those whom we know will be most likely to wait the longest anyway – Black children, siblings, children with disabilities for example. This should involve more rapid processes for making children waiting known to external adopters.

The interagency fee is an obstacle faced by RAAs and LAs in some regions particularly where there is no allocated budget for paying for adopters from external agencies (VAAs and other LAs). This blocks children from being matched with adopters who may be the perfect fit, thus plainly working against children’s best interests. The combination of restricted visibility and lack of resources for the interagency fee can lead to long, damaging delays for some children and research is needed into whether these factors are influencing the recent rise in reversals of decisions that children should be adopted. The aims of the Act in emphasising both the paramountcy of finding the best match for children and acting swiftly to place children in their permanent home, need to be re-emphasised as the primary considerations for successful adoption. It is also important that more bespoke family finding happens collaboratively between agencies across the country, and amendments to legislation would help this to happen more consistently. If we are genuinely committed to children being adopted and placed with the best matched family, funding should not be the barrier to this being achieved, particularly if it means children are not adopted, as outcomes for young people leaving care are still far poorer than for children who were adopted.

Finally, many foster carers who have built relationships with children would like to adopt them, but the lack of financial support for them as well as adopted children no longer having access to statutory support services, despite their level of need not changing, are disincentives and a review of regulations could remedy this.

Provisions around improving adoption support (Section 1, Part 5&6)

The provisions improving adoption support in the 2014 Act have undoubtedly had life-changing consequences for adoptive families, including the duties on LAs to provide personal budgets and share information and entitlements to support. However there are still many limitations to the support adopters and adoptive children receive. First, adoption support is currently available on


6 Coram-i - ASGLB Q4 2020/21 Headline Measures


 

application to the Adoption Support Fund (ASF), rather than as a universal offer to all adopted families. This ignores children’s vulnerabilities by nature of being adopted – the evaluation of the Adoption Support Fund7 showed that the support needs of adoptive children seem to be significantly higher than their non-adopted peers. It also has the adverse effect that families do not seek support until they are in crisis - at which point bureaucratic delay in accessing support, as well as geographic variation in available services, can exacerbate the situation. Many VAAs are struggling to access support at the point of placement for children with extremely complex behaviours despite the existence of ASF, which is only storing up problems to re-emerge later in childhood – and more intensely. Some VAAs are even providing support without funding which is not sustainable long term. An improved Act would give greater focus to the value of early support for all adoptive and special guardian families, and ultimately reduce placement breakdown and the need to draw on more expensive crisis interventions later on.

An additional issue with the current system of adoption support is that it is only provided on a yearly basis, requiring repeated applications to the ASF to be made when children require longer-term support, with no security that the therapeutic interventions they rely on will continue. Families are therefore left struggling whilst waiting for funding or reliant on VAAs to fund using their own limited reserves. This carries an administrative burden, especially for independent agencies and their adopters who experience more barriers accessing the fund than LA/RAA adopters. But the psychological impact is especially concerning. It is known that some children will require long-term support – for example those who have experienced cumulative Adverse Child Experiences and have been deeply traumatised. For these children, yearly applications simply wastes time and money, risks further harm to the child, and puts strain upon an already fragile placement.

Improving access for all agencies delivering this crucial work and allowing applications for long-term work would lessen disruption and alleviate anxiety for children. It would also benefit children to expand the definition of adoption support beyond purely therapeutic interventions, to mirror the fact that children have diverse needs and need to access a range of specialists to meet them.

Adoption support plans also need to be based on robust and multi-disciplinary assessments which leads to properly informed recommendations about children’s placement, identity and contact needs.

Changes to the arrangements for contact for adopted children (Section 1, Part 9)

The changes to contact for adopted children in the 2014 Act, giving courts the ability to demand contact between children and their birth parents of other relatives, was an important step forward. This section of the Act acknowledged that continuing positive relationships with birth families, where possible, can transform children’s senses of identity as they grow up and support their development into healthy and happy adults.

However, contact between adopted children and birth parents is not keeping up with the recommendations outlined in research. The latest research broadly shows the benefits of well- managed and consistent contact, whether direct or indirect, to ensure children grow up with coherent senses of identity.8 Yet Adoption UK’s 2021 Adoption Barometer found that only 22% of

 

 

 


7   https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/adoption-support-fund-baseline-survey-of-families

8 4d454c4c-9d0e-d1fc-58f7-95adac1a7f12 (uea.ac.uk)


 

adopters had a child who had participated in direct contact with a family member during 2020, and only 5% had direct contact with a birth parent.9

Contact is also failing to keep up with the online world in which many young people connect with birth families themselves via social media, often unbeknownst to their adoptive parents. This bring a high risk of placement disruption as there is no support in place for the child or family.

While the Act gives rights to contact, practical support for parents to make this contact work well is virtually non-existent, which undermines the purpose of this section of the Act. Birth family members who want contact (whether direct or indirect) are often worn down by the emotional challenges it presents, which regularly results in adults withdrawing from contact.10

We would welcome stronger legislation to bring the Act in line with the latest research in support of positive contact, and associated recommendations that all parties involved have access to diverse types and levels of support.11 We would also urge a greater emphasis on direct contact rather than indirect contact, which research has described as often more complex for families, and less enduring over time.12 This echoes comments made by the President of the Family Division and Head of Family Justice, Sir Andrew McFarlane, who has publicly advocated for “direct contact that develops slowly during childhood”13. VAAs who specialise in this work have found that linking therapeutic life story work early on into facilitated contact can have very positive results for children, especially when birth parents have been involved from the start the process of supporting their child make sense of their life story. There are areas in England such as Bedfordshire which are preparing new adopters to expect direct contact from the start rather than letterbox contact, and in doing so are setting the precedent for modern adoption. A stronger steer from legislation or statutory guidance would encourage more areas to follow their lead.

Introduction of the 26 week timescale for care proceedings (Part 2, Section 14)

It is by now well documented and widely understood that the requirement for care proceedings to conclude within 26 weeks has in many cases resulted in inadequate assessment and preparation of potential special guardians. This issue of inadequate assessments and support plans is discussed at length in a 2019 report from the Nuffield Family Justice Observatory, which summarises evidence and concludes that increasing numbers of SGOs are being granted where children have had little previous relationship with the prospective carers.14 It identified a number of concerns including:

 


9 Adoption Barometer | Adoption UK Charity

10 The 2021 Adoption Barometer found that 59% of birth mothers, 72% of birth fathers, and 19% of adoptive families had stopped participating in the planned arrangements.

11 Modernising post-adoption contact: findings from a recent consultation (nuffieldfjo.org.uk)

12 4d454c4c-9d0e-d1fc-58f7-95adac1a7f12 (uea.ac.uk)

13 https://www.familylawweek.co.uk/site.aspx?i=ed200419

14  NuffieldFJO-Special-Guardianship-190731-WEB-final.pdf


 

Additionally, a 2019 study by Lancaster University found that, “in the view of professionals, special guardians are treated less favourably at all stages of the assessment process. Professionals consistently expressed concern about the rigour of assessments of prospective special guardians. In particular, they considered that the 26-week statutory timeframe has resulted in rushed assessments and in some case, premature decisions on the suitability of the special guardian.”15

As such, there is significant disparity between adoption and special guardianship when it comes to assessment, preparation and pre-placement support. Adopters undertake rigorous assessment and training, whilst the assessment of special guardians is variable, and they often receive no training at all – despite the similarities in the needs of the children for whom they take responsibility. Moreover VAAs find that special guardians frequently struggle to access support across the spectrum, including via the ASF which they are eligible for.

It is imperative that special guardians are subject to the same checks and balances as adopters, and receive the same levels of pre and post placement support from specialist social workers and therapists so that their children have the best chance to thrive and their placements are sustained. Assessments of special guardians must take place before placement, but preparation and training could be made available concurrently to prevent delays in children moving in.

Adoption guidance and regulations

We would like to take this opportunity to note that updates are sorely needed to both the Statutory Guidance on Adoption 201316 and the Adoption Agencies Regulations 200517 which are out of date with current practice. This has been evidenced by:


15 Microsoft Word - HARWIN SO_SGO_FinalReport_4Mar2019 (cfj-lancaster.org.uk)

16   https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/adoption-statutory-guidance-2013

17 https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2005/389/contents/made


 

We would welcome a review of these additional documents which underpin the daily work that adoption agencies do. The cases above show that failure to keep Regulations and Guidance in line with practice is negatively impacting on children and families, and this may get worse the longer that the disparity is allowed to persist.

 

May 2022