Written evidence from IAC The Centre for Adoption (CFA0128)
HOUSE OF LORDS CHILDREN AND FAMILIES ACT 2014 SELECT COMMITTEE INQURY
IAC – The Centre for Adoption’s written submission of evidence for UK Parliamentary Committee ‘Is the Children and Families Act 2014 fit for purpose?’
Our Credentials
IAC is the UK’s only specialist intercountry adoption agency, and one of just two working both internationally and domestically. The latest data from the Department for Education showed that in 2020, 91% of all English intercountry adoption applications were being processed via IAC. On an average year IAC approves approximately 60 applications for intercountry adoption and 10 for domestic adoption. Approximately 85% of all our applications are from Black and Minority Ethnic (BAME) applicants and the children we place are all children of colour.
IAC is unique in that we also advise local authorities on outbound adoption and permanence cases, where children from care are to be placed with family members abroad. We have offered this service since 2017.
IAC is 25 years old and has been operating as a full adoption agency since 2009. We have been judged to be outstanding by Ofsted three times since 2014.
IAC is the only adoption agency in the whole of the UK across the voluntary and statutory sectors that is led by a BAME team. Our CEO and Operations Director are both people of colour.
Submissions
Any new act must address the disparities experienced by intercountry adopters and their children. This is at all stages of the process but particularly post approval. One of the fundamentals is the fact that prospective adopters are not deemed to have parental responsibility for children entrusted into their care but not legally adopted when they enter the UK. All such children are subject to monitoring by their local authority but the fact that no one in the UK has parental responsibility for these children is hugely problematic. All domestic adopters acquire parental responsibility on placement, and we cannot see why intercountry adopters are treated differently given they have been subject to a far more in-depth process which is scrutinised by the Department for Education and Home Office post approval. Crucially though, not having someone legally responsible for them leaves these already vulnerable children at risk.
Further to this we would wish to see the Act enable more cooperation between government departments in intercountry adoption matters. When a child placed needs to enter the country there are often protracted delays as no priority is given to them when it comes to issuing visas. By default, these families have already had their applications and placements verified, legalised and at a time of prolonged stress when they are in effect living abroad, the ongoing nature of delays is unacceptable.
Children need to be able to come to the UK as quickly as possible when an adoption or entrustment is legalised, so that they can begin to settle, recover, and make lifelong attachments with their new family and community. Instead, prospective parents are left navigating complex entry clearance processes whilst living in hotels and navigating the impact of avoidable delays on their lives back home in the UK.
We do not believe it is. This is a complex matter though as other issues across the sector impact on this outcome. Increasing thresholds for children being received into care, extended family finding across kinship networks and children coming into care with much higher levels of need are all contributory factors to slower, less secure and less stable adoptions.
In our recent experience though, since the advent of RAAs, children continue to wait longer than they need to because of bureaucracy. A lot of expertise in adoption has been lost and the disconnect that has emerged between the RAAs and the local authority teams responsible for children and care planning is evident in working relationships with adoptive parents and prospective adopters.
Since the act became law the culture of placement orders being challenged at late stages of adoption proceedings has also often resulted in very high levels of anxiety in adopters, who are then subject to protracted proceedings at a time when they may also be dealing with a range of issues with their children. In the days of ‘freeing orders’ this did not happen, and we cannot see how this is child-centred when the evidence to grant a placement order itself has to be substantial and overwhelming.
Intercountry adopters also remain at a disadvantage here as updates to intercountry specific regulations have never materialised. IAC often has applicants who are approved as suitable to adopt who are a suitable match for a child in care in the UK, but as they are approved for a specific country they must return to Panel for a change of country. Applicants approved domestically do not need to undertake this step, and inbuilt delay, so we would like to see this change effected across the board. Suitability to adopt from abroad is assessed at the same standards as suitability to adopt from the UK so there is no need for reassessment or reapproval by a Panel. Issues relating to the specific country eligibility could then be formally addressed as advice and confirmed by the Agency Decision Maker rather than needing a Panel.
IAC has also seen huge disparity in timescales and care planning for children who are being placed abroad. Our outbound service had huge take up and impact in Year 1 when it was free and centrally funded by the Department for Education. Since the funding ended and IAC moved onto a subscription model, take up has been patchy and we have repeatedly seen local authority legal teams spend time pursuing permanence plans abroad only to find the receiving country does not recognise the legal order being proposed. We know that when advice is sought from IAC at an early stage of care planning a lot of time and money can be saved.
The UK has also only positioned itself as a receiving country for adoption, yet the Act has enabled children to be placed abroad with family members. In some cases, it may be in a child’s best interests to be placed abroad with a suitable adopter in an intercountry adoption arrangement, for example in the USA where the adoption of older children is much more common. Such children may never be adopted in England. As the UK is a signatory to the 1993 Hague Convention for Intercountry Adoption, so a legal route for such placements does exist, so long as adequate placement and outcome monitoring can be in effect to.
At present no central authority or local authority routinely monitors the numbers of children being placed abroad, or their outcomes, and this is a huge failure of the state and should be rectified immediately through regulations.
Firstly, it is important to note that our expressed view as an organisation is that a repeal was not necessary in the first place. This decision was based on a flawed, Eurocentric perception of adoption and the assumption that BAME families do not wish to adopt.
Adoption exists across the world in many forms, both formal and informal. It is of course crucial that children being adopted are fully emotionally and legally accepted into their adoptive families, but our experience is that by working in a culturally sensitive way, BAME families are more than willing to adopt children who may be of the same, similar, and sometimes, different ethnicity, to their own.
When the repeal was first discussed, an adoption agency in London was reporting huge successes in recruiting BAME adopters and placed record numbers of children. The Adoption Black Families project was inclusive by design and delivered by an almost exclusive BAME workforce. Messaging and customer experience were key drivers in making this project a success. As word spread that there was an adoption agency welcoming BAME families and working with them in a flexible, sensitive manner, whilst still adhering to the law and highest standards of practice, more and more BAME families flocked to the project. As a result, it was also one of the first agencies to work with increasing numbers of LGBTQ+ applicants, as almost a third of couples from the community were from mixed heritage relationships. Our CEO was the Chair of the Adoption Black Families Panel and so has direct experience of this history and success. Families rarely waited long for a suitable match.
The Mander case recently demonstrated that BAME families who do come forward to adopt are sometimes not considered with equity and parity to their White peers and therefore it is our system that is preventing children being adopted, not the lack of prospective adopters. The Mander family eventually came to IAC and adopted from the USA, and ironically had a child of mixed heritage placed with them.
The work of the National Adopter Recruitment Committee and the You Can Adopt campaign, which our CEO has been involved in since the Department for Education first set it up, has also shown that investment in culturally sensitive recruitment activity and marketing materials that are truly representative, does work and significant increases in BAME families coming forward to adopt have been recorded.
BAME families have always adopted and in increasingly significant numbers. However, the disparity in the numbers of BAME children waiting the longest for adoption is not an issue that can be remedied by recruiting more families from any background. The reality in 2022 is that any child who waits longer than other children for an adoptive placement in England is waiting because of the perceived level of need and the fact that adoption support that will truly support them and their new family remains patchy and can often not be accessed in times of crisis because of the time taken to process referrals, assessments and applications for funding.
This is where there is clear evidence that the repeal has failed. If it has been a success, no child of any ethnicity would be waiting as long as the ASGLB data shows that they do, because any family who could meet their needs would have come forward for a match. However, this is not happening. Meanwhile, increasing numbers of BAME applicants who apply to adopt internationally via our agency say they are doing so because they have often been told this is the best option for them.
Finally, the lived experience of adopted adults who were placed transracially must inform our practice in 2022 and going forwards, if we are truly committed to adoption being informed by best practice. Adoptee Voices is a growing community across the globe and the sector is being repeatedly told what we got right and what we could have done better. One of the clear messages is that if a child is to be placed transracially, a lot more work needs to be done with prospective adopters before a match is agreed and support needs to be ongoing. At IAC we run mandatory preparation for all adopters considering transracial matches and much more needs to be done to support parents to prepare their children for independence and adulthood as a transracially adopted person.
The fact that not all children need to be referred to a central register means that inevitably placement choice is affected. The advent of RAAs and pressure for them to be more self-sufficient already means that families being provided by VAAs are less likely to be used, even if they are an ideal match, as i) they may not be aware the child even exists due to the lack of a mandatory register, and ii) the RAA may not provide a budget for the interagency fee in any case.
Adoption should be a service for children in need. If those legally responsible for them make choices about placement options before even knowing what choice is possible, this is in effect limiting the life chances that adoption can bring.
Historically VAAs have provided families for priority children in greater numbers due to expertise built up over many years. With RAAs and VAAs all now scrambling to do the same thing when it comes to recruitment there is simply a skewed balance of services. A far better model would have been for VAAs to recruit, prepare and assess families and RAAs to focus on preparing and matching children, and offering a fully funded support package, rather than spending this money simply replicating what VAAs were already doing.
IAC – The Centre for Adoption
April 2022
May 2022
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