Adoption Legislation - Evidence - Parliament UK

Select Committee on Adoption Legislation Adoption Legislation Oral and written evidence Contents Action for Children—Written evidence................................................................................................... 7 Adopt UK Child Director Ms Azra Jabbar—Written evidence ............................................................... 13 Adopt West Mids (West Midlands Adoption Consortium)—Written evidence .................................... 16 Adoption Focus—Written evidence ...................................................................................................... 25 Adoption Matters Northwest—Written evidence ................................................................................ 32 Adoption Matters Northwest—Oral evidence (QQ 354–382) .............................................................. 34 Adoptionplus—Written evidence ......................................................................................................... 48 After Adoption—Written evidence ....................................................................................................... 50 After Adoption—Oral evidence (QQ 437–459) ..................................................................................... 60 After Adoption: Safebase—Supplementary written evidence .............................................................. 72 Alliance for Child-Centred Care—Written evidence ............................................................................. 74 Association of Directors of Children’s Services (ADCS)—Written evidence ......................................... 76 Association of Directors of Children’s Services (ADCS)—Oral evidence (QQ 548-566) ........................ 82 Association of Directors of Children’s Services (ADCS)—Supplementary written evidence .............. 104 Professor Ravinder Barn (Royal Holloway, University of London) and Dr Derek Kirton (University of Kent)—Written evidence .................................................................................................................... 106 Barnardo’s—Written evidence............................................................................................................ 116 Barnardo’s—Oral evidence (QQ 187–233).......................................................................................... 132 Jonathan Ewen, Lead Director, Children in Care, Barnardo’s—Supplementary written evidence ..... 148 Barnardo’s—Further supplementary written evidence ...................................................................... 149 Stephen Bashford—Written evidence ................................................................................................ 151

Florence Bellone—Written evidence .................................................................................................. 152 Pete Bentley—Written evidence......................................................................................................... 159 Professor Nina Biehal, Professor Julie Selwyn, and Professor June Thoburn— Oral evidence (QQ 718– 769)...................................................................................................................................................... 176 Birmingham City Council’s Adoption Service—Written evidence....................................................... 177 Amanda Boorman—Written evidence ................................................................................................ 186 Bradford Metropolitan District Council—Written evidence ............................................................... 189 British Association for Adoption and Fostering (BAAF)—Oral evidence (QQ 80–107) ....................... 197 British Association for Adoption and Fostering (BAAF)—Written evidence ....................................... 212 British Association for Adoption and Fostering (BAAF)—Supplementary written evidence .............. 273 British Association of Social Workers (BASW)—Written evidence ..................................................... 283 British Association of Social Workers (BASW) and College of Social Work Faculty for Children and Families—Oral evidence (QQ 589-621) ............................................................................................... 301 British Association of Social Workers (BASW)—Supplementary written evidence ............................ 321 Ian Bugg, Nicola Jones-King, and Martha Cover—Oral evidence (QQ 622–667) ................................ 331 Roger Bullock—Written evidence ....................................................................................................... 332 Cafcass—Oral evidence (QQ 234–274) ............................................................................................... 346 Cafcass—Written evidence ................................................................................................................. 364 Cambridgeshire County Council—Written evidence .......................................................................... 367 Jim Clifford—Written evidence ........................................................................................................... 375 College of Social Work Faculty for Children and Families and British Association of Social Workers (BASW)—Oral evidence (QQ 589-621) ................................................................................................ 382 Consortium of Voluntary Adoption Agencies (CVAA)—Written evidence .......................................... 383 Office of the Children’s Commissioner—Oral evidence (QQ 536–547) .............................................. 391 Coram—Written evidence .................................................................................................................. 405 Coram—Oral evidence (QQ 156–186)................................................................................................. 418 Coram—Supplementary written evidence.......................................................................................... 433 Martha Cover, Nicola Jones-King and Ian Bugg—Oral evidence (QQ 622–667) ................................. 436 District Judge Nicholas Crichton—Oral evidence (QQ 694–717) ........................................................ 456

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Department for Education—Oral evidence (QQ 1–79) ....................................................................... 466 Department for Education—Written evidence ................................................................................... 494 Department for Education—Supplementary written evidence .......................................................... 504 Edward Timpson MP, Minister for Children and Families, Department for Education—Oral evidence (QQ 805–830) ...................................................................................................................................... 506 Evangelical Alliance and Care for the Family—Written evidence ....................................................... 528 Family Justice Council—Written evidence .......................................................................................... 532 Family Rights Group—Written evidence............................................................................................. 536 Family Rights Group, Grandparents Plus, and The Who Cares? Trust—Oral evidence (QQ 668-693) 539 Family Rights Group—Supplementary written evidence .................................................................... 557 Fostering Network—Written evidence ............................................................................................... 565 Charles Geekie QC—Written evidence ............................................................................................... 571 Grandparents Plus, Family Rights Group, and The Who Cares? Trust—Oral evidence (QQ 668-693) 574 Councillor Nicola Greene, Councillor Rita Krishna, and Councillor David Simmonds— Oral evidence (QQ 275–308) ...................................................................................................................................... 575 Her Honour Judge Hindley, Lord Justice McFarlane, Mr Justice Ryder, and Her Honour Judge Swindells—Oral evidence (QQ 770–804) ............................................................................................ 576 Collette Anne Ibbotson, Director of Yorkshire Adoption Agency—Written evidence ........................ 577 Intercountry Adoption Centre (IAC)—Written evidence .................................................................... 580 Intercountry Adoption Centre (IAC)—Oral evidence (QQ 412–436) .................................................. 593 Intercountry Adoption Centre (IAC)—Supplementary written evidence ........................................... 609 Interdisciplinary Alliance for Children—Written evidence ................................................................. 616 Nicola Jones-King, Martha Cover, and Ian Bugg—Oral evidence (QQ 622–667) ................................ 630 Justice for Families—Written evidence............................................................................................... 631 Six independent Chairpersons of Adoption Panels, in Kent—Written evidence ................................ 634 Kinship Care Alliance—Written evidence ........................................................................................... 636 Dr Derek Kirton (University of Kent) and Professor Ravinder Barn (Royal Holloway, University of London)—Written evidence ................................................................................................................ 645

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Councillor Rita Krishna, Cabinet Member for Children's Services, Stoke Newington central ward— Written evidence ................................................................................................................................. 646 Councillor Rita Krishna, Councillor Nicola Greene, and Councillor David Simmonds— Oral evidence (QQ 275–308) ...................................................................................................................................... 649 Local Government Association—Written evidence ............................................................................ 650 Local Government Association—Supplementary written evidence ................................................... 659 Local Government Association—Further supplementary written evidence ...................................... 662 Local Government Association—Further supplementary written evidence ...................................... 664 Tim Loughton MP—Oral evidence (QQ 567-588) ............................................................................... 665 Professor N V Lowe, Professor of Law, Head of Cardiff Law School—Written evidence.................... 682 Jan Loxley Blount TCert., Dip Child Development—Written evidence ............................................... 686 Lord Justice McFarlane, Mr Justice Ryder, Her Honour Judge Hindley, and Her Honour Judge Swindells—Oral evidence (QQ 770–804) ............................................................................................ 698 Professor Eileen Munro CBE—Oral evidence (QQ 383–411) .............................................................. 726 Nagalro—Written evidence................................................................................................................. 740 Martin Narey, Government Advisor on Adoption—Written evidence ............................................... 753 Martin Narey, Government Advisor on Adoption—Oral evidence (QQ 309–353) ............................. 757 National Adoption and Fostering Service, South London and Maudsley (SLAM)—Written evidence 775 National IRO Managers Group—Written evidence............................................................................. 787 National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC)—Written evidence ................... 794 National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC)—Oral evidence (QQ 831–848) . 798 NORCAP—Written evidence ............................................................................................................... 810 Helen Oakwater—Written evidence ................................................................................................... 814 Ofsted—Oral evidence (QQ 460-500) ................................................................................................. 818 Ofsted—Supplementary written evidence ......................................................................................... 835 PAC—Oral evidence (QQ 108–155) ..................................................................................................... 837 PAC—Written evidence ....................................................................................................................... 853 PAC—Supplementary written evidence .............................................................................................. 858 Parents Against Injustice (P.A.I.N.)—Written evidence ...................................................................... 860

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Race Equality Foundation—Written evidence .................................................................................... 871 Resolution—Written evidence ............................................................................................................ 878 Mark Rogers, Chief Executive, Solihull Metropolitan Borough Council and Children’s Lead for the Society of Local Authority Chief Executives (SOLACE)—Oral evidence (QQ 501-534) ........................ 883 Councillor Rosalyn St Pierre—Written evidence ................................................................................. 898 Mr Justice Ryder, Lord Justice McFarlane, Her Honour Judge Hindley, and Her Honour Judge Swindells—Oral evidence (QQ 770–804) ............................................................................................ 899 Dr Julie Selwyn, Director of the Hadley Centre for Adoption and Foster Care Studies, University of Bristol—Written evidence ................................................................................................................... 900 Professor Julie Selwyn, Professor Nina Biehal, and Professor June Thoburn— Oral evidence (QQ 718– 769)...................................................................................................................................................... 903 Councillor David Simmonds, Councillor Rita Krishna, and Councillor Nicola Greene— Oral evidence (QQ 275–308) ...................................................................................................................................... 924 South East Post Adoption Network (SEPAN)—Written evidence ....................................................... 945 Stonewall—Written evidence ............................................................................................................. 947 Sally Stoker, Head of Adoption, Suffolk Adoption Agency—Written evidence .................................. 949 Her Honour Judge Swindells. Lord Justice McFarlane, Mr Justice Ryder, and Her Honour Judge Hindley—Oral evidence (QQ 770–804) ............................................................................................... 954 TACT (The Adolescent and Children’s Trust)—Written evidence ....................................................... 955 Specialist Fostering, Adoption and Kinship Care Service, Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust—Written evidence ..................................................................................................................... 962 The Who Cares? Trust—Written evidence.......................................................................................... 970 The Who Cares? Trust, Family Rights Group, and Grandparents Plus—Oral evidence (QQ 668-693) 973 Professor June Thoburn, Emeritus Professor of Social Work, Centre for Research on the Child and Family, University of East Anglia, Norwich—Written evidence .......................................................... 974 Professor June Thoburn, Professor Julie Selwyn, and Professor Nina Biehal— Oral evidence (QQ 718– 769)...................................................................................................................................................... 987 Professor June Thoburn, Emeritus Professor of Social Work, Centre for Research on the Child and Family, University of East Anglia, Norwich—Supplementary written evidence ................................. 988 Tri-borough Adoption and Fostering Service (London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham; Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, Westminster City Council)—Written evidence ........................ 991

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Tri-borough Adoption and Fostering Service (London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham; Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, Westminster City Council)—Supplementary written evidence ........................................................................................................................................................... 1003 Paul Twyman—Written evidence...................................................................................................... 1007 Alex Verdan QC—Written evidence .................................................................................................. 1011 Warwickshire County Council—Written evidence ............................................................................ 1020 Warrington, Wigan and St Helens Councils (WWISH) shared Adoption Service—Written evidence1025 Welsh Government—Written evidence ............................................................................................ 1030

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Action for Children—Written evidence

Action for Children—Written evidence Action for Children 1

Action for Children is committed to helping the most vulnerable children and young people in the UK break through injustice, deprivation and inequality, so they can achieve their full potential. Action for Children helps children, young people and their families through nearly 500 services across the UK. These include adoption, fostering and residential provision.

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Action for Children is part of the Alliance for Child-centred Care which has submitted a separate response on behalf of its members.

Key points 3

Key points are:   

We agree that there is scope to reduce bureaucracy, duplication and delay within the adoption system, but the focus of any change must remain on achieving the best outcomes for children. Any forthcoming adoption legislation must work towards a system which has at its heart a drive to find the right placement for each individual child, rather than creating a false hierarchy of care. Vulnerable children with complex needs may need more support to achieve stable placements. The system must enable agencies to provide the necessary level of quality support to meet children’s needs, even when this entails greater costs in the short term.

Background and structure for adoption 4

With the number of children in the care system at an all-time high, the need for adopters is greater than ever before. However, adoption needs to be seen as one part of a wider framework to support vulnerable children and young people. As well as being considered as one of a range of different care options, adoption also needs to be seen in the context of the wider family support systems and services.

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Vulnerable children with complex needs may take longer to place than others and when in placement require additional support. This may result in greater costs in the short term. On-going issues around the Inter-agency Fee mean that in some cases local authorities are not meeting the full costs of voluntary sector placement.

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We agree that there is scope to reduce bureaucracy and duplication within the adoption system, but the focus of any change must remain on achieving the best outcomes for individual children taking their circumstances into account.

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Action for Children—Written evidence

The falling number of adoptions 7

Overall, Action for Children has not experienced a significant change in the number of our adopters. However, we have seen a change in demographics, such as an increase in single adopters, gay adopters and in same sex couples.

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We have experienced a slight increase in the numbers of older children being adopted but we are finding that it remains a challenge to place sibling groups. We have also identified an increase in the complexities of matching children who are slightly older and have contra-indications which can cause a delay in family finding. This highlights the different ages and needs of children and young people and the importance of recruiting a diverse pool of adopters to be able to meet those needs.

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In general, we think that that national trend in a reduction of adopters is linked to the current economic climate with many families facing job uncertainty, redundancy or reduction in salary not being able to commit or see adoption as an option at this time.

Legislation impact 10

Since the 2002 Act, we have noticed a positive increase in applications from unmarried couples and gay and lesbian applicants, and an increase in support for adopters. However, we have also seen delays in permanency planning processes caused by ongoing negotiations between local authorities and other parties in relation to support packages for children. Other barriers to making placements have arisen due to bureaucracy and delays in assessment of other family members and agreement over contact packages.

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We need to ensure that any forthcoming adoption legislation works towards a system which has at its heart a drive to find the right placement for each individual child, rather than creating a false hierarchy of care – where adoption is interpreted as being the preferred care option.

Time taken in placing children 12

Individual children have different needs which mean that finding the best placement will take different lengths of time. The adoption system must focus on achieving the best outcomes for children, not by putting a time limit on placing them. Complexities which may need to be taken into account include children with medical contra–indications, complex contact arrangements and behavioural difficulties.

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Inter-agency working needs to be improved as it can cause delay to planning processes and placements. The system needs to support agencies to work together, keeping the

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Action for Children—Written evidence needs of the individual child at the centre, while working to the child’s timescales. 14

We hope to see an efficient system that retains a focus on safeguarding. The adoption process could be accelerated, for example by allowing checks and references to be carried out ahead of the assessment process as this would avoid time wasted when concerns are discovered later on such as undisclosed convictions, medical concerns, concerning references. In our experience, one of the biggest delays in the system emanates from the lack of permanency planning at the point of a child’s entry into the care system. The timing of decision making could speed up the process, e.g. permanency decisions should be taken at the second Looked-After Children Review. Furthermore, local authorities need to have clear planning processes in relation to care proceedings which included clear guidance on assessments and timescales.

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Action for Children is developing our approach to concurrent planning. We recognise that it can provide a very positive approach where it meets the individual children’s needs, and those of the adopters, and want it to be seen as part of the range of options for children. Expectations of concurrent planning need to be clear from the start of the process so that all involved are aware of what it involves and agree that it is the most appropriate route to take for the child. Local authorities can vary in time taken to place children. When thinking about timescales, it is important to remember that individual children will take different lengths of time to place according to their needs. However factors that may result in variations of placement time include continuity of social workers and the level of the legal staff’s knowledge. Local authorities also differ in the quality of their monitoring systems and some may be under performing generally and therefore focusing on areas such as frontline safeguarding services as opposed to adoption.

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The number of potential adopters 17

In our experience, the reasons that potential adopters drop out during the adoption process are multi-layered and related to the circumstances of individual applicant(s). For some, there are life changing circumstances beyond their control; i.e. bereavement, life threating conditions. For others, it may be the realisation that adoption is not right for them or that the timing is not right.

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We believe that the changes to eligibility introduced by the 2002 Act positively impacted on the number of potential adopters.

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Action for Children encourages a diverse pool of adopters to reflect the individual needs of the children and young people that we place. One way in which we achieve this is through our specialist black adoption service which successfully recruits black adopters and supports lasting placements of children with those adopters. During 2010/11, the service placed 23 black and minority ethnic children with adopters recruited and supported through the Action for Children service and there has been only one disruption of a placement in that time.

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Action for Children—Written evidence 20

Action for Children commissioned the University of Central Lancashire to evaluate the effectiveness of this service in developing, supporting and encouraging adoptive parents (and families) from black and minority ethnic (BME) backgrounds to provide permanent homes for children and young people waiting for adoption. The report concluded: ‘With an all-BME staff group and central focus on ethnically matched placements, Action for Children Adoption Black Families had developed specialist expertise and insight into the myriad ethnicities, cultures and religions of both adoptive parents and children.’

Department for Education’s Action Plan for Adoption 21

The Government’s commitment to improving the adoption process is encouraging, however, it is important to ensure that there is not a race to simply place children in families, but that children are placed in the right care that meets their individual needs and leads to the stability they need to achieve positive outcomes. The Department for Education Action Plan for Adoption puts forward a range of new measures. The focus on reducing delay is welcomed; however, new legislation must focus on the best match and placement to meet children’s needs. We are aware that careful matching, including the ability to reflect and support the development of a child’s identity, is likely to enhance the success of permanent placements. Due consideration must be given to ethnicity, culture and religion when making placements.

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Performance measures need to focus on outcomes as well as outputs – i.e. not just on numbers of placements and time taken to make a placement, but what impact did this have on outcomes for children. The introduction of local authority scorecards should not detract from the focus on outcomes for children and must not penalise agencies that are working with the ‘hardest to place’ who we know wait longer to be placed, such as sibling groups. Faster matching and placement of children with adoptive families does not necessary equate to achieving the best outcomes.

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We recognise the potential of the National Adoption Register to access a wider pool of prospective adopters, however, it does not necessarily result in the best match for children because it is not a level playing field for adopters approved by voluntary agencies as local authorities can still avoid the inter-agency costs if they place within their own or neighbouring area.

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The reduced assessment process for new adopters has potential if the checks and references are completed in advance but it needs to take account of the applicants preferred timescales without penalising the agency. Furthermore, a shorter assessment process for new adopters must not result in a compromise on quality and focus on recruiting the right families.

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A new ‘national gateway’ for adoption offers a central point of reference, clearly signposting to organisations and support options, but thought should go into ensuring this method of communication reaches a wide-range of prospective adopters and how to engage with those who do not have easy access to the internet.

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Action for Children—Written evidence 26

We know that some local authorities are better than others in placing children for adoption. Government plans to shake up the adoption process need to take into consideration lessons learnt from areas where it has failed and succeeded, and share information and knowledge between all agencies involved.

27

In our experience, the number of agencies does not inhibit the number of potential adopters recruited.

Post-adoption support 28

We know that post-adoption support is critical to successful, stable placements and is particularly important when a child has complex needs. The 2002 Act impacted upon the provision of post-adoption contacts and support as it put complex arrangements in place. It does not consider the fact that once an order is made, some adopters choose to change their minds about contact arrangements or delay these, and adoption agencies cannot force adopters to have or maintain contact. Again, it is important that the needs of the child remain at the centre of the process. However, the Act has the potential to, and does in cases, result in quality post-adoptions support. We know that immediate, easy access to qualified, experienced staff is key. Our adopters want general or specific advice and seek support to access services and help to raise awareness levels about their children’s specific needs in statutory services such as schools and mental health services. Others require temporary, intensive support in a crisis, especially in relation to family dynamics and behaviours often related to attachment issues. However, many of our adoption cases require additional support to meet need and this is not covered by the Inter-agency Fee.

Access to Information 29

In our experience the 2002 Act has had varying impact. We have found that it has probably benefited relatives more so than adopted adults as the option to trace was always there for adopted adults under previous legislation. Also, the fact that the Act allowed for the creation of regulated adoption support agencies means that adopted adults and relatives have a choice of which agency they contact for a service. Before, this would have just been limited to local authorities and voluntary agencies. However, this has meant that some local authorities have sign posted on this type of work to other adoption support agencies which means that the adopted adults and relatives may incur a cost as a result.

Other permanent placements 30

The best way to ensure permanent and consistent placements for children is by making sound assessments, good matches and providing consistent good quality advice and support throughout the adoption process. Stability of placement is associated with a range of better outcomes for looked after children. Our success is reflected in our low disruption rates, i.e. avoiding circumstances where the placement of a child with a foster carer or adoptive parent breaks down in an unplanned way. At only five per cent, the

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Action for Children—Written evidence disruption rate for our adoptive placements demonstrates that we provide stability to some of society’s most troubled children and young people. These include those from a black and minority ethnic (BME) background, sibling groups and older children. Early intervention 31

As previously highlighted, the care system needs to be seen in the context of wider family support systems and services. We know that early intervention is key achieving the best outcomes for children. Action for Children commissioned the University of Salford to carry out a four-year (2008-2012) evaluation of the nature and impact of interventions offered to assist children who are being neglected or are at risk of neglect. The research found that the Action for Children services that were included in the research demonstrated their ability to intervene successfully in most cases of neglect, even when neglect was a most serious concern (to the level of child protection intervention). In cases where parents refused or were unable to respond positively, children benefited from an expedited move into care. Our services achieved the following:   

In 79% of cases, the prevention of neglect or improvement in the level of concern about neglect was shown. In 59% of cases, concern about neglect was removed completely. In a further 9% of cases, intervention to prevent the expected development of neglect was successful.

Based on our work around neglect, we see early intervention as an essential part of the process of working with families in the best interest of the child. Early intervention can support the decision making process by providing the evidence needed to make decisions. It can enable children to remain within their birth families; however, if concerns have not been sufficiently met by intensive, early intervention, it is important to offer a timely response focusing on the child’s individual, immediate and long-term needs by providing a range of alternative care solutions. Monitoring 32

As mentioned above, performance measures need to focus on outcomes as well as outputs. Local authority scorecards should not detract from the focus on outcomes for children and must not penalise agencies that are working with the ‘hardest to place’.

19 July 2012

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Adopt UK Child Director Ms Azra Jabbar—Written evidence

Adopt UK Child Director Ms Azra Jabbar—Written evidence Executive summary I wish to comment on the following area: Time taken in placing children 1. I am the Director of ‘Adopt UK Child’ this is a new organisation. Even though it is new we are not new to Adoption. (My background is that I am a qualified social worker with over 15 years of experience in the area of child protection, adoption and management.) 2. I have formed the above organisation as a result of my experience at looking at different approaches that could reduce delay for children in reference to children who have Placement Orders, and being able to find a suitable adoptive placement sooner rather than later. 3. My approach appears radical however these ideas have been implemented in other industry’s to increase revenue and productivity etc. 4. In January of this year I was designing an Adoption App. The purpose of the App was to target a wider audience in doing so making adoption advice easily accesible to all, and advertising difficult to place children via the Adoption App. This led me to researching companies who have the business interest and potential to sponsor my App. 5. As a result I have set up ‘Adopt UK Child’ it is an agency that utilises open market business tools and methods. Its aim is to target a wider audience so that children who tend to wait the longest are given wider exposure in relation to their adoption profiles. Our aim is to target adopters including potential adopters who may be able to meet the children’s presents and later life needs, hence local authorities have the option of fast tracking potential adopters. 6. I have explored how children’s permanency needs are viewed within my own culture which is South Asian and to expand my learning I have visited Palestine and met managers at children’s orphanages. All this experience and learning has been integrated into setting up Adopt UK Child. Adopt UK Child takes ideas from USA in terms of open adoption, advertising adopters and children waiting for adoption within the mainstream media. 7. I have found many people in my community adopting from abroad whilst Asian children are still in the looked after system in the UK. There are numerous reasons as to why this may be, one reason in particular that I have observed is that for Asian and Black African Caribbean familes there are so many barriers to overcome before they can even be assessed as adopters. In the 5 local authorities I have worked they have all had high 13

Adopt UK Child Director Ms Azra Jabbar—Written evidence levels of children from BME groups, yet this has not reflected in the literature that is produced to advertise adoption, it does not reflect the multiple languages that make up the diverse communities. 8. We asked 50 social workers who were employed in statutory adoption teams if they had come across ‘Be My Parent’ magazine (produced by BAAF) This magazine advertises profiles of difficult to place children or children who tend to wait the longest in terms of age, disability and complex backgrounds. 48 social workers said they have never come across ‘Be My Parent’ magazine until they started to work in adoption teams. Prior to this most of these social works held positions in child protection children and families teams. 9. We asked 50 adults in the Pakistani and Bangladeshi community and showed a copy of the ‘Be My Parent’ magazine (given that this is the one of the groups that waits the longest to be placed), and asked them whether they had come across this magazine. All 50 people said they had never come across ‘Be My Parent’ magazine. 10. We asked 10 Asian business in a predomianaet Asian area if they had come across ‘Be My Parent’ they all said no and enquired as to what ‘Be My Parent’ was. 11. We did not come across a single lay person within the Asian Pakastani/Bangledshi community who was able to identity with what ‘Be My Parent’ was. 12. Be My Parent profiles children who tend to wait the longest. If the professionals who work with children are not familiar with Be My Parent magazine and the Asian community who we surveyed has not come across Be My Parent magazine then this leads me to question the effectiveness of Be My Parent magazine and who the target audience is. 13. In addition to this the majority of local authorities use ‘Be My Parent’ to advertise difficult to place children. One of the reasons ‘Be My Parent’ is used is because there is not many alternatives apart from ‘Children Who Wait’ magazine. Be my parent publication is limited to professionals and people who have been approved as adopters or who are being approved. For example if you are in the process of being assessed as an adopter or are approved you can access 100% of the children’s profile on Be My Parent website. However, if you subscribe and you are a lay person you will only have access to around 50% of children’s profiles. 14. We believe Children who are most challenging to place in terms of their age or ethnic background or other reasons should have wide exposure all year around. When children have been waiting longer the department will look into advertising children’s profile in mainstream media. For example, Black Voice, Asian Eye, or SEN magazine etc. If we already are aware that certain groups of children will wait longer then it is in the children’s interest for adoption professionals to target publications that are specific to that group and advertise children’s profiles much earlier.

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Adopt UK Child Director Ms Azra Jabbar—Written evidence 15. My experience and business research indicates that narrow business thinking is a hindrance to children who wait for adoption placements. In America adopters and children’s profile are advertised in many states. In this country the choice is limited to ‘Be My Parent’ and Children Who Wait’ magazine. 16. We propose to use the sophisticated technology that is available to safeguard sensitive data, and network with sponsors in return for advertising space to target a wider audience including Black Minority Ethnic groups. For example we know there are particular publications out there that have a target group of 75,000+ (Asian paper). Obviously I cannot expand on this area as it raises issues of trade secrets. However, there is a great difference from an audience of 3,700 to over 75,000+ 17. In conclusion are business research tells us that if professionals working in child protection and lay people cannot recognise ‘Be My Parent’ then it cannot be effective as it pertains to be. We also know from experience whilst some services are easily accessible to some groups other groups may experience multiply barriers. We need to explore further what these barriers are and what solutions are available to overcome the barriers, in order for ‘Every Child to Matter’‘. 19 July 2012

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Adopt West Mids (West Midlands Adoption Consortium)—Written evidence

Adopt West Mids (West Midlands Adoption Consortium)—Written evidence Background a. We believe the present structure in adoption works well and should continue. There is a good level of child-focussed and professional adoption expertise across the UK. It is right that adoption remains a non-profit making activity at all levels. b. We should be concerned about the falling number of adoptions, particularly as this is not paralleled by a similar reduction to the Looked After Children population in the UK. There are likely to be a range of reasons for the decrease in adoptions. We consider these to include: (i) the use of legal alternatives, including Special Guardianship Orders(SGOs) and Residence Orders. Whilst both Orders are useful alternatives giving children a level of legal security, in the right circumstances, we do have a concern that SGOs are not always used appropriately, resulting in children not being adopted, for whom adoption would be the best outcome. We welcome the Government’s decision to commission research into the use of SGOs (Action Plan For Adoption DfE). (ii) Lack of guaranteed financial support after adoption. In the recent challenging economic climate, the decision to apply to adopt, for some, may well be influenced by whether the person/couple considers they can ‘afford’ to…take time out of work/give up work. Legislation a – d. Whilst the guiding principle of the Adoption and Children Act 2002 is that the child’s welfare is paramount, in practice, the implementation of the Act has often resulted in the rights of the birth parents outweighing both the needs of the child and the role of the adopters. Placement Orders do not work well. Every step of the process allows birth parents in to challenge the plan for adoption. This can raise unrealistic expectations for the birth parent, who may not be given sound legal advice, and believe that a challenge to the Placement Order will result in the child returning to their care. This then impacts on the birth parent’s ability to participate in adoption planning, including lifestory work, meeting the adoptive parents and effective letterbox exchange. The adopters also have to cope with the stress of a possible late legal challenge, at a time when all their energies need to be focussed on building their relationship with the child who has recently come to live with them.

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Adopt West Mids (West Midlands Adoption Consortium)—Written evidence In cases of relinquishment, there are too many opportunities for birth parents to challenge and change their minds. In our view, the use of Freeing Orders worked much better in supporting the matching process by bringing the decision-making process to a clear conclusion at an earlier stage. It also gives birth parents a clear end to the adversarial process, allowing them to move on with access to independent support. We would welcome changes to Legislation/Regulations which redefine the end point at which the Placement Order can be legally challenged. This could work well if it were at the point of the match being agreed by the Agency Decision Maker. Rights to Adoption Leave and Pay need to be extended to adopters who are self-employed, as well as low paid workers who may have not paid sufficient NI contributions. The Government’s ‘Fostering For Adoption’ proposals will also need to make provision for entitlement to leave from work at the point of the child’s placement, at which point the carers will be foster carers rather than adopters. Under the current regulations, the right to leave only becomes available at the point of approval as adopters. Time taken in placing children a. The time taken to place children in terms of the matching/preparing/introduction processes are not excessive. They reflect the seriousness of the lifelong decisions being made for the child, as well as the professional experience and knowledge of the workers regarding what helps to set a strong foundation in the early days of an adoptive placement. There is currently a scarcity of skilled adopters for larger and/or older (4+) sibling groups, children from a range of Black and Minority Ethnic backgrounds, children with disabilities, and children with challenging behaviour and attachment difficulties. This does impact negatively on the length of time it takes to achieve an adoptive placement, if it is achieved. b. The Child’s Permanence Report (CPR) is an important document, and takes a significant amount of social worker time to prepare well. The replication of information inevitably impacts on timescales. If both the CPR and the Prospective Adopters Report (PAR) could be redesigned so that each one could be also used as the Annexe A and B Court Reports, (perhaps with appropriate appendices) an enormous amount of social work time would be saved. The preparation of the child, through therapeutic support and lifestory work is also time intensive. The lack of availability of the right models of intervention for children moving to adoption, as well as the inconsistent access to CAMHS across the UK creates further delays in placement. The current legal framework permits relatives of the child to come forward at too late a stage in the proceedings. Where this results in a permanent home for the child within the extended birth family, it is to be welcomed. However, on the occasions where it does not, the delay for the child is often significant.

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Adopt West Mids (West Midlands Adoption Consortium)—Written evidence

c. Our experience across the Consortium is that there is a culture of willingness to work together amongst the various professionals involved in adoption work. There are many examples of good practice, although this is not always consistent. There is a need for further work to be done regarding the relationship between the Courts/CAFCASS/Local Authorities. Currently, where the Courts/CAFCASS lack confidence in the Local Authority, the child’s case may remain in the court arena for longer than is necessary. Compulsory joint training would be helpful in providing opportunities for greater appreciation of each profession’s perspective and knowledge in adoption matters. There is also a tendency for roles to become blurred once a case enters the court arena. Both the Court’s and Children’s Guardian’s role and expertise should be focussed on whether the circumstances meet the threshold for a Placement Order. Other matters, such as the level of contact, and where the child will be placed, takes up a lot of Court time. In many cases, this can result in insufficient weight being given to the expertise within the Local Authority Adoption Teams. d. From the child’s perspective, the adoption process could be speeded up by reducing the number of repeated parenting assessments, where there is considerable evidence that the birth parents will not be able to achieve the progress necessary, and within a realistic timeframe, for the child to be able to thrive in their care long term. Earlier pre-birth assessments would also prevent delay in some cases. As has been stated previously in this submission, the early and effective preparation of children would also reduce delay. This has resource implications in both staffing and training. From the adopters’ perspective, it is our view that the current timescales for the preparation, training and assessment of adoptive applicants, is both realistic and reasonable. It is important to recognise that adoptive applicants come to Adoption Agencies as service users, with needs which they are hoping will be fulfilled through adoption. It is vital that thorough, comprehensive assessments continue. Applicants often need time to process the vast amount of information given to them, both intellectually and emotionally. Because of this, the timescales for the completion of assessment need to have a degree of flexibility, without the concern that the Adoption Agency will be penalised. An extra few weeks of discussion and reflection at the assessment stage may prevent poor matching or subsequent placement difficulties/breakdowns. e. In the West Midlands, pure Concurrent Planning is not widely used at present. It is hugely resource intensive model and is difficult or Local Authorities to develop in the current economic climate. In recognition of this, Adoption Focus, a Voluntary Adoption Agency (VAA), and Consortium member agency, is currently working collaboratively with two other VAAs to develop this service in this region. This collaborative approach aims to share expertise and knowledge, and share the risk of development costs for this specialist service.

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Adopt West Mids (West Midlands Adoption Consortium)—Written evidence

The Government’s Fostering for Adoption proposal (also known as ‘dual approval’) is more likely to be used and is a welcome development for 3 particular groups: 1. Adopters who wish to adopt a young child 2. Foster carers who do not want to have to move on lots of children, and have the potential to embrace permanency. Dual approval would also protect such placements from having lots of other children placed there at the fostering stage, were this deemed detrimental to the child already placed. 3. Placement of a child with a family who have already adopted a sibling/s. f.

The variations in the time taken to place children by different local authorities cannot be answered completely. The timescales published do not reflect an accurate picture. For example: A child who is adopted by their foster carer will have taken a significantly longer time than a child who is placed directly with adopters. This is due to their needing to be approved as adopters. However, the outcome for the child is good and they will not have experienced another placement move. There will be in some local authorities the issue of resources such as staffing levels, preventing children moving quickly into their adoptive placement. The culture within the local Courts and Cafcass will also result in delays in effective decision-making in some areas.

The number of potential adopters a. Whilst a number of Adoption Agencies in this Consortium have seen some increase in the number of adopters recently, there continues to be a need for adopters from a wider range of ethnic backgrounds, and with the potential to parent children with a wider range of backgrounds/behaviours/needs. There is a mismatch in the profile of children with a plan for adoption, and the adopters matching considerations. b. The best ‘fit’ for a child is ensured when thorough, rounded assessments are completed on that child’s needs, with ethnicity included as one important aspect. In our experience, it is more often the adopters who express a wish for a child from a particularly ethnic background. Reasons expressed for this include the desire for the child to ‘look’ as though s/he were born into the family. c. The reasons for applicants ‘dropping out’ during the assessment process, often stem from a growing understanding about the realities of adoption, and the distinct differences between parenting an adoptive child rather than a birth child. These include: -learning about the long term needs of the children -living with uncertainty regarding the child’s future needs -the reality of the child having two sets of parents -the expectation that adopters will take part in post adoption letterbox contact as a minimum

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Adopt West Mids (West Midlands Adoption Consortium)—Written evidence For some, the strain of failed fertility treatments and resultant relationship difficulties surface during the assessment; for others, an unexpected pregnancy or offer of fertility treatment brings an end to the adoption process. The fact that applicants do drop out during the assessment process, reinforces the importance of assessments being thorough as at present. d. The changes in eligibility have increased the range of adopters coming forward. e. The ‘Action Plan for Adoption’ has raised the profile of adoption in the media, and we hope that ongoing publicity proves helpful in increasing the number of adopters. We look forward to the outcomes of the research commissioned on disruption and the use of SGOs. We welcome the production of guidance on child development/impact of delay/key research evidence for use in care proceedings for the judiciary and lawyers. The acknowledgement of the importance of adoption support is also positive, although to be effective, will require an increase in resources. The main concern regarding the proposals is that in speeding up the processes, the risk of disruption will increase. In order to meet the new timescales for assessments, it is likely that they will be outsourced by some Agencies. We are concerned that this may result in adoption applications being taken up in order to increase the numbers. The risk is that without an initial robust social work assessment, which supports enquirers understanding of adoption, and provides safeguards for our most vulnerable children, there will be an increase in disruptions/breakdowns. When the number of adopters recruited becomes a driving force, it increases the risk that during the assessment process, (i) far more time will need to be taken supporting and counselling adopters regarding the emotional issues of loss because they have come to adoption too soon; (ii) adopters have unrealistic expectations of adoption, and Adoption Agencies are not able to recommend their approval. Both of these pieces of work take up a significant amount of time and take time away from ensuring that the right adopters are recruited to meet the needs of children. A lack of confidence in the quality of assessments may mean that social workers undertake further assessment at the matching stage. We believe it is a misconception that the Adoption Panel process, in itself, has created delay. The decision to replace the Panel’s scrutiny of Care Plans with an individual increases the risks. f.

The wide range of adoption agencies enhances the number of potential adopters, as it offers more choice.

g. The growing body of knowledge on early child development is extremely helpful in the assessments of young children, and emphasises the vital importance of early decision-making on behalf of vulnerable children.

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Adopt West Mids (West Midlands Adoption Consortium)—Written evidence Court Proceedings a. Yes, court processes are unduly lengthy. Repetition of birth parent assessments, kinship assessments, and the focus on gaining ‘expert’ opinion has taken the focus from the paramountcy of the child’s welfare. b. If the recommendations of the Family Justice Review are embraced fully, we expect to see a substantial improvement in court timescales. We look forward to this. c. We recognise the importance of the child having independent representation in the court process. However, the parameters of the Children’s Guardian’s role do need some refining. One particular concern is the propensity to introduce late challenges to the Local Authority’s plans. The resultant delay does not serve the best interests of the child. d. Whilst we understand the reasons behind the move away from Freeing Orders, due to children being left in legal ‘limbo,’ Placement Orders have not brought the improvements hoped for. Freeing Orders provided a clearer legal ending for adopters, removing the stress associated with legal uncertainty once the child is placed. In consequence, children with Freeing Orders were placed more quickly. The current investigations into adoption provide an opportunity to re-examine Placement Orders and strengthen this aspect of the legal process. This could be achieved by combining the best features of Freeing Orders, as outlined above, and Placement Orders, where Care Order status is maintained, this preventing the possibility of children who are not subsequently placed for adoption becoming ‘organisational orphans.’ e. It is usual practice for Care Order and Placement Order proceedings to be heard together in this region. This reduces delay and its continuation is vital for this reason. f.

The changes in legal aid provisions have the potential to create further delays for children. If birth parents are not able to access this, and their consent is then dispensed with, they could later challenge the Adoption Order on the grounds of their not having access to legal aid.

Post-Adoption Support a. The 2002 Act highlighted the importance of post adoption support and services have grown significantly in subsequent years, with many Local Authorities having dedicated Adoption Support workers/teams. Challenges remain, however, due to the varied interpretation of the provisions in the 2002 Act, by Local Authorities and Primary Care Trusts, including CAMHS and related therapeutic services. There continues to be a need for therapeutic services that are able to respond to the needs of adopted children.

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Adopt West Mids (West Midlands Adoption Consortium)—Written evidence Geographical issues present a particular challenge for children with disabilities, who may be receiving services in one Local Authority when they are a Looked After Child, but need to have services in place in the Local Authority/PCT where their adoptive placement is situated. At present, there is often resistance to set up services on the part of the receiving Local Authority/PCT, until the child is in placement. We recommend that the 3 year rule be dispensed with, as it works against the best interests of adoptive families. b. In order to enhance the current and future demand for adoption support by all those connected to adoption, increased financial resources are needed by Local Authorities. Regarding regular financial support, in the form of adoption allowances, there needs to be a mandatory central benchmarking system put in place. This would remove the current ‘postcode lottery,’ where each Local Authority benchmarks differently. The need for a revision of the provisions for adoption leave and pay has been outlined earlier in this submission. Intermediary Services continue to place demands on both Local Authorities and Voluntary Adoption Agencies. Due to the level of investigative work, and length of involvement in these cases, charges are now made to the service user by many agencies. This may result in an unfair system, only available to those with the necessary financial resources. Birth Parents often reach the point of needing support during the years when Letterbox contact is taking place. As letterbox contact arrangements are now standard in the majority of adoptions, this is becoming a growing area of work. Inter-Country Adoption a-c. Given the specialist nature of this area of adoption work, we suggest the setting up of a National Agency for Inter-Country Adoption as an effective way of meeting the needs of Adopters for this particular group of children. We would also suggest that consideration be given to the UK becoming a ‘placing country’ in a limited way, for inter-country adopters from closely geographical and cultural neighbours, such as The Republic of Ireland. Access to Information a. The 2002 Act has made it easier for adopted adults to trace. However, this impact of the rise in social media, such as Facebook, TV programmes, such as ‘Who Do You Think You Are’ as well as easier access to Genealogy websites is likely to have had an even greater impact.

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Adopt West Mids (West Midlands Adoption Consortium)—Written evidence Other Permanent Placements a. Special Guardianship Orders have resulted in a decrease in Adoption Orders in some Local Authorities. We hope the current research being undertaken will give a clearer picture nationally in this respect. b. Special Guardianship Orders should only be used for older children if the legal security of an Adoption Order is not achievable. It should be the 2nd option after adoption. c. Permanent and consistent placements for children can be achieved by: -thorough preparation of the adopters -accurate assessment of the child, which is communicated to the adopters -ongoing support which can ebb and flow in response to the needs of the whole adoptive family at any particular time d. Earlier interventions are likely to increase the number of adoptions.

Monitoring a-b. We do not consider scorecards an effective means of monitoring Local Authority performance in their current form. They miss the subtleties of the content of adoption caseloads, and create incentives which may work against the best outcomes for children. For example, older children with complex needs who take longer to place may not be considered for adoption, due to the impact on the scorecards. Also, as the scorecards are adoption focussed, which detached them from early Child In Care (CIC) and Looked After Children (LAC) processes. Therefore, the CIC and LAC teams do not realise how their work impacts on the adoption scorecards. a. number of adoptions made – factual; number awaiting adoption – inconsistent as different things are being counted; delay experienced – misses subtleties, such as older children where more preparation of child is needed. This submission is made by the 15 members of the West Midlands Adoption Consortium, comprising: Action For Children Adoption (Midlands)-VAA Adoption Focus-VAA Birmingham City Council Coventry City Council

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Adopt West Mids (West Midlands Adoption Consortium)—Written evidence Dudley Metropolitan Borough Council Herefordshire Council Sandwell Metropolitan Borough Council Shropshire/Telford & Wrekin Councils (Joint Adoption Service) Solihull Metropolitan Borough Council Staffordshire County Council Stoke On Trent City Council Walsall Council Warwickshire County Council Wolverhampton City Council Worcestershire County Council July 2012

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Adoption Focus—Written evidence

Adoption Focus—Written evidence Adoption Focus operates from a central office based in Coleshill near Birmingham, and from two satellite offices in Newcastle-under-Lyme, Staffordshire and in Witney, Oxfordshire. Background a. Structure 1. The structure can work well. Local consortiums can enable the sharing of expertise and resources, and good working relationships between agencies (LA to LA; LA to VAA; and VAA to VAA) can enable prospective adopters to find the right agency for them, and for LA’s to find the right family for the child. This co-operation is enabled because Local Authorities and VAA’s can work without business competition coming into the adoption equation. This would be threatened by the introduction of the profit-making private sector. b. Numbers 2. Adoption is a positive option for children who cannot live with their birth families. A reduction in the numbers of adoptions taking place, at a time when the looked after population has increased is therefore of concern. Negative media reports about the difficult adoption process has impacted – prospective adopters have contacted our agency stating that they know it (the adoption process) is really difficult. Our view is that it is not difficult – it is a robust and careful process which combines training and preparation with a thorough assessment. However, many prospective adopters start the process hoping for the baby they have been unable to have, and do not want their parenting experience to be caring for a traumatised child. The adoption process aims to find good adoptive families for children who have experienced trauma. 3. Uncertainty about adoption allowances means that consideration of larger sibling groups is financially prohibitive for many people. Legislation a. Impact of the legislation 4. Positively the ACA 2002 significantly improved the range of post-adoption support services provided by LA’s. However, the 3 year ‘cut-off’ has created other difficulties around continuing/ending responsibility of LA’s, and current spending cuts threaten the continuation of post-adoption support service provision. 5 The introduction of the IRM process has introduced a range of practice concerns in the assessment process: - the undermining of the social worker’s professional judgement; the adopter’s perceived ‘right’ to parent; the inflexible approach to the timing of an application. b.

Appropriate and successful implementation 25

Adoption Focus—Written evidence 6.

This continues to be a work in progress.

c. Legislation to improve any aspect of the adoption system 7. In order that adopters can enter into ‘fostering with a view to adoption placements’, the process by which they are dual-approved needs to be made as simple as possible. d. Identification of any problems 8. The introduction of the Placement Order has created significant uncertainty for adopters who enter into a placement knowing that their application to adopt the child could be challenged right up to the point of the ‘celebration day’. Whilst it aimed to solve the problems associated with Freeing Orders, the continuing potential for legal challenge provokes additional anxiety for adopters; unfair ‘hope’ for birth parents; and continuing uncertainty for the child. Having permission to ‘own’ their child by closing the door to further legal challenge, would better enable adopters to focus on their developing relationship with the child. 9. Similarly, in the case of relinquished children, the need to confirm (with birth parents) this hugely significant decision on a number of occasions, heightens the adopters sense of difference and relative insignificance until the final order is made. . Time taken in placing children a. Is excessive time taken? Disproportionate length of time for some? 10. Adoption Focus places children referred by LA’s. In our experience the main area in which delay happens, is the pre-adoption process – i.e. LA’s fulfilling their legal requirement to fully assess the suitability of birth parents and other ‘connected’ people, before they can move forward with the adoption plan. 11. Adoption Focus aims to recruit adopters who will consider older children (aged 4 years+); sibling groups; children with disabilities. BME adopters have always found that once approved, they are overwhelmed with referrals for possible links. The effect of this has been that they very often restrict their placement choice to very young (under 2 years) children, which means that older BME children wait much longer for placements. In the last 18 months, we have experienced a similar pattern with white adopters. They are also feeling overwhelmed by the volume of children referred, and are achieving links with pre-school age children, and are not waiting long for placements. This means that older white children, large (3+) sibling groups, and children with disabilities are waiting longer. 12. Usually, LA’s work quickly to place children once an appropriate placement is identified. There is a lot which must happen to ensure that a placement is likely to be successful, and that cannot be rushed – the adopters must feel confident that they have all the information they need not only to make the life long decision to adopt a particular child, but also feel sufficiently optimistic that on the basis of this information they can successfully parent the child. They must not feel rushed, and therefore need time to adjust to and assimilate the information provided.

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Adoption Focus—Written evidence 13. Delays occur when information is incomplete, or out of date; late information comes to light (e.g. regarding a medical concern); or the LA panel is over-stretched. Occasionally, delays have happened when a late ‘in-house’ resource has to be considered because of LA budgetary constraints, but this has not happened for some time. LA’s have now realised that children remaining in care and not adopted is a hugely costly outcome (both financially and in terms of the child’s reduced life-chances). To address this they must continue to fully utilise the resources provided by the VAA’s. b. What takes the most time? 14. As a VAA which does not control the process for children, the most time is spent on family finding, and can be frustrating when over-stretched LA social workers do not respond quickly to placement offers, or requests for additional information. c. Working together 15 Our working relationships with LAs are generally good. Courts have always been respectful of and confident about our work as a VAA. d. Speeding up the process 16. Adoption is complex and demanding. The key area where the process could be speeded up is in the early planning and decision making for children. In cases where this is legally complex and difficult and likely to take some months to achieve, the child’s stability could be better assured by providing fostering with a view to adoption and concurrent planning placements. Carers/adopters would need the same level of assessment, with additional training regarding their dual approval status, and managing uncertainty (particularly given the difficulties noted above regarding Placement Orders). e. Concurrent Planning 17. Adoption Focus is currently working collaboratively with two other VAA’s (Faith in Families; and St Francis) to develop a concurrent planning service. The collaborative approach has come about because of the low number of children for whom this service is likely to be suitable (based on Coram; Brighton and Hove; and Manchester Adoption Society experiences); the resource intensive nature of the service required; and the opportunity to share expertise, skills and resources for LA’s in the geographical area covered by the agencies. The collaborative working will also consider the development a ‘fostering with a view to adoption’ service. 18. Both services enable the early placement of the child with carers who have the capacity to become the permanent family. It is resource intensive. The main concern is whether or not LA’s have the capacity to purchase the service, if they do not provide it themselves. 19.

Advantages: early stability for the child.

20. Disadvantages: high level of input required to ensure sufficient support to carers and birth parents; high level of need of child (e.g. drug withdrawing) which must be considered by carers.

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Adoption Focus—Written evidence

The number of potential adopters a. People coming forward 21. Adoption Focus has experienced an increase in the numbers of people coming forward to consider adoption. We believe that the increase we have experienced is in part due to the fact that people can research their options (in respect of adoption agencies) using the internet, and do not therefore automatically assume that their only option is their LA. However, the majority of enquiries are from people who are unable to achieve a pregnancy, and come to adoption in the desperate hope that they can get the baby they wanted. There is therefore a mismatch between what they want, and who the majority of the children are. That there are delays arising in the legal process which enables the adoption option to be pursued, means that the children are older, and more traumatised than most people feel able to parent, or want to parent. Children have to be the focus of the adoption process, but their adopters have to feel motivated to want to parent them. b. Achieving best ‘fit’ 22. The best fit is achieved through a match of the assessed skills of the adopters with the assessed needs of the child. The match is life-long and must consider and weigh up all the factors presented and minimise the risk of difficulties arising at any point in the future. Children should not be left waiting for a placement because an absolute racial match is unavailable, but if placed trans-racially, adopters must evidence how they will support their child – to be adopted is to feel a sense of belonging. This is more difficult to achieve with trans-racial placements. c. 23.    

Drop-outs Drop-out occurs for a range of reasons, which include: the mismatch between what adopters want and who the children are, means that they decide to continue their lives as childless people; the assessment process identifies difficulties about their ability to undertake the adoptive parenting role; a change in personal circumstances – relationship; employment; pregnancy; illness a realisation that one partner is highly motivated whilst the other is not.

f. Number of agencies 24. The range of adoption agencies available means that prospective adopters have choices – it is something which they can exercise some control over. g. Child development knowledge 25. Increased knowledge in child development has highlighted the importance of quick, decisive, and child focussed planning which places children with their permanent carers at the earliest opportunity. It refocuses the adoption process on the needs of the child in respect of placement planning, contact arrangements, and early confirmation of the lasting and significant relationships.

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Adoption Focus—Written evidence

Court proceedings 26. As noted previously, our experience of court proceedings has been that delay can arise because of late challenges to the process. d. Placement Orders and Freeing Orders 27. Freeing Orders enabled the placement of children with adopters in the knowledge that the placement could not be challenged, and the adoption order would be made provided that the adopters had demonstrated their ability to care for the child. Placement Orders are open to challenge. Post-adoption support a. Impact of the ACA 2002 on post-adoption support 28. As noted previously, LA post-adoption provision has improved and increased significantly. However, there remains variation in accessibility to therapeutic services and adopters can be caught between placing and receiving LA’s deciding who should pay. 29. Adoption Focus continues to provide post adoption support to adoptive families approved by the agency. b. Measures to enhance post-adoption financial and other support 30. Two key areas: To ensure that when financial support has been agreed, it continues; and that there is a more consistent approach across LA’s to the level of financial support provided. 31. To ensure that birth parents can easily access independent support to enable them to manage letterbox contact etc.. Inter-country adoption 32. Adoption Focus does not do inter-country adoptions. This is a very specialised area of work with changing legislative and procedural requirements depending on which country the child comes from. Access to Information 33. The legislation has enabled other family members (i.e. not restricted to birth parents) to trace their relatives, and this has made it easier. Social networking sites have further increased this potential, and adopters and their children need help in managing the safety of their information.

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Adoption Focus—Written evidence Other permanent placements e. Special Guardianship Orders 34. Our understanding from our LA colleagues is that Special Guardianship Orders have led to a reduction in Adoption Orders. f. Special Guardianship Orders as an effective alternative to adoption 35. Adoption Orders can still be successfully achieved for older children. Their existence should not prevent the exploration of adoption as a permanent and life-long option for children. g. Permanent and consistent placements for children 36. This requires thorough preparation of adopters which includes a careful assessment highlighting skills and experience which will enhance their parenting. 37. The child must be properly assessed, and their identified needs explained to adopters who show that they understand the implications and are prepared to manage them. 38. Continuing support which recognises that adoptive family life often includes additional stresses which other families do not face. h. Earlier interventions 39. These are likely to increase the number of adoptions, if decisive intervention means that professionals are confident in their judgements, and are enabled to stop a continuing programme of assessments of birth families, and accept that small children cannot wait for ever for their parents to change. Monitoring a. Scorecards 40. Initial feedback from LA’s indicate that scorecards prevent the consideration of the often complex case specific situations adoption services may face. Timescales may prevent the consideration of older children with more complex care needs from being considered for adoption on the basis that it will inevitably take longer to find their family. However, if it becomes apparent that some children wait much longer than others because of the LA responsible for them, then those ‘failing’ LA’s will have to consider their practice. 41.

Quantitative data must be considered alongside qualitative analysis.

b. Robust systems 42. The number of adoptions made is easily collated, factual information. The numbers waiting will vary depending on the point at which a child is considered by their LA to be waiting (e.g. at the point at which the Placement Order is granted; at the point at which the LA adoption resources have been exhausted; at the point at which the child is referred to the National Adoption Register).

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Adoption Focus—Written evidence 43. Delay is very difficult to establish because it can occur at different stages – e.g. during early family assessments; delays in court process; delays in family finding activity commencing; delays in decision making regarding which link to pursue etc.. 19 July 2012

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Adoption Matters Northwest—Written evidence

Adoption Matters Northwest—Written evidence a. Have the inter-country adoption safeguards introduced by the 2002 and 2006 Acts proved successful? The safeguards have proved successful in ensuring there is clear communication between countries of origin of children being placed and the Department for Education. The clear message about the routes for prospective adopters (PAs) and the need for them to follow prescribed steps in order to be approved and to bring children in to the UK for the purpose of adoption has been welcomed by this agency. It has begun to move the focus from the needs of the adults to meeting the needs of children. The changes to increase involvement in the matching process by Local Authorities and Adoption Agencies from the 2002 Act consist largely of an improved paper trail in relation to the child. It does not, however, improve or increase, in real terms, the part the UK Adoption Agency plays in agreeing the match. Whilst the Agency is able to offer advice, it is up to the prospective adoptive parent (PAP) if they go on to accept the match. The countries on the designated country list still allow those who want to adopt from overseas the opportunity to adopt a child and a year after the making of that order, bring the child back to the UK without undertaking any UK PA assessment. The PA does not have to have lived with the child during that 12 month period. Under current legislation, children entering the UK where the UK do not recognise the Adoption Order or there is Guardianship have no person or organisation that holds Parental Responsibility for them. b. Would you recommend any change to the legislation to make inter-country adoption simpler? The process could be made simpler but should not be made easier. Most established sending countries are stating they will match our inter-country adopters with older children and those with additional needs. It would not seem appropriate for any legislation that would make it simpler for these children to enter the UK. There are demands already for children requiring domestic adoption who share these needs and those for post adoption support and services relating to health and emotional wellbeing of adopted children. As with domestic adoptions, the formats for collating reports are lengthy and repetitive and these could be streamlined in line with the new domestic PAR. c.

Are there any special challenges in adopting children from particular countries or regions?

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Adoption Matters Northwest—Written evidence

The costs of adopting from overseas in relation to UK charges and to charges within specific countries are prohibitive for the majority of families who may want to consider this route to extending their family. There are significant challenges encountered in relation to country-specific bureaucracy which leads to PAs having to send out information that has already been previously sent, or requests from sending countries for information that does not appear relevant or transparent, eg a full psychological assessment after approval and additional financial statements, also proof of agency registration and social work qualifications, eg Philippines and Russia. More countries are stipulating that prospective adopters can only expect to be matched with children who are older and who have additional needs. This means that the parenting challenges for prospective adopters are becoming greater regardless of their chosen country. There are many challenges that relate to the political situation in sending countries and the UK. The lengthy wait for some countries who in principal are open but take, in some cases, many years to agree a match and the uncertainty that with some countries a match will ever be agreed, for example China, Kenya and Thailand. In most cases, the Article 16 information on children being linked to adopters is very limited and this makes the whole issue of advising on matching very difficult. Unlike domestic adoption, where there is a need to have a post adoption support plan that is specific to the child being placed, there is no requirement for such to be in place for children placed from overseas. The assessment of a person’s suitability to become an adoptive parent is very broad when the child is unknown and discussions are academic up to a child being identified. Due to the limitations of the Article 16 information, it is therefore hard for the worker to fully assess the capacity of the applicant to meet the needs of a specific child and to determine what level of support may be required for the future. 17 July 2012

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Adoption Matters Northwest—Oral evidence (QQ 354–382)

Adoption Matters Northwest—Oral evidence (QQ 354–382) Evidence Session No. 5.

Heard in Public.

Questions 354–382

TUESDAY 24 JULY 2012 Members present Baroness Butler-Sloss (Chairman) Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top Baroness Eaton Viscount Eccles Baroness Hamwee Baroness Howarth of Breckland Baroness King of Bow Baroness Knight of Collingtree Baroness Morris of Bolton Lord Morris of Handsworth Baroness Walmsley Lord Warner ________________ Examination of Witness Norman Goodwin, Chief Executive of Adoption Matters Northwest and Executive Member of the Consortium of Voluntary Adoption Agencies.

Q354 The Chairman: I have two apologies to make to you: first of all, for keeping you waiting, but much more importantly for the way you have been treated in coming into this Building. I am extremely shocked to find that you were told that your part of this morning was cancelled. It is absolutely inconceivable that that would have happened from the Committee, for a number of reasons but mainly because we want your evidence. So we will investigate through the interstices of this Building how on earth you came to be told that. We are glad you pursued your way here, despite it, because your evidence will be extremely valuable to us, but I am so sorry that you should have had an uncomfortable or an unacceptable arrival here. Now we will get down to asking you some very similar questions to those that we have asked Mr Narey and I would like to start by asking you about whether you take the view that the current adoption system works effectively. I am particularly interested in whether the number and size of adoption agencies, both local authority and voluntary, present any sort of problem

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Adoption Matters Northwest—Oral evidence (QQ 354–382) and whether you think that that could be streamlined, for instance by making greater use of regionalisation and standardisation of resources and policies and procedures. We have been told of a number of local authorities that are working across a group. I think you probably are, are you not, in the north-west? Norman Goodwin: Yes, as a voluntary agency we are part of Adoption 22, which vicariously is 23 local authorities. That is a consortium of local authorities. The voluntary agencies are deemed associate members rather than full members. I think that highlights some of the issues in terms of voluntary agencies working with local authorities, and I would like to be advocating that a greater level of partnership should be sought between local authorities and voluntary agencies. One has to remember that in some areas of the country there are a number of voluntary adoption agencies that may be operating in that area, whereas in some other areas there are no voluntary agencies, so that is a bit of a dilemma. I would like to see an encouragement of local authorities and voluntary agencies working together in identifying children who are up for adoption, looking at regional initiatives to recruitment, working together to provide a number of preparation, information evenings and things like that. I think that happens in some areas and I think happens with groups of local authorities trying to do things, but there are some pitfalls to that in terms of trying to get decisions based on five or six local authorities. They all have their own opinions and when you get initiatives that are maybe trying to incorporate 23 different local authorities, that is quite difficult, as you can imagine. In the north-west we have tried on several occasions to analyse some of the data that is coming out in terms of children waiting, the length of time that children have been waiting, and trying to offer some solutions to that. But the significant factor of that is usually around cost and local authorities’ unwillingness, I guess, to share the risk in terms of some of that. I think there is almost an incentive for us to do it as long as we take the risk rather than a sharing of the risk. I think that nationally we would, as a group of agencies, be calling for the one main issue, which is around the inter-agency fee to be a level playing field across all organisations. You have the situation in some local consortia where they do not pay any fee to each other, so there is a nil transaction of money, and I understand that you probably have heard from Julie Selwyn who indicates that the cost of doing that is £36,000 irrespective of whether you are a VA or a local authority. A nil transfer of any money clearly is a factor that I think is a bit of a false accounting position for the local authorities to understand because there are some net users and some net providers. Q355 The Chairman: Some written evidence has just come in that has particularly highlighted the fact that local authorities believe that voluntary agencies are much more expensive. Norman Goodwin: They are, because the inter-agency fee, if you buy a family from a VAA, the fee is £27,000. If you operate in a consortium where there is no fee exchanged, it is zero. You operate in some consortia that may have a nominal figure, which may be £6,000 to £10,000. There is a fee between local authorities not in a consortium, which is about £14,000. But as Martin mentioned earlier, the evidence that is around, both from Julie Selwyn and the social return on investment research findings, is showing that the cost expended earlier makes a saving in the long run, so if you do not have a family because you are not willing to pay for it

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Adoption Matters Northwest—Oral evidence (QQ 354–382) your costs will be in your fostering budget or in some other budget. But that does not seem to transfer into the financial radar of local authorities who are looking in terms of transfers between different budgets. Julie Selwyn indicated that the average time that is taken for a child to be placed, which is between 12 and 18 months, is the same cost in fostering fees as it would have been to pay the fee in the first place. The child would have been placed earlier, which would reduce the time that children are waiting in care to be placed. We would certainly be advocating that a level playing field would speed up the placement of children. Q356 Lord Morris of Handsworth: Mr Goodwin, the proposed new national gateway to adoption being promoted by the Department for Education has generated a tremendous amount of debate, not least among professionals. To what extent, if at all, would you support the introduction of such a gateway? Norman Goodwin: As I was part of the implementation group I suppose I should say that I would support the implementation. I think the idea of a gateway is not a bad thing. I do not think we, in the voluntary sector, have any problem in attracting and retaining prospective adopters. We have a good record of taking people through the process and producing adoptive parents at the end of that process. I think they are well prepared and well able to cope with the demands that will be placed on them. There is lots of anecdotal evidence to show that people have had a poor response in some areas from some agencies, and I would accept that they may have had a bad experience from some voluntary agencies. I think the opportunity for them to have the option of the gateway, where they can get further information and they can take further advice, is a good thing, but I would not like to see it being the first gate in the process. I would still like people to approach their own agencies. Q357 Lord Morris of Handsworth: I think the argument is in advance obviously on the benefit. What would you see as the disbenefit, if any? Norman Goodwin: I think people come into adoption at their own pace. Some people are far more advanced than others. We see people, as I think the gateway would, who come in where they do not want to make a commitment at that stage. They want to gain information. That information can be gained from using various agencies’ websites, downloading information, reading about it, and people go through a process whereby at some point in time they then decide adoption is for them. I can assure you that people do shop around and people will decide that they are going to go with a particular agency for quite a variety of reasons, sometimes ill-founded. But they are a discerning group of people, and they do make every effort to find out information. When they are ready they make their choices in terms of who they go forward with. I think for most people that will be the same type of experience. There will be some who will go through the gateway. There will be people maybe where they have had a response from an agency that says, “We do not need the type of adopter that you are”. One of the difficulties will be that we all know that adoption is not for everyone. Sometimes the people who make the most noise about adoption I sense are likely to be the types of people who will write to Martin and say, “We have had a bad experience”. Sometimes you respond by making rules and regulations based on the experiences of a few people. We have been tracking some of the

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Adoption Matters Northwest—Oral evidence (QQ 354–382) things that have been happening recently, and a lot of people are feeding back to us that they do not want to see some of the things introduced because they think the experience they have had has been a positive one. That is quite a difficult tension. However, in encouraging more people to come forward, the web is a wonderful place for people to make decisions on their own. They do not have the pressure of somebody telling them information. They can read it at their own pace, at their leisure, talk about it, and I think those are two important things. People need to talk about it, and the pace that they do it has to be right for them. Q358 Lord Warner: I think from what you have said so far, Mr Goodwin, you do see voluntary adoption agencies as able to play a greater role in the provision of adoption services. Perhaps you could just confirm that is right. What, if any, do you think are the financial or institutional barriers to more effective working partnerships between local authorities and voluntary adoption agencies? You mentioned the inter-agency fee, but could you elaborate on what these barriers might be? Norman Goodwin: I think we have quite a bit to offer. Voluntary Adoption Agencies (VAAs) are providing families for 30% of the children who are in the looked-after system. I think we are able to demonstrate a very low disruption rate. On average over the last five years the disruption rate in the voluntary sector is less than 5%. In my own agency we placed 65 children last year and none of them disrupted. So I think that the families we are preparing are good families. I think there has been a huge delay in them being used. Recently that has changed, and I think that has changed because there is a greater pressure on local authorities to place their children quicker. I would like to see, as I said, a greater sharing of the risk between voluntary adoption agencies and local authorities. We have begun to see some of that partnership develop in the implementation groups and in some of the ideas that have been coming out. I think there has to be an acceptance that the voluntary sector cannot do some of this work on the cheap. It does cost and, as Martin said, local authorities may not have accurate information about what some of the things are costing in their services. I think we do. We know exactly what it is costing us. We have it worked out quite tightly. It does cost to do the pieces of work, so we have to get away from the fact of thinking that it can be done on the cheap. It can be done by acknowledging that people seem to think that there is a huge incoming of resources to the third sector, that charitable giving is paying for some of the work. We need to dispel some of that. Q359 Lord Warner: But if they are not using your services, what do they think it is costing them? I am still puzzling over why they are not using you because they think you are very pricey. They presumably have some idea of what it costs them to recruit parents. Is the implication of what you are saying that they are cutting corners in their own recruitment processes? Norman Goodwin: No, I think it is only recently, maybe even as a result of the Selwyn research, that it has been indicated to local authorities what some of their true costs are. I think there is a mismatch between how that is perceived at senior management level and how that is perceived by the people on the ground who have a finite budget that there is very strict control on. If they overspend that budget, I am sure there are not severe penalties for it but

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Adoption Matters Northwest—Oral evidence (QQ 354–382) there may be an inquisition about it. There is a mismatch of seeing that if you move five children out of your fostering budget, and that can save you £150,000, and that budget is put into your adoption budget, the money is the same, but they do not see it like that. Q360 Lord Warner: I can understand your frustration, but you were sitting, I think, in the background when Martin Narey was giving us these rather impressive statistics about the difference each year between the number of placement orders and the availability of adoptive parents. If in some happy world local authorities were enlightened and fell over backwards to try to use voluntary agencies, what is your capability to expand your capacity to produce more adoptive parents? Are you saying if they all behaved in a more benign manner there would be an upsurge in available adopters? Norman Goodwin: No, but we have committed, in conjunction with the Government, to increase the number of adopters being recruited and prepared through the voluntary sector. We have seen a 20% increase in the number of families coming through this year. We have committed to take that incrementally by 20% over the next three years, which we hope will take us up to at least 1,000 placements. There are a number of voluntary agencies who this year have made increases in their placements of over 50% and a number over 100%. I think we do have the capacity but we also have to have some financial assurance that those placements will be used. We had the rather sad situation in one agency last year where the trustees of that organisation were encouraging them not to place as many children because the more children that were placed the greater the loss to the organisation. Only since the increase in the interagency fee has that been a much better financial equation for the voluntary sector. Q361 Baroness Hamwee: Following on from that, would a social impact bond or something of that sort help the voluntary sector deliver services and keep operating? Norman Goodwin: This is a new initiative. We would like to call it an enhanced family-finding initiative. We have been struggling for a name to replace social impact bond because that maybe does not have a great connotation for some people. I think we are going to come up with a name for it but we are looking at an enhanced family finding initiative. I think we are mindful there are specific children who might benefit from that initiative. At the moment we are developing the final phase of that initiative, and we hope that by next week we probably will have it almost finished and signed off. We have been working very closely with local authorities in taking that forward. It will be really interesting to see how that develops. I think it will be effective for a finite group of children. I do not think it will be appropriate for every child, and it will be up to the local authorities to decide, and there will be some variation in that in terms of which children are referred. How that is defined and determined will vary from local authorities, because we know that some local authorities are struggling to place certain categories of children. We had a set of adopters who were approved for three children. We had 17 different local authorities who were interested in that family, and I did think about whether or not we could have auctioned the family. But I think that indicates that there will be a high demand for certain families. The initiative is an incentive to us to come up with those types of families but those types of families will need the level of support, which no doubt you are going to come on and ask about, in terms of therapeutic input, almost 24-hour cover. They will be the types of children who will

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Adoption Matters Northwest—Oral evidence (QQ 354–382) demand a lot of adopters and a lot of the services that are going to be supporting that placement, and that is going to cost money. Q362 Baroness Hamwee: Perhaps as you are just coming up to finalising your plans it would be appropriate, if I may, to ask if you could write to us when they are finalised with the detail rather than going into it now. Norman Goodwin: Yes. Q363 Baroness King of Bow: I wanted to ask what you think the impact has been of the closure of Catholic adoption agencies. Or maybe it has not impacted on you and your agency. Norman Goodwin: I think the number was so few. I think the other agencies have adapted to the regulations. Alongside that has to be seen the closure of other agencies, not as a result of that, and I am not sure there has been a discernible impact. That is notwithstanding what impact it may have been for those agencies that were directly involved. Over the last three or four years we have seen the demise of a number of agencies. We have seen the merger of a couple of agencies. I do not think that that is detrimental to the overall level of service because that has been picked up by other organisations. Baroness King of Bow: Chairman, on a point of information could I ask was the request for written information about the practical workings of social impact bonds in this area? That is what I would like to ask, in writing, just because I am not clear on exactly how it works in this sector. Baroness Hamwee: I thought that as the agencies are just coming up towards finalising their proposals, rather than going through it now it would be sensible— Baroness King of Bow: Absolutely, but that is what was requested? Norman Goodwin: There is a technical document. The Chairman: It would be very helpful, Mr Goodwin, if we could have some written evidence. I share Lady King’s view. I do not quite understand how it works, so do you think you could give a junior class of a primary school explanation for Lady King and me? It is not so much the title, if I may say, as how you expect this fund to work, whatever name you give it. Q364 Baroness Knight of Collingtree: I was wondering about the duties that local authorities have with regard to assessing the need for post-adoption support. Do you think these assessments are working out to be sufficiently long term in their interpretation? What about a statutory duty to provide the services, which is not, I think, there at the moment? How can we avoid the adopters being more of of senior position with regard to support than some others who also take care of children who need a home? Norman Goodwin: Parents tend to fight for their children and we try to identify that same tenacity in adoptive parents as well as natural parents. I think it is a tendency that has increased recently where all parents have to fight for all services. I think there should be a package of support. It should be part and parcel of adopting a child that you can have access to services. We have seen some of those things coming into play in terms of school admissions and things like that, which has been good. We would like to feel that adoptive parents can have access to therapeutic services at the time that it is right for them. That is the key thing about assessing and providing in terms of need.

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Adoption Matters Northwest—Oral evidence (QQ 354–382) The child may not need those services at the time of the placement. If you do an assessment at that particular time the assessment may decide that you do not need those things that might be available. But it may be that three years on with a particular change, an event in the child’s life such as a change in school or moving into adolescence, that the significance of being adopted will impact on them and on the family. We would like to think that it would be up to the parents to have the right of knowing that some of those services were available and for them to access those services at the time that it was right for their child and then to go into that. One of the additional difficulties is that sometimes when the family are in a crisis their ability to access the services is not allowable because there is a nine-month waiting list for those services—particularly, say, CAMHS-type services. Some agencies within the voluntary sector have been developing their own therapeutic services. They have been adding that as part of the package of saying that, “If you adopt through us, we will provide access to these services and we will be encouraging local authorities to see that as part of our unique selling point or part of the added value of coming and using a family that has access into those services”. Q365 Baroness Knight of Collingtree: Mr Goodwin, to be absolutely specific and to get it very clear, you have mentioned twice, as it were, a counselling type. Do you when you say “support” go over the whole range of monetary support, or are we speaking just of being there to get advice? Norman Goodwin: No, we are always there to give advice. We would see that as part of the adoption support package that most agencies would offer. I think that there is an underestimation of the time that that takes. We had an example the other day of a social worker taking an inordinate amount of time to chase up a local authority social worker to get the lifestory book. That was even after the adoption order was granted. There is an amount of support that goes on. That is notwithstanding the fact that some of these children may need some specific therapeutic intervention. Q366 Baroness Knight of Collingtree: But on therapeutic intervention—that is the third time you have used that phrase—I am trying to find out whether this includes asking for money. Norman Goodwin: You mean the families asking for money? Baroness Knight of Collingtree: Yes. Norman Goodwin: The information from our families would be often that support is not about accessing the money. It may be access to different services that may be free at the point of delivery, but sometimes those services have to be paid for. It is likely to be us who will be doing the asking for the money to provide those services rather than the families themselves. What I am submitting is that it would be better that each family had a bond that was worth, say, £3,000 or whatever, that they could spend when it was appropriate for them and that they did not have to go and ask for that money to provide that service, but it would be there for them to access as and when they needed it. If the money runs out, then we have to go back and ask the local authority for more money. Q367 Baroness Howarth of Breckland: I was going to ask, if I could before I just move on—you did mention about families generally having to struggle for resources. If you are an adoptive parent and you have come to the front of the queue, how do you think that is going to be viewed by your neighbour who is still waiting in the queue and who, if they got the service, the breakdown of their family might be avoided? 40

Adoption Matters Northwest—Oral evidence (QQ 354–382) Norman Goodwin: That is a fair point, but these are vulnerable children and we owe them some options in terms of taking some priority in some of the areas in the provision of a service. There is also a bit of a myth that is developing that if we cut down on all the work involved in preparing adopters, that money can be used at the back end in providing the support. We should maybe dispel that myth or think about it again. That is maybe another thing in terms of where that resource comes from. Q368 The Chairman: What is your view about a passport? Norman Goodwin: I think that is what I have been advocating. The Chairman: If it was encapsulated in a passport, would that be a good idea? Norman Goodwin: Yes, I think so. Q369 Baroness Howarth of Breckland: You heard a little bit about what Martin Narey was saying about contact and his worry that there may be too much contact at certain points. What do you think about arrangements for post-adoption contact with birth families, and how do you think that is likely to change in the future? Norman Goodwin: I was interested in what he was saying. I think you will have good and bad experiences from both sides, and we have some very good examples of very good contact arrangements. My view would be that I would like to think that the families should be left to negotiate some of these things themselves because they are in the best position to do some of that. We have gone through phases. I have been in adoption probably long enough to remember when contact came in in the first place and how difficult it was to convince adopters that some form of contact, even if it was meeting a birth parent, was a good thing. I think we are now at a position where we would prepare all our adopters for the fact that there may be some contact. We would see it as positive. They see it as positive. We would build in meetings with birth parents. We might build in people coming to speak at the preparation groups who have experienced that, so they build up a much more positive picture about contact. I acknowledge that, as Martin said, some of the circumstances for some children may be detrimental. But on the other hand there are some very good positive experiences. As the Chairman suggested earlier about grandparents, we have some very good examples of grandparents being incorporated into the family, even going on holiday with the families. So there are some very positive experiences, and I think it is about promotion and about seeing the benefits of that and allowing people to develop some of those things at their own pace, in their own way. Q370 Baroness Howarth of Breckland: Do you think it is about good assessment and good intervention and not allowing there to be deals in relation to court and whether or not the adoption will be allowed to go through if you agree a deal for contact? Those are the things that I recognise break down. Rather, it is good assessment about what is best for the child, the child’s needs being paramount. Norman Goodwin: We have had quite a lot of experience of placing sibling groups together and, while we would want to advocate that groups of three, four and five should be placed together, if the local authority decides to split those children it is important that they communicate together. It is in those circumstances where we have some very good examples of those families, maybe two families, even three families, working together to benefit what is in the best interests of the children. 41

Adoption Matters Northwest—Oral evidence (QQ 354–382) Q371 The Chairman: We now have some proposals from the Government, on which they are seeking views, on dividing sibling groups. One would be looking at a rather different sort of contact, would you not, not contact with the birth parents, but contact with different groups of adopters? Norman Goodwin: Yes, and that is very difficult if you have one set of adopters in Devon and one in Cheshire. If there are three sets of contacts, you could spend every weekend travelling up and down the motorway for contact, and I think that is where it is really important that is not prescriptive. If they decide, “We are going to meet twice a year, we are all going to come together, we are all going to meet at Alton Towers”—or something like that—“and do something together”, that is much more positive than the drudgery, and it almost becomes a chore that that has to be done. That is the point at which people see the negative side of it rather than the positive side of it. Q372 The Chairman: Do you think we should go back to recognising that when a child is adopted by an adoptive family that child then genuinely becomes the child of that family and should in a sense go to that family without baggage, and the family should be making its own decisions about what happens to the child, including contact? That is a very draconian approach, but I wondered how you viewed it. Norman Goodwin: That is what used to happen in the 1980s and before. The Chairman: I do not know the answer to it, which is why I am asking you the question. Norman Goodwin: Thank you. I am not sure I know the answer. Sometimes you do the things that you have become used to doing but, as I would reflect, I think that the adoptions that we are doing now are much more positive than the sort of more closed adoptions that we might have been doing in the early 1980s and the late 1970s. I think the positive outcomes for children outweigh the more negative things. We see that even in our work with nonrelinquishing birth parents, that if you can have that communication with them, if you can help them to work through some of the dilemmas, some of the hard bits for them to accept, they are much more willing to be co-operative in the final adoption process and participate more positively in the way forward for the children. So I think that the much more active communication, much more engaging process, is much more positive than it being very clearcut and final. Q373 Viscount Eccles: On the question of recruiting prospective adopters, are there problems with particular social and ethnic backgrounds? If so, why? What more could be done to increase the pool of adopters? Norman Goodwin: If we had an answer to that then we might all be in a better place. I think it is difficult to recruit all adopters. I think it is difficult to recruit adopters for a whole range of specific children, and I ask myself the question, “Is it more difficult to find adopters for a child who has a particular disability or maybe a child that has foetal alcohol syndrome?” The ethnicity of that child is one of those factors and for a whole range of children there are difficulties in finding families. The issue in terms of children who are of mixed heritage seems to be more difficult, according to the research, than say a black child or a child who has a single ethnicity. We try to recruit families from fairly diverse ethnic backgrounds. We operate in an area where there is not a huge ethnic mix in some bits of our area of operation. Voluntary agencies who

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Adoption Matters Northwest—Oral evidence (QQ 354–382) are operating in different areas of the country will have different challenges and different degrees of success in recruiting prospective adopters. Sometimes people will come to an adoption agency and will say, “Could you take us forward as prospective adopters?” and they may get the answer after some research that might show that there are not a lot of those types of children waiting. They may be from a specific ethnic background, and when questions are asked about taking those families forward there may be an issue of supply and demand, is the best way that I can describe it. Sometimes those families are put off. This is where a more national approach, which goes back to the gateway issue, might be more positive, that people could get some experience of saying, “Well, if that local authority is not willing to take you forward, these other local authorities may be willing because they have children in their area who may be suitable for placement”. So there are things that could be done to improve some of those things, but also we have to be as flexible as we can in taking people forward and trying to produce those families for the nation’s children rather than for the children who are in the looked-after system of a particular local authority. Q374 Baroness Howarth of Breckland: I want to clarify the last bit you were talking about. One of the bits of evidence we have had is about finding families from wherever for whoever and not this bit about culture, religion and so on being taken as issues rather than a main framework. I was not clear in the way you presented your last bit of evidence whether you felt that we should be looking for a particular sort of family for a particular sort of adopter or whether it is the adopters who ask for a particular sort of child and therefore you have to have a search. Norman Goodwin: As VAA’s, we have no children in our care, so we are not looking for a suitable match for those children. We are providing resources for local authorities to place children with. I think most VAA’s would take the view that they will try to recruit families from a wide range of ethnicity, for instance, if we are targeting that particular area. Their ability then is based on the fact of a local authority having a suitable child to place with that family. Q375 Baroness Howarth of Breckland: So what you are saying is it is from the local authority end that the expectation comes of the kind of match that they are looking for? Norman Goodwin: We have people who might come to us and say, “We have tried our local authority and they do not have the type of child in their looked-after system to match us”. So we are likely to recruit them and they may be used by somebody in another area of the country, but if you are a local authority, you are likely to be trying to recruit resources for your immediate area, perhaps your consortium. There is a question about whose children they are. Are they the nation’s children, or are they Birmingham’s children or Devon’s children? It is about local authorities, and rightly so I am sure they would say, being interested in the lookedafter population of their area and improving their scorecard and their targets as opposed to finding families who may be in Bradford or in Northumberland, so I think there are some dilemmas there. The VAA’s transcend some of those areas and are able to pick up and recruit and prepare families who can then be sold on the market to a particular local authority who is looking for a family for a particular child. Q376 Viscount Eccles: In the circumstances where it is policy that there should be more adoptions, then the supply and demand to which you referred is a pretty crucial issue. I suppose our question is: are there rigidities in the market for adoptive parents and for adopted children

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Adoption Matters Northwest—Oral evidence (QQ 354–382) that could be removed by policy or by behaviour or whatever? It might be that if you were willing, you could give that a bit of thought that led to your writing to us about it, because it seems to me it is a pretty complicated issue. Norman Goodwin: I know that there are a number of initiatives that are being looked at at the moment in terms of a greater degree of media attention to the whole area of recruitment and trying to encourage people who are experts in the field of advertising and recruitment into the field of adoption to try to improve our image and what we are trying to do. The use of role models is very important in that, as is having avenues into different cultures and groups of cultures that sometimes are more difficult for us to penetrate. But certainly some of the VAA’s have had some good success in recruitment particularly of black families in particular initiatives that they have been developing. Q377 Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top: Is there a variation in the quality of performance between different adoption agencies, or is it that when we see apparent differences there is an explanation for that? Norman Goodwin: I think, generally speaking, the measure that is used in terms of the quality of adoption agencies is our Ofsted ratings. We are all inspected under the same framework, and I think it is fair to say that the majority of the VAA’s fall into the good or outstanding categories. There are a large number of outstanding agencies in the voluntary sector. One has to also recognise the size implications of the voluntary agencies. There are 22 VAs in England, and about half of those agencies are placing fewer than 20 children a year, so that is a sort of factor. I think that there is also a bit of a misconception about the size and recognition of some of the organisations. The major players in the field of adoption are not necessarily the major charities with which one would associate the field of social care. So while two, Barnardo’s and Action for Children, are providers of adoption services, they are delivered in geographical areas in quite small projects. So there are quite small organisations, relatively speaking, that are kicking above their weight to some extent in how the public perceive how the service is delivered by adoption agencies. If the media want a quote on adoption, they are likely to go to some of the bigger charities, but they are not the big players necessarily in adoption. So I think there has to be some sort of recognition of that. They are likely to be the players that can divert greater PR and greater awareness and greater media interest, but there are some quite significant players who are small to medium-sized organisations. Q378 Lord Warner: Could you give us some sense of where we are in a historical picture on voluntary agencies for adoption? What is going to happen now? Are we in the middle of consolidation? Are we in the middle of people who do not get a good and outstanding Ofsted report going to the wall because local authorities simply will not use them? Where are we, in your view, about what is going to happen to this sector? Norman Goodwin: I think the sector could be quite strong. There are a number of significant players in adoption who, with the right help, could make an even greater import into the system. It is not unreasonable to expect that some will go to the wall; we have seen that in the last few years—Baroness King asked about the Catholic agencies going out of business—and there have been some VAA’s that have gone out of business. There have been some mergers and consolidations. I see that as the possibility of a way forward. We are already looking at

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Adoption Matters Northwest—Oral evidence (QQ 354–382) ways in which some VAA’s will look to work together and I think the SIB (Social Impact Bond) initiative will be one area where a number of agencies may look to work together to provide a more concerted service. It is going to be quite costly to provide that service for a small number of children, but doing that together could be positive. So I think that we are in a reasonably healthy position, but, as I mentioned earlier in terms of the fee, if there was a level playing field, that would give further incentive for investment into the sector. We sought to elicit the views of our members following the request from the department as to how we could increase the number of placements over the next few years, and there was a very positive response to that. Members were also suggesting that they would be willing to make investment in staffing and resources to bring about that increase but would also be looking towards Government to maybe facilitate that process in terms of some guarantees. Q379 Baroness Eaton: Do you think scorecards will provide a fair representation of the comparative performance of adoption agencies? Norman Goodwin: It will be interesting to see. We have been invited to some roundtables. The Minister had suggested to local authorities that that may be a good thing to do. We have been invited to some and we have been not invited to others. It has been interesting that one of the things that has been commented on has been looking at the scorecards and I think they have all looked at their scorecard as, “How am I doing against my neighbour?” So I think that there will be a continuation of that. The point that was made earlier—and I think it was yourself who raised it—about the local authority that had a very good record in placing sibling groups and maybe that takes a bit longer, was something that I had written down to say, because I think that is a very valid point. I am not saying it is a bad thing, but the key question is: what is it measuring? I am not as enthusiastic about them as Martin is, but I can understand why he is. We need to define a little bit more about what it is we are measuring, and we have to take into account that different local authorities are made up in different ways and will have different emphasis on different things. It is interesting how other people view those organisations that are set up as the model to follow, and sometimes when you hear that information on the ground it is not as positive as you would like. If you place five children for adoption a year, I think it is not unreasonable that you will be at the top of the league, but if you are placing 200 children, that is a bit harder to achieve. I would like to disregard the top 10% and the bottom 10%. The local authorities that fall into those categories are probably going to fluctuate up and down like a yo-yo because their demographics are not going to be able to give you enough evidence to mark a scorecard. But, in saying that, that is what we have, and it will be interesting to see how it develops. I know that they are interested in not producing the league tables in The Times. I think it will be difficult for that not to happen and once we have had two or three patterns will emerge. The VAA’s would like to be seen alongside some of that information because at the moment I do not think we are excluded but clearly our information only incorporates a couple of the bands in the scorecard. We would like to contribute that information in terms of the performance of our agencies against how long it has taken to become an approved adopter. In my own organisation, we are meeting the timescales that are set out by the Government and I know that a number of our members are at least meeting, if not bettering, the timescales. If we can do it, we would like our figures to be up there so that people, if they are looking at the

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Adoption Matters Northwest—Oral evidence (QQ 354–382) league tables, can say, “Why do I not go to a voluntary agency?” It is important to remember that people do have a choice, although that is not very obvious sometimes. People think that adoption is only carried out by local authorities, but they do have a choice. Q380 The Chairman: Mr Goodwin, do you have any of the scorecards? Have you seen them? Do you have any? Norman Goodwin: With me? Yes, I have seen them. The Chairman: I am thinking that when you are kind enough to send us some views on the various aspects we have asked—and anything else that you think has been raised today that you would like to comment on and we would be very grateful for anything you wanted to say—do you think you could send us a copy of the scorecard? We would find it very interesting, particularly the ones that you have seen. I wondered in asking that whether you thought the scorecard was sufficiently comprehensive. Do you think there are areas of it that ought to be enhanced? Norman Goodwin: They are on a single landscaped sheet of paper and you could have an enormous amount of information. It is about the ability to get what is relevant on to a single sheet of paper I guess, which makes it worth while. I think that is where the analysis has to come in. It is what is the value of what is on that piece of paper and what lies underneath that. If you are achieving 100% success in the children that you are placing, that is fine, as long as you recognise that you are only placing five children for adoption a year, which some local authorities do. But if you are achieving 80% but you have placed 290 children, then I think that is admirable. So I think it is a bit about how we interpret that and how do you get that information on to the scorecard unless you go away and you do some research to know that if you are in Rutland that is slightly different to the city of Nottingham, which is probably 20 miles away. The Chairman: I am going to ask Lady King in just a moment, but if you have any views about any of the questions, we would also be very interested in that. Q381 Baroness King of Bow: On that point, you mentioned sibling groups, which is a clear area where you could quite easily calibrate the scorecard, could you not? What you are saying is you need to put more context around it. You might want to write to us on it because we do not have very much time, but what are the other obvious areas where some calibration would make scorecards more effective—or fairer perhaps is the word? Norman Goodwin: We will have a look at that, and we will come back on that. I am sure they will develop and I am sure they will be changed, and I am sure other things will be added. I am sure it is not beyond the realms of possibility that we might have two pages and 10 pages, because people will say, “We need this and we need this”. Q382 The Chairman: But your views on that would be very helpful. We have taken up an hour of your time and we are extremely grateful. We hope you have recovered from your arrival here. Norman Goodwin: I am just glad that I persevered and came. The Chairman: We are very grateful for that because we would have wasted time otherwise. No, we would not, but it was better to have you. We shall be extremely grateful to receive any

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Adoption Matters Northwest—Oral evidence (QQ 354–382) further evidence you would like to give us. Thank you very much indeed for coming from— Liverpool, I think, was it? Norman Goodwin: Chester. The Chairman: Chester. That is perhaps even nicer. Thank you very much indeed.

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Adoptionplus—Written evidence

Adoptionplus—Written evidence Do we have the Right Structure for Adoption? 1. Adoptionplus believe that the current government focus on speeding up assessments of adoptive parents is misplaced. We currently take about 8 months to complete an assessment and many people need this time to prepare for parenting. We think that speeding up these assessments could:    

risk the quality of the assessment result in adoptive parents not being prepared for the task increase risk of adoption disruption increases risks re matching

2. Additionally we are aware that this focus on timescales has even led to one local authority taking no more applications from perspective adopters as they are concerned about meeting timescales within their existing resources. 3. However, the biggest concern we have is the lack of government focus and investment in effective adoption support services. The reality of adoption today is parenting children who have suffered abuse and developmental trauma. Adoption is more than children moving into a new family where they are safe and cared for. Their early traumatic experiences will impact on their development so they will need on-going support and their parents need support to parent them successfully. Also if adoptive parents are confident that support is readily accessible, more people may come forward to adopt. Appropriate support will ensure parents better understand the emotional needs of their children and are able to parent more effectively, which in turn will promote emotional health and limit the risk of disruption. 4. Also, as an agency we believe in the need to support the adoptive family’s network and in particular the children’s schools, as the support around the child needs to acknowledge the impact of the child’s difficult early experiences. We believe it is important to work together as a team to support the child, with a joint understanding of what is needed and a consistent approach. 5. The directors at Adoptionplus recognised that the current adoption system needed changing, which is why we took the decision to set up a brand new adoption agency that offered a completely new type of adoption service in the UK. The difference with Adoptionplus is that we provide all of our families with on-going access to our specialist developmental trauma and attachment therapy services as standard. 6. We believe that we are only the second new adoption agency to set up in this country since the end of World War 2, and decided to set up at a time when many other voluntary adoption agencies were closing down. We made this brave decision because we passionately wanted to offer an adoption service that was truly helpful to children

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Adoptionplus—Written evidence and families, particularly those children who traditionally local authorities struggled to find adoptive families for. 7. The directors at Adoptionplus have all previously worked as local authority senior managers in social services child care. We saw for ourselves that there were so many children in the system, that given the right family and the right support, could have the chance of a happy healthy life, where they could have relationships, become good parents and positively contribute to the communities they lived in. We also saw how much money was wasted taking a short term reactive response to children’s difficulties. Plastering over one crisis led to another, to the point where the difficulties escalate and eventually became more unmanageable and more costly. 8. Adoptionplus was established specifically to find families for older children with a history of abuse, neglect and developmental trauma. We believe it is essential to consider long term support when thinking about the needs of these children and their adoptive families. Our placement service is unique in the fact that we provide our families with on-going specialist therapeutic support throughout childhood. We employ a team of therapists who all have considerable experience in the field of adoption and developmental trauma, and are additionally trained in models of therapeutic intervention that are specifically helpful to children who have suffered abuse. The team is led by a consultant clinical child psychologist with particular expertise in this area. Families can access this support from us whenever they need it. We are the only adoption agency in the UK to provide this support to all of our families as standard. Local authorities pay upfront and then it is our interest to do all we can to ensure the placement is successful. We believe that it is essential to address difficulties early on and prevent problems escalating. This proactive approach is also more cost effective as you are not waiting for an emergency situation to occur and then having to respond to the devastating impact of family crisis where behaviour patterns become fixed and everyone feels exhausted. 9. We absolutely believe that investing early in appropriate therapeutic support that prevents problems is enormously cost effective, both financially and in terms of good emotional health. 10. We have over the last few years developed good relationships with a number of local authorities, where they can see the social, emotional and financial benefits of our models of working. 11. We believe that the reality of adoption today is about supporting families in parenting children who have suffered from neglect and abuse. The cost of not doing it properly is huge….both emotionally, socially and financially. Properly funded adoption support services provided by people who understand about adoption, developmental trauma and attachment problems are the most effective and financially efficient way to address these problems. 19 July 2012

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After Adoption—Written evidence

After Adoption—Written evidence After Adoption is a Voluntary Adoption Agency operating in England and Wales. After Adoption finds adoptive families for children with complex needs and provides adoption support to all parties in adoption. We provide a seamless access to adoption support for adoptive families. This includes SafeBase parenting programme that is delivered via a partnership model across the voluntary and local authority sectors. We have 22 years’ experience of delivering services for birthparents affected by the loss of their children through adoption. Background a) Do we have the right structure for adoption? We believe that both Local Authorities and Voluntary Adoption Agencies need to play an active role in the recruitment and preparation of adoptive families. Currently, financial barriers exist preventing VAAs from maximizing their capacity. The current system should achieve good outcomes for children if each part of the system operated efficiently. Some processes, such as statutory checks and references for prospective adoptive parents could be made much more streamlined and take less time. Children could in essence be linked earlier with prospective families provided care planning is more robust and less cumbersome. The responsibility for children placement planning is appropriately placed with the Local Authority and therefore matching responsibility needs to remain with the Local Authority. It is important for knowledge and understanding of adoption to exist within LA children’s services to inform decision making for looked after children. b) Should we be concerned about the falling number of adoptions? Why are the numbers falling? The falling numbers of adoptions is a cause for concern relative to numbers of children in care. This trend may well relate to Special Guardian Orders increasing but it is also about social workers not feeling confident in finding adoptive families for children at the end of lengthy care proceedings. The older the child is at the end of these proceedings the greater impact this has. We are concerned about this trend and fear that children beyond the age of five may be perceived as being ‘unadoptable’. Current measures to address the recruitment of adoptive parents and amendments to court proceedings should address this issue. In our experience prospective adoptive parents can be found children with complex needs if we collectively positively promote adoption to the general public and maintain an open attitude to recruitment. Prospective adopters need to feel confident in the process and know that there will be a seamless access to adoption support. To be most effective we need to recognise that the majority of children adopted from care have very complex needs and therefore we need to properly resource the long-term support that these families need to build futures for these children.

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After Adoption—Written evidence Legislation a) What impact did the 2002 Act have on the adoption process? The Act had a positive impact improving the range of people ‘who can adopt’, providing a clear structure for the process of adoption assessments and the functioning of adoption agencies and panels. It had a positive impact on the development of adoption support particularly for birth families and adult adopted people. The definition about who holds responsibility for adoption support simplified and clarified matters considerably. There still needs to be greater consistency across all adoption agencies in access to adoption support, particularly financial support for adoptive families and the provision of services to birth parents. It is our experience that most birth parents will not take up support from the same LA that has been involved in the removal of their children. Our consultation with birth families found they felt social workers should be more proactive in working with them at early stages and to be clearer about the process they were engaged in. b) Have all aspects of the 2002 and 2006 Acts been implemented appropriately and successfully? There needs to be greater consistency in the ability to access adoption support and service provision available. c) Is further legislation required to improve any aspect of the adoption system? The current proposed changes should address delays for children. This needs to be properly resourced and the social care workforce needs to be appropriately trained to provide consistency of service. d) Can you as a respondent identify a problem and tell us if, and if so where, the legislation (including regulations), needs to change? Within current Regulations Local Authorities only have a duty to assess an adoptive family’s support needs and there is no duty to provide adoption support services. Legislation should be changed to place a duty on LAs to provide appropriate support services. With regard to Access to Records, agencies can take many months to respond in providing adoption records. Timescales within which record holding authorities must respond should be clearer. Time taken in placing children a) Is excessive time taken in placing children? Do some groups of children take a disproportionate length of time? Yes, excessive time is taken to place children who are part of sibling groups, are BME, or have a history of long-term neglect. Social workers need additional training to understand the impact of early life trauma on the long-term development and outcomes for children so that timely decisions are taken when it is appropriate in care proceedings.

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After Adoption—Written evidence It is more difficult to place children with complex needs. We have found where there is a guarantee of adoption support available this significantly increases the enquiries from prospective adoptive parents. There need to be more awareness campaigns targeted at BME communities and a widespread positive message about adoption for the general public. The financially driven hierarchy in finding adoptive families operated in LAs needs to be addressed so that a greater emphasis is on speed of finding families rather than which sector provides them. b) What aspects of the adoption process, including pre-process care proceedings, take most time? Currently, care proceedings, then family finding. c) Do the various parts of the system – local authorities, adoption agencies, courts and others – work effectively together? With our sector colleagues we would like to see LA’s and VAA’s working more in partnership. This could be effective in identifying the needs of children coming through the system and by targeting recruitment to meet these needs. In our experience where LAs do this we have been very successful in targeting marketing campaigns for the recruitment of specific children and groups of children achieving placement in relatively short timescales. d) Could the adoption process be speeded up, whilst ensuring that necessary safeguards are preserved? Yes, especially if earlier care planning embraced adoption and concurrent, rather than sequential, family finding was effected. Additionally, limiting the timescale within which ‘connected people’ could seek to be assessed to care for a child would further reduce delay. e) How widely used is concurrent planning? What are its advantages and disadvantages? Not widely used. There are benefits to children as it involves fewer placements but the challenge is in recruiting suitable adopters who can take the risk of a child going home. It requires intensive work with birth families. It is appropriate for some children but not all. Delivery of this type of service requires considerable resourcing. f) What are the reasons for the variations in time taken to place children by different local authorities? Poor care planning and inexperienced front line practitioners; lack of involvement of the adoption teams in child care planning: the courts having little confidence in the care plan of the Local authority; unwillingness to refer family finding to VAA’s or Adoption Register to speed matching.

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After Adoption—Written evidence There is a poor understanding within local authorities structures about return on investment caused by, in our view, cost centre control rather than strategic budget management. This significantly impacts on adoption placements made with VAA’s. Family finding based on a hierarchy of low level financial decisions greatly affect outcomes for children and costs the public purse when a child remains in care longer than is necessary. The number of potential adopters a) Are there enough potential adopters coming forward? Are there shortages in particular ethnic groups? There is a significant shortage of adoptive families for children who wait. We believe this can be improved by targeted recruitment, and improved value proposition for prospective adoptive parents, detailing from the outset the adoption support package available to them. Our agency has seen a significant growth in the number of potential adopters coming forward in recent years as a result of employing marketing specialists, running specific campaigns planned in some instances with LAs. The evidence from our performance reports shows that 64% of adopters coming forward in our campaigns are willing to adopt siblings and many who are interested in older children. Encouraging enquiries from BME groups remains difficult, there needs to be a collective campaign to improve understanding about adoption as building awareness in these communities is resource intensive. b) How do we ensure the best “fit” for a child, and is trans-racial adoption relevant to this issue? The child’s needs must be paramount in the matching process. Good comprehensive information about the child and a robust parent assessment are both important factors in finding the best match. There is also a need to provide training for social workers working in child care teams about matching so that thinking about how a family could meet a child’s needs, even with additional support is developed rather than decisions being made on an emotive response to find the perfect family for children. Children should not wait longer for a placement based on ethnicity but it is important that prospective adopters are able to recognise and celebrate origins in order to provide the child with positive identity. c) Why do some potential adopters drop out during the adoption process? There are a whole range of factors from relationship issues, bereavement, resolution of infertility, pregnancy, a ‘reality check’ and exposure of factors, eg medical, lifestyle, serious debt, that impact on suitability. They may feel at approval and preparation stages that they still wish to go ahead but do not feel reassured about the possibility of wraparound on going support to prevent ‘crises’ and/or disruptions in the future.

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After Adoption—Written evidence d) Have the changes to eligibility introduced by the 2002 Act impacted the number of potential adopters? Yes, but not greatly. There is still a lot of public misunderstanding regarding eligibility. f) What will be the likely effect of the measures proposed in the Department for Education’s ‘Action Plan for Adoption’? We have found that the significant media profile of adoption is leading to increased numbers of enquiries. We understand this to be the experience across sector. It is very important that ongoing promotion is targeted at the needs of children who need or wait for placements. The Gateway should support this in the future. This will also provide some consistency for enquirers in the information they receive. To be most effective this will need increased resourcing to process enquiries. There needs to be clarity about what prospective adoptive parents can expect to in the process, to avoid possible unrealistic expectations impacting on people feeling disillusioned. We welcome proposals to delay the point at which applicants have recourse to the IRM because this will enable adoption agencies to assess the strengths and consider a wider range of applicants, at an initial stage. Changes to the function of Adoption Panels who will no longer consider whether a child should be placed for adoption will improve the pressure on workloads, though there will be a continued need to quality assure care plans and documentation prior to final care proceedings. Again, we welcome proposals to improve access to adoption support. This needs to be from the point of placement and ensure that adoptive parents are supported to develop skills to parent children who have had troubled pasts. g) Does the number of agencies inhibit the number of adopters recruited? We believe that the accessibility and quality of the service provided is key. The adoption service is people based and therefore confidence in the developing relationship with an agency plays an important role to both the success of preparation and assessment and also in the future to prevent inhibitors to seeking support. The body of expertise, knowledge and success rates play an important role in choice of agency. It is important to provide adopters with choice at the point of accessing an adoption service to maximize the potential of increasing the number of adopters. Agencies within the voluntary sector provide greater guarantees to adoptive parents and to LAs seeking to place children because of their inbuilt knowledge of the life long impact of adoption, their continued success rates and their continued investment and development of services to support the most vulnerable children in their new families. This perception was borne out in recent focus groups held by After Adoption. It is our view that it would not be helpful to increase the number of agencies providing these services but rather to build on the experience of our sector and look for ways to establish frameworks for strategic development of partnership arrangements with LAs so that there is more planned approach to providing excellent outcomes for children.

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After Adoption—Written evidence We welcome a mechanism whereby adoptive families can access support services post placement and beyond. The adoption Passport may provide this. There is a need to educate all stakeholders, including education professionals, about the impact of early life trauma and attachment so what is needed to build solid foundations for adoptive families is clearly understood. This education will enable adoptive families to understand the type of support that would be most effective in meeting their current and future needs. h) Does the recent increase in knowledge about early child development affect the balance between children’s rights and parental rights? Children’s rights need to be paramount. The growing body of research strengthens the arguments that delay is damaging for children. However, birth parents report to us that they are often unclear about the expectations placed upon them. This underlines the fact that LAs need to provide effective services to determine the viability of rehabilitation to birth families with an effective outcome of successful future parenting of a child and an ability to understand and repair damage caused by early life trauma. We would like to see the development of time focused intervention for birth families affording them the knowledge and education of what is needed to parent their children safely now and into the future. To be most effective this needs to be determined in timescales that take into account the ‘child’s time frame’. Delay by caused by ineffective child care planning and the courts is not helpful to the future of children. Court proceedings a) Do court proceedings take undue time in the adoption process? Yes, After Adoption supports the changes embodied within the Family Justice Review which focus on reducing delay for children to be adopted. b) Would the recommendations of the Family Justice Review substantially alter the position? Yes, however there is a need to build confidence about the skills of the social work profession to present the care panning process. This is an education issue with emphasis placed on analysis in assessment built on a body of knowledge through research and skill development. After Adoption has a number of social work partnerships with universities, providing student placements through learning centres. What is apparent in students is the omission of good analytical skills in assessment based on current understanding of research of the outcomes for children and early life trauma. This could be addressed through education, building skill and confidence in the profession. c) How effective are provisions for the representation by guardians of children in court proceedings? The efficiency of Children’s Guardian’s practice is sporadic i.e. some have been greatly proactive at engaging well with the LA to get a wider picture and others less so.

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After Adoption—Written evidence d) How effective have placement orders been in facilitating the placement and adoption of children compared with “freeing orders”? This is an improved system for children. However, birthparents rarely understand the implications of placement orders. There is confusion about seeking leave of the court to appeal decisions. e) How common is it for care proceedings and placement order proceedings to be heard together or consecutively? What are the advantages and disadvantages of this approach? Practice varies. f) How will changes to legal aid impact, if at all, on adoption proceedings? After Adoption cannot comment. Post-adoption support a) How, if at all, has the 2002 Act impacted upon the provision of post-adoption contacts and support? This has placed more emphasis on the importance of support but not necessarily funded entitlement and provision. Some children placed for adoption have enduring needs due to emotional & behavioural difficulties, attachment difficulties and other intrinsic problems. Some generic CAMHS services may not be ‘adoption sensitive’ and only provide limited therapeutic services for children with attachment difficulties. Some of the wider services still regard the adoptive parents as deficient in parenting rather than recognising the child’s behaviours are related to their early life experiences. Contact There a tendency to adopt a formulaic model of contact rather than flexibility, with review centred on the needs of the individual child at different life stages. Support for all parties in contact is often limited. There is rarely a review of arrangements in subsequent years with an omission about planning for a young person beyond 18 to manage birth family relationships. b) Are measures needed to enhance post-adoption financial and other support for (i) adopted children; (ii) adoptive parents, (iii) birth families? Yes, there is currently no consistency of service provision across LAs for all three groups. For adoptive families this places additional strain when children are placed across geographical boundaries. We also note that the provision of financial support is tightening.

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After Adoption—Written evidence Adopted children and young people’s voices need to be heard in a more formalised and structured way so that we can respond to their concerns about bullying in school and dealing with the difference adoption brings to their lives. Inter-country adoption Adopters often have no knowledge of children’s background, early experiences and birth family as no records kept in some countries. Adopters need to know impact of not having this knowledge. Access to Information The provision for birth relatives to access services as well as adopted adults is helpful. Adopted Adults However, for adopted adults accessing a service there are still variations in how long it takes to obtain records from the relevant agency. The process is more cumbersome and lengthy than previously. There are still variations in what information is shared but the retention of “professional discretion”, reg 15, is necessary and appropriate. It is our view that more discretion should rest with the agency who is actually working with the adopted person as opposed to the agency holding the records, whilst recognising that the Appropriate Adoption Agency owns the records and their advice should be sought where appropriate. The fact that agencies are now required to obtain the view of the AAA in relation to the adopted adult tracing birth relatives causes further delay and we know of no cases where this has been considered inadvisable. Usually the AAA has no relevant information. While the number of adopted people placed in the 1960’s and 70’s wishing to search is decreasing, we are aware of an increasing number of very troubled young people over 18 wishing to do so. They are very vulnerable and particularly need to be supported. They often have great difficulty talking about their adoptions and have unrealistic expectations / beliefs about their birth families. Birth relatives Overall there has been a dramatic reduction in the number of Local Authorities offering/ commissioning services for birth relatives with an increase in signposting to voluntary organisations with expectation for self-funding. This means only those who can afford to pay can access the service in most areas. The requirement to seek “the view” of the Appropriate Adoption Agency is viewed is an appropriate safeguard in relation to birth relatives. There needs to be guidance about what to do if the AAA cannot be identified.

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After Adoption—Written evidence The facility for the GRO to provide identifying information (through the application form AF3) has proved invaluable in many cases as we have been able to trace subjects when this would otherwise have proved impossible. Other permanent placements a) Special Guardianship We welcomed the introduction of Special Guardianship as it is appropriate for some children to be parented by kinship carers or for older children who have been in a foster placement for sometime. However, we are concerned about children living in the context of poorly supported families, who are not given the support they need to parent these children. b) Consistency of placement for children Good early assessment and support, robust intervention, well documented information concerning children and careful matching with well prepared and supported adopters who have a right to services and financial support to ensure stability and longevity of placement. There is a need to educate professionals supporting the child in a wider context to have a greater understanding of attachment and early life trauma and greater professional recognition of the demands placed upon adopters/carers in providing permanence for children. There is a need to raise greater public awareness of many positives of adoption with emphasis on the positive outcomes for children. c) Early intervention We cannot ignore the growing body of knowledge about the impact of early life trauma on children and therefore we support early intervention with support for families to determine whether they can parent children, that safely meets their needs and in the child’s timeframe. Where this is not the case, there needs to be robust decision making that recognises the benefits adoption can bring to children. In these cases every effort should be made to find a suitable placement with seamless access to support. Monitoring We welcome the current focus on the reduction of delay for children and the national measurement of performance for adoption services. In some instances, systems that track children who wait, work well, for example, shared data across LA and voluntary sector. There needs to be coherent data available to both sectors that tracks delay for children and provides early notification of the needs of children potentially requiring adoptive placements. For some time now the voluntary adoption agencies via CVAA have collated data and this has been invaluable in the development of quality services for those who wish to adopt and specialist services that support some of the most challenging children. Within the sector and our agency this has led to a greater understanding of what works to support families and has

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After Adoption—Written evidence enabled us to target services to meet the needs of adoptive families. This use of data and tracking of performance has enabled us to find families children with very complex needs and to sustain these placements with a success rate of over 98% for families who were given targeted support. July 2012

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After Adoption—Oral evidence (QQ 437–459)

After Adoption—Oral evidence (QQ 437–459) Evidence Session No. 7.

Heard in Public.

Questions 437–459

TUESDAY 16 OCTOBER 2012 Members present Lord Warner (Chairman) Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top Baroness Eaton Viscount Eccles Baroness Hamwee Baroness King of Bow Baroness Knight of Collingtree Baroness Morris of Bolton Lord Morris of Handsworth Baroness Walmsley ________________ Examination of Witness Lynn Charlton, Chief Executive, After Adoption

Q437 The Chairman: We can now move to our second evidence session. Welcome and thank you very much for coming. You no doubt have a sense of how we proceed, as you were sitting in the public area. So without further ado, could I ask you to begin by saying who you are and what your background is? If you want to make any opening statement, feel free to do so, but the floor is yours. Lynn Charlton: Thank you. I am Lynn Charlton. I am Chief Executive of After Adoption. I am also a qualified social worker and counsellor, and I have specialised in fostering and adoption work since around about 1987. My introduction would be—and I really welcome the opportunity of coming here to talk to you—to talk a little bit more widely about post-adoption issues. I will do that from the point of view that I run an agency that finds families for children with complex needs but also runs a very large range of post-adoption services. We are unique in that we were set up to run post-adoption services first, and we came to child placement because we felt we were able to put forward the lifelong learning about the impact of adoption into current services. The thing that I am ever mindful of in my practice is that adoption is an irrevocable order and it is life-changing for all of those affected by it.

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After Adoption—Oral evidence (QQ 437–459) Q438 The Chairman: Thank you very much. Perhaps I could start off by asking a question about recruiting prospective adopters. How do you think we can increase the pool of prospective adopters willing to adopt harder-to-place children? Is there, in fact, a tension between the need to raise greater public awareness of the positives of adoption while also managing the potentially unrealistic expectations of prospective adopters, and how do you think some of these tensions might be best resolved? Lynn Charlton: The first thing that I would say about increasing the pool of adopters is that the local authorities and the voluntary adoption agencies have to work together. This is one market, so to speak, and we have to pool our resources and use our expertise effectively, and remove any of the barriers that are either institutional or financial around that. In terms of finding families for hard-to-place children, we have had considerable success in this area. One of the key things to that success has been around advertising real children with real needs that people then respond to. I think when we advertise generically, or in abstract, it is difficult for people who want to build families to think how that fits for them. We have had a considerable amount of success with that. When I look at our figures, the kind of success that I am talking about, from the point that a child for that kind of recruitment is referred to us to our average point of placement, is eight months. That tells us something about the last part of your question around how we balance the tensions with what people come through the door looking for, and actually what we have to offer. I think there are a couple of things: generically, we need to improve for example our customer service. Currently that is being addressed through the proposal of a national gateway, and I think that will help considerably so that people know where they go to. But our experience is also that adoptive parents, or prospective adoptive parents, shop around for some considerable time before they choose an agency that they will feel comfortable about going to. Obviously websites and responses, if they are ringing local authorities, are very important at that point. It comes back to being transparent about what we need and how that matches the requests of the prospective adoptive family. I think we can manage that. The social work profession are not confident enough about stretching people’s ideas about what their family might look like. Some people might think, “I might only get accepted for one child, therefore I will come forward for one child”, but actually they may really want to build a family through adoption. Why are we not fully exploring that, and why are we not fully exploring with them the support that can be available if they were to go down that path? Support is key here. We know that where we put an explicit offer of adoption support on the table, which we do in our agency and many voluntary adoption agencies do, then actually it does attract people to come to your agency and it does instil confidence in the prospective adoptive families moving forward. The Chairman: Thank you very much.

Q439 Baroness Knight of Collingtree: From your own experience, would you say that too much emphasis is currently being placed on the question of putting siblings together at the expense of other children? I would have thought that it was always a good thing to try to get siblings together, because there is a bond there that would not be there otherwise. Could we clarify this? What is your opinion?

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After Adoption—Oral evidence (QQ 437–459) Lynn Charlton: I do not think there is too much emphasis about placing siblings together. In fact, 64% of the adoptive families that come to our agency will take one or more children. If we look at that, that is the earlier point that I made about stretching people to think about what they might be able to offer the children we have available. The other thing that I am mindful about is that over the last five years we have done a considerable amount of work with young adopted people, for under-18-year-olds currently in placement. One of the things that I see, time and time again, is that they operate in a sea of confusion about trying to integrate their past life with their current life. On the surface they will seem fine and they will be benefiting from all the things that their adoptive families are giving them, but inside they have this continual little war going on about, “How do we make sense of what happened before that, that time before I came to live with this family?” On that basis, the people who can provide the most consistent relationship are siblings. Siblings were there with each other, usually. They have come from the same place, so they can provide some comfort, if not on an emotional and a psychological level, within the context of the family. I am also mindful about what we hear from adopted adults, because we provide services at the other end where people are trying to talk about their identities and their histories. What we find, time and time again, is that adopted adults report a huge wrench when they have been separated from their siblings. They talk, as adults, about feeling isolated. They talk, as adults, about this having an effect on their self-esteem. So, I am mindful of all of those things. Would I say that we have to hold out for a family, if that is not going to be in all of the children’s best interests in a sibling group? No, I would not. What I would say is we have to exercise professional judgment here; we have to look at what the needs of the children are, but we also have to know and understand what the impact is of making the decisions if we choose to separate siblings. Q440 Baroness Knight of Collingtree: Could you see any situation in which the first interest of the sibling placement would go against helping an individual child? Lynn Charlton: I think we have to be really sensible. It goes back to being realistic about what the offer is. If we are looking for families for siblings, we need to be saying that. We need to be explaining to people how to meet the individual child’s needs within the context of that sibling group, and then people can make informed choices about whether they feel drawn to do that, in the first instance. We also have to support these placements, because some of these children come from such complex backgrounds, and they have difficult behaviours and different needs happening at the same time. Adoptive parents need that. You cannot go from not being a parent one day to being an expert parent of these children the next. We need to put the proper foundations in place and to support those placements. There are some situations where we might have to make decisions to separate siblings and I do not think that should be done lightly. As I have said, I think that needs to be done on a very sound professional judgment that actually looks at the individual needs of those children. Where siblings are separated in adoption, then contact needs to be addressed between those siblings to maintain that sibling connection. Q441 Baroness Knight of Collingtree: Finally, what about a case, as there has been, of a family who very successfully adopted a boy and then asked if they could adopt again, and the local authority asked them, “Yes, would you take a sibling”? They were delighted to do so, but

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After Adoption—Oral evidence (QQ 437–459) they found that they had to go through another two and a half years of checking—checks that they had already done with the first child successfully. Therefore the whole thing fell apart a bit because the child thought he was not going to have the sister that he had been promised, because two and a half years is such a long time for a child. Would you think, in those circumstances, when one child has been adopted successfully, we could do away with the length of time that it would have normally taken if no such adoption had taken place? Lynn Charlton: Absolutely. Frankly, I do not quite know how we got to this place because in the past that is exactly what we would have done—we would have done an abridged assessment and so brought the original assessment up to date. We would have run some current checks, obviously. That is appropriate. But that would be all. I think we have got ourselves in a position where we have ridiculously bureaucratic systems, around things that actually are causing delays for children. I think that could be improved. Q442 Baroness King of Bow: There are a few separate elements of that. There is the six months that it takes for the home assessment, but there is the two years that it is stipulated must be the gap between two adoptive children? Lynn Charlton: Again, I think we need to look at that when we are building families, and particularly where there is a sibling relationship. When we are talking about a stipulated gap, it is just about giving one child time to settle into the placement and another child a similar time. Baroness King of Bow: Absolutely. But they will not let you come back. I was not allowed to begin the assessment to adopt again until two years had passed. Lynn Charlton: I think we need to be exercising good professional judgment here—that is my view. The Chairman: Many families do not wait two years before they have their second child. Lynn Charlton: Yes, you are right. Q443 Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top: I am interested in the balance between birth families and adoptive families, and whether you have any experience of birth families feeling, under the more recent legislation, their wishes are overridden and the system is not fair. I wonder if you had any comment on that. Lynn Charlton: Yes. We have a lot of experience of working with birth families and birth families rarely feel fairly treated in adoption. I think we have to acknowledge that usually the decision to place a child for adoption is a profound intervention into that child’s life and into their lives. Initially it is often a subjective view. There is a huge emotional impact in losing a child to adoption and that will trigger very early stages of high anxiety, things like denial, shock, numbness, and all of those kind of things, and within that context a tendency to blame or seek second opinions or whatever it is, which we would see as a normal process with anybody in a process of enforced change. What we do find, repeatedly—and it does concern me, because I think there is some weight to this on occasions—is that they do feel that they have been treated with a lack of respect. They often feel that they are being judged. Well, of course, in some ways they are being judged, by virtue of the fact that their parenting and lifestyle may be under question. I think they feel that

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After Adoption—Oral evidence (QQ 437–459) on a very personal level on a lot of occasions. That might be seen in the context of this being an exceptionally difficult and emotional transition for anybody. However, we recently held some consultation—as we do periodically—with birth parents that we have worked with for a while. What I found very interesting about that consultation was that they said that the social workers were often not transparent enough. They were not clear in the reasons why things were happening. They were not clear about what was expected of them. Their comment was that, in contrast to that, the judiciary were very clear. We might need to put that into a little bit of context, but I think it is interesting. Do we have social workers on the front line packaging things up in a way that people cannot understand? That is just a question, really, at this stage. From a birth parent’s point of view, it is most definitely a subjective view, and it is not until much later on that they are able to reflect on the part that they may have played in that whole process. Q444 Baroness Walmsley: Have the support needs of birth families changed, in the light of the changing social purpose of adoption and the fact that there is no longer any stigma to having a child out of wedlock, so the nature of the pool of children available has considerably changed? I think you have partly answered the second part already but you may want to add something. The question is: from your experience, what are the most common needs of birth families, both during and after the adoption process? Lynn Charlton: The most common need for all birth parents is emotional support. As I said before, this is a very profound intervention. I think what they need in the first instance is someone who can actually hear the story from their perspective—to not judge that and not to pass any judgment on that at all. The reason why I say that is not to be able to say, necessarily, “I will completely stand in your shoes and agree with you”. It is about enabling someone to actually process what has happened to them, for their own psychological well-being. What we have found, and what we learn from the past, is that where there was no mechanism for people to do that, that has a profound impact on their mental health in the future; it has a profound impact on how they might seek to mitigate that pain, and we lock them into patterns of pathological mourning so that it is very difficult for them to then function as citizens in our society. The key thing to this I think is set out in regulation—the services that need to be provided for birth parents. The question is this issue about independence: it needs to be provided independently of the child’s social worker. That can be within the context of a local authority or it could be—as it is with our agency—contracted to an agency to provide that service. What I would say is that birth parents consistently report that when it is set in the context of the social service provision, no matter how good that provision may be, they still feel that is part of the same process and they still feel judged by that service. For me, it is about independence; it is about hearing their story. It is about enabling them to process what is happening. I am not a believer—and I have written and researched in this whole area—that people ever get over it. You do not get over something as profound as a child being removed from your care. What you learn to do is to live with that experience and to have strategies to move on in your own life. Q445 Baroness Walmsley: Can I follow that up? Are the needs very different between parents who have given up a very young child, a baby, or parents who have been forced to give up older children?

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After Adoption—Oral evidence (QQ 437–459) Lynn Charlton: I do not think they are significantly different. When you look back at some of the accounts that came out of the Post-Adoption Centre in the early to mid-1980s, some of the birth mothers who had given up children for adoption still felt the need to know about that child’s well-being. They felt the need to understand a little bit more about the adoption. They needed to talk to people about their experience, and I do not see that being any different whether it is a relinquished child or a non-relinquished child. Q446 Viscount Eccles: Can I just pursue the question of independence? How would that come about on a regular basis, that there was the independent service available to talk to the birth families and to discuss it and to help them to come to terms with what has happened? Lynn Charlton: For example, our agency, and a number of other voluntary agencies, may provide services for birth parents prior to the adoption order going through. We are contracted by local authorities, so they contract out their statutory responsibility through a commissioning process to us to provide those services. We make all our materials available, so we advertise our helpline and that kind of thing through the local authorities so that we get access to those birth parents. There is an issue about access to services when you have it contracted out to an independent agency. I think information needs to be given not just once—every single time the birth parent has contact with the statutory agency they need to be reminded that there is a service that they can access for themselves. That needs to be done in a format that they can retain, for all of the reasons I have outlined. We have found that things like a leaflet, with very simple information on, with a telephone number, or a number to text, are a very effective mechanism these days in engaging birth parents. Once we get them to text us, we can then begin to text them and we can provide that kind of service on an ongoing basis until we are able to engage them face to face. Q447 Lord Morris of Handsworth: My question is still on the theme of support of families. Could you tell us please what entitlement, if any, do birth families have to support, both during and after adoption, and can you tell us whether the current provisions are adequate, and if any legislative changes are needed? Lynn Charlton: If we take the processes of adoption, I think the framework set out in regulations is good. It covers all the key areas for birth parents. The question is really how then that is practised. So I think the framework is good. The thing that concerns me most is the support can be patchy, for the reasons that we have talked about: accessibility of service and the ability to retain information about what is available, which might not be well publicised. What I noticed recently was that we were getting calls from professionals on our helpline to ask if there were any services available for birth parents, when we were signposting them back to the very organisation that they were working for, so within the context of their own local authority they were not aware of the services provided to them. I do not think it is legislation that needs to change for that; I think it is practice and it is guidance. The one area that I think we need to address—and I will say this consistently—is the duty to provide adoption support because, and I am sure we will come on to it, we have contact and it is set out in primary legislation that birth parents have the right to be assessed for postadoption support. That is most likely to be around contact issues, to be truthful about that. But

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After Adoption—Oral evidence (QQ 437–459) actually there is no duty to provide those services, and I think there are implications across the board for all parties when there is no duty to provide. Q448 Baroness Morris of Bolton: Thank you very much for everything so far. I want to move on to contact. We have slightly touched on it. I wonder if you might say something about the positives and the negatives of contact with birth family members at the different stages— when a placement order has been made but a child is still awaiting placement, once a child is placed for adoption and then post-adoption. Also, could you touch on your experiences of working with adopted children and birth families and adoptive parents, where you may have concerns about the current practice with respect to birth family contact and say what you think we may do to make it better? Lynn Charlton: First of all, we need to be clear about the reason contact is put in place, once there is a best-interest decision for adoption. It is not about maintenance of the relationships as they were with the birth family. It is about continuity for the child, in terms of their emotional, cultural and identity needs. I think sometimes in social work practice, at that time where you are going to work towards care proceedings and then into placement orders, that might be a little bit unclear for general practitioners in their thinking. From my point of view it is actually very clear. That is the purpose of contact. That said, the other thing that people are often quite concerned about is whether children understand, if we put contact in place, who their parenting parent will be, and what we know from our work with adopted children is they are very clear about who is their everyday parent. What they like is to have some continuity that enables them to integrate the past with the present, and obviously then the future. I think contact can play a very useful role for the child in helping them understand their world and their life history. Contact with siblings obviously plays a different role because that is about the maintenance of relationships; that is about connections and that needs to be maintained, and I will cover those separately. The concerns that I have about current practice is that often contact arrangements are indirect and those that are through letterbox exchanges are often formulaic. What I mean by that is that often they are set up to be twice a year, but that may just be a random date, so it could be 30 April or 1 December. It does not necessarily relate to the child’s birthday or to a significant event that would enable a birth parent to, perhaps, contribute meaningfully. The reason I am raising this is that I usually use the analogy of when you have a friend who moves abroad. The first year in a Christmas card you might write quite a lot about your everyday life but, as the years go on, that becomes more and more difficult. It is no different for people who are severed through adoption. It is very difficult for the birth parent, who would in time have no context with that child’s life to have any meaningful way of being able to update what is happening in the family to the adoptive family, for example. That is formulaic, but it has also become very systemised. The other thing is that sometimes certainly our workers report instances where contact is used as a bargaining tool in care proceedings, and certainly adoption proceedings. I think that it is very dangerous practice to be using it as a bargaining tool perhaps to meet the needs specifically of birth parents. While it is important that we have some contact, so that they know that the child is still alive or is well, for their own emotional well-being, I think we need to be clear about the fact that the purpose of contact is about the child. Adoption is about the child. What we have found is that where adoptive families feel that decisions about contact have been

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After Adoption—Oral evidence (QQ 437–459) made in the child’s best interests, or with the child in mind, they are much more supportive of that and will want to continue that contact through. Also to mention direct contact, certainly this would be perhaps more likely among siblings, where you might have siblings placed with different adoptive families—I am talking about large sibling groups that may have been separated. I think that this does place quite a large burden on some adoptive families because, unless both or three parties of adoptive families are all committed to it with the same vigour, it may fall down to one particular party to be organising that—to perhaps have to organise the event that they might do together or the travel, or whatever it is. You often hear stories of adoptive families feeling quite burdened by the frequency of some of those arrangements or the demands that some of those arrangements place on them. Additionally, when siblings are reunited, of course, some of their behaviour can be very challenging and difficult to manage, and some adoptive families find it very, very difficult to come back from that and resume normal family life. So, there is a huge support need again for all parties in adoption around contact, both the preparation of contact and also a “washdown” post-direct contact arrangement. Q449 Baroness Morris of Bolton: Could I just have a very quick follow-up? I assume it is going to be different from family to family, is it not, but where contact has been started quite quickly in the process, do you find that that helped the child? We are talking about adoption being for the child, rather than maybe going a long, long time then suddenly having the shock of contact later on. Lynn Charlton: Where there is some kind of relationship—when I say that, I use that term very loosely—where it has been discussed with the adopted families that contact would be part of the plan, where perhaps the birth family and the adoptive family members have met each other, that all helps to produce a good exchange of contact or information and that can work very well for children. I do not know of many instances where contact is suddenly started without that being triggered by the adoptive families themselves. The adoptive family might say, “There is a need to be in touch with the birth family because we cannot answer all of the child’s questions”, or it might help them deal with some emotional issue, and it can be resumed on that basis if it has fallen off along the years, or if it was not in place in the first place. So usually it is triggered by the adoptive family. I think the key thing that I would say about contact is that when we are making adoption orders then we need to understand that we say to the adoptive parents, “Parent these children”, so they need to be in the driving seat with what actually happens. Q450 Baroness Eaton: My question follows on from Lady Morris’s. Do you think the current legislative framework, dealing with contact with both birth family members, including siblings, and the child at the various stages of the adoption process, is adequate or is legislative change needed in this area? Lynn Charlton: The key thing for me is that we need to have a duty to provide adoption support. That is the key. We need to support all parties with contact. It is very, very difficult for birth parents who predominantly come from lower socioeconomic groups, and often struggle with education, for them to be writing letters. We get people coming in all the time needing support with that, and it can be very meaningful for the child when that support is in place. Equally, adoptive parents might struggle with how to address certain issues or to ask certain

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After Adoption—Oral evidence (QQ 437–459) questions, so they will seek support too. So the key legislative change is about the postadoption support. The Chairman: That brings us very nicely on to post-adoption support, Baroness King. Q451 Baroness King of Bow: It is a very neat transition. I wonder if you support the introduction of a statutory duty on local authorities to provide post-adoption support and, if you do, how do you respond to the suggestion that you then need to provide support for special guardianship or for looked-after children who now have residence orders? Lastly, in terms of that prioritisation, how do you support adopted children, or how can you argue for giving more support to adopted children over those that are still in need but living at home? Lynn Charlton: The first thing that I would say is that adopted children are children in need, because they are the children who cannot go home. They are the children with the more complex of backgrounds usually. They are the children who have not been able to be rehabilitated. I find it quite astounding that, just because they are placed with an adoptive family who may be very resourceful in the things they have to offer that child, it does not mean to say that that child’s needs—their complex histories and their backgrounds and their attachment difficulties—get wiped out with the making of an adoption order. I think they are a child in need and I think they should be treated accordingly. Should they be prioritised over any other children in need? No, because they are all children in need. I recognise that you cannot— Q452 Baroness King of Bow: But if you are arguing for the introduction of a statutory duty on local authorities—which incidentally I do, but the Committee have different views on the matter—then you have to grapple with the problem that you are saying we should prioritise those children in resource terms above other permanency routes that children end up with. Lynn Charlton: I think all the children within the permanency route are children in need at different times, but they are not always children in need all at the same time. Our experience of running post-adoption services is that people need to dip in and out of these services. They also need to be tailored to those families. So, it is not that they engage with the service and they need it every single week for the rest of their lives. They need different things at different times, and those services can be delivered in different ways at different times. For example, the kinds of things that we would provide to families are: our helpline; our family days; children’s groups; children’s clubs; and parenting programmes. All those kind of things allow people to dip in and out of the services that they need, and they are not particularly expensive. I think it is wrong to say that actually we are increasing the burden on the state by providing post-adoption services, because I would say if those children returned to care with an adoption breakdown, we would not be looking at them being able to go into a foster— Baroness King of Bow: Sorry to interrupt—I hate it when politicians say, “Sorry to interrupt”, and then they just carry straight on. I do not think anyone would disagree with that. What people would disagree with is that it is not very expensive because the sorts of postadoption support that we are really talking about here are the assessed ones, where you have behavioural problems that need expensive therapeutic treatment, which a local authority may be paying for now but will not be paying for once the child is adopted. Lynn Charlton: I find it very difficult to understand what the argument would be about that, because if we want to make the family successful we need to put in the services to enable them 68

After Adoption—Oral evidence (QQ 437–459) to do that. Just because there is an adoption order—again, to go back to my point—it does not mean that that child stops being a child in need. If that child has that level of complex needs, then we need to do something about that because that child will come back into the arena of public care at some point or another and that family will fail. Q453 The Chairman: Can I ask you a question about the timing of this? In your experience, is most of this post-adoption support likely to come early on in the new relationship with the adoptive parents, or is there no indication? Is it just random, so that it comes at all sorts of times? Because if it is actually very much within, say, the first year after adoption, that is a more predictable thing than if it is going to be spread over five, 10 or 15 years? Lynn Charlton: I think people need some services in the lifetime of adoption, but I think the intensive services need to be put in to build the foundations of that adoptive family. I know that in the voluntary sector we are currently piloting an enhanced family finding service whereby those things would be put in place, and we are saying they need to be in place for two to three years, so we would say that all the services around parenting programmes, around therapeutic services for the child and so on need to be at least in the first two to three years. Q454 Baroness King of Bow: What about the problems that stereotypically emerge in the teenage years? Lynn Charlton: People still need to come to organisations like ours, who will be able to deal with that. But I think there is a myth about post-adoption services costing lots and lots of money. Quite often people who are having difficulties with their teenagers will come and they may be seen as a family and the young people might join a club to be with other adopted people or they might come to a young persons’ group, and that might be enough to be able to deal with some of the issues that that family are facing. So, it is not about creating dependency and it is not always about the kind of therapeutic intervention level of services. Q455 Baroness Knight of Collingtree: I was a little worried, Ms Charlton, about a phrase you used in answer to this question earlier on, when you said, “These are children who cannot go home”. Is it very rare for the adopted child to think of his adopted parents and their house as home? It worried me that the implication was that if they were adopted they did not have a home. Lynn Charlton: No. What I meant by that was the children who now cannot return to their family of origin. That is what I meant by that, and I think I also said that children are very clear about who parents them. They are very clear that, once they are in an adoptive family, that that is their family, but they also have this internal world that goes on that can quite often be very confused. Q456 Baroness Hamwee: You have been quite forceful about the importance of the availability of post-adoption services. Can you give any examples of best practice of how they are resourced at the moment, and can you also give us your views on an adoption passport of entitlement to specific services and any weaknesses there might be in that? Lynn Charlton: An example of good practice I would like to highlight to you is our SafeBase programme, which is a programme that we provide for adoptive families. We provide it within a year of placement, ideally, but if there are adoptions that are in crisis much later on and they

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After Adoption—Oral evidence (QQ 437–459) have not had any training, then obviously we would provide it for them too. The SafeBase programme is a very cost-effective programme. It has a component of family assessment, an educative programme where we teach adoptive parents skills and then a supportive element that can go on where they can join support groups or networks, and all that kind of thing. What we have had from the feedback from this programme is that adoptive parents feel that it really works. It gives them practical tools and it educates them about the type of children that they are taking on, so it educates about attachment and early life trauma and so on. We currently have a 98% success rate with people who have done the programme in terms of disruptions. We recently looked back over the last seven years and that was fairly consistent, so we know it works. Of course, there will be other services that other people provide. The thing that we are doing with SafeBase, which may be of interest to you, is that we have brought together private funding, voluntary sector expertise, the lifelong part of adoption, and put that on the table to develop partnerships with other voluntary agencies, so that we are sharing intellectual knowledge. We are also providing partnerships to local authorities on a match-funding basis. We have been running the programme for over seven years. But we started to roll out the whole concept of partnerships and working with other agencies to increase the public benefit in April 2010. We now have 21 local authorities currently signed up to the partnership. So that is an example of a very cost-effective, very innovative way for providing adoption support services to a lot of people. There is obviously the enhanced family finding service that is currently being developed by the voluntary sector and that I think is going to be launched at National Adoption Week. That will target children who have very particular needs, and ensure that the support is available. That is an innovative tool. In terms of the adoption passport, I think any mechanism that allows adoptive families to access support is a good thing. We have touched on this but to give priority status in terms of special educational needs is a good thing, although I did learn yesterday that there might be some restrictions on children with special educational needs from next year, so it will be interesting to see how that works for adopted families. I think it is a good thing that they have priority access to current services. The delays that some people experience with that are unacceptable and of course, within that context, the proposal is that they would have a parenting skills voucher, which also would enable them to be appropriately equipped. There are some downsides about that as well, because that presumes that all the services will be there for them to access, and I think that that does depend on where you live. At least what it does do is to give adoptive families choices and give them access to something that they do not have now. Q457 Baroness Hamwee: I do not want to put words in your mouth, but would I be correct in saying, from all of your evidence, that you regard adoption support as a continuum from the moment that someone first thinks about adoption, right through the order and beyond? Lynn Charlton: Absolutely, it is. It is something that people need to know is there and they can access when they need it, but they should not have barriers, financial or otherwise, put in their place. Q458 Viscount Eccles: Are the current legal provisions on the right to access information about adoption adequate, or should there be changes to the legislation? 70

After Adoption—Oral evidence (QQ 437–459) Lynn Charlton: Again, I think the framework is good. The framework of the legislation is good. We were very pleased that Regulation 15 from the Adoption Agencies Regulations 1983 was maintained in current legislation. That is the agency’s discretion around the sharing of information. That has been quite key for adopted people. I think there is some delay in accessing records from the appropriate adoption agency, so my agency might be doing the work and we would have to ask for the records from the agency in order to prepare the statement. Then we would have to go back to that agency and ask for their permission to share this. I think that that is cumbersome at times. It takes a long time and, when I look at the complaints to our agencies, the bulk of the complaints are about the length of time it takes to access those records from the appropriate agency. I would probably say that what we need to do is to look at whether we could actually insert some timescales into the regulations to just speed that up a little bit. The Chairman: Any other questions? Q459 Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top: Does your agency work nationally, or largely in the north-west? Lynn Charlton: We work in England and Wales, and we have a franchise partner for the parenting programme in Scotland. The Chairman: Thank you very much for your time. Are there any other points you would like to make to us here? If not, if any thoughts occur to you after this session, do not hesitate to be in touch with us. I have asked the Clerk to be in touch with you to get us a little more detail on your cost-effective post-adoption support programme, because I think that would be extremely helpful to the Committee. Thank you very much for all the work you have done in coming this morning. That is the end of our session.

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After Adoption: Safebase—Supplementary written evidence

After Adoption: Safebase—Supplementary written evidence After Adoption is one of the largest providers of adoption support services operating in England and Wales. Drawing on over twenty years’ experience, the organisation has developed The SafeBase Parenting Programme as a way of responding to the direct need for targeted adoption support. SafeBase is a parenting programme in three parts. The taught course takes place over four days and is delivered to 10 families at a time. The programme involves an initial Family Observation (with feedback) which acts as a learning platform from which parents can put the exercises and information they gain on the programme into perspective, and gain the knowledge needed to understand their family. The final element is the ongoing support groups. The effectiveness of the programme has been evaluated in two stages, initially in 2008 and with a follow up study taking place five years later. The programme was also accredited and validated by C4EO in March 2012, providing a quality benchmark to commissioners of children services. Key findings highlighted: the combination of attachment theory and appropriate parenting techniques makes SafeBase highly effective for adoptive families (providing both understanding and a set of practical tools). Parents who attended were able to adapt their parenting, and appreciably change their response to challenging behaviour, as a direct result of the SafeBase training. Parents attributed a sustained ability to deal with challenging behaviour to their knowledge and understanding of attachment disorder and the range of practical and nurturing tools provided to them by the SafeBase programme, and this knowledge continued to inform their parenting in the long term. Families reported sustained improvements in their adopted child(ren)’s behaviour, citing bonding and improved attachment between parents and their adoptive child(ren). Changes in the behaviour of their adoptive child(ren) led to broad and long term benefits in the home, with peers, and at school. As a result of the success of the programme we started to look for ways to make this more widely available to adoptive parents. We recognised there would be limitations if we were to do this solely using of own resources. In 2009 we developed a formal partnership with another Voluntary Adoption Agency in Scotland enabling them to utilise our intellectual property to deliver the programme. In 2010 After Adoption worked with John Timpson, a high street retailer who has an interest in adoption and fostering, to raise £1M of funding for five years through his retail outlets to support the wider delivery of Safebase. With this investment we sought to build partnerships with Local Authority to enable the programme to be to be delivered on a much wider scale and remove some of the financial barriers to accessing adoption support. 72

After Adoption: Safebase—Supplementary written evidence

The partnership agreements are built upon the following principles: formal agreement, matched funding, partnership working, shared promotion and public exposure, and participation in a research programme. To date After Adoption has established partnerships involving 28 Local Authorities across England and Wales and this continues to grow. The programme currently costs £1,995 (£2,195 in London) for one family to attend. The saving stands at approximately £30,000 £50,000 for every year that the child is in care, plus the incalculable costs of a disrupted adoption (such as crime, mental health issues, academic performance and the risk of repeating the cycle). The success rate of families staying together where parents have attended Safebase is 98%. To date the programme has benefitted the lives of 445 children, with 294 families attending the programme since 2005. The 2% of families who witnessed an adoption breakdown were noted to already be in severe crisis prior to the programme, having had previous CAMHS involvement. We suggest that the programme is best delivered within the first year of placement though referrals to the programme are not restricted to this. October 2012

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Alliance for Child-Centred Care—Written evidence

Alliance for Child-Centred Care—Written evidence Summary The Alliance for Child-Centred Care1 believes that adoption has a key role to play in caring for children and young people who are unable to continue living with their birth family. We welcome the Government’s recently published Action Plan for Adoption and the legislative proposals that have been announced as part of the forthcoming Children and Families Bill. We support the focus of the reform agenda on achieving a less bureaucratic and more proactive adoption process. However, we are concerned that this needs to be seen as one part of a wider framework of support for these children. Individual member submissions will deal with the detail of adoption legislation and processes. Background At the 31st March 2011 65,620 children and young people were looked-after, but these children are not a homogenous group. Looked-after children come into care for a variety of reasons, at different ages and are cared for in different placements. Some will only be looked-after for a short period before returning home, but others will need a new permanent home. This difference is vital when considering the role adoption should play in the care system because every child needs a high quality placement based on their needs, wishes and feelings. Child-centred placements There are children and young people for whom adoption may be the right answer, but there are also a large number for whom a different placement will be needed. The current focus on adoption must not lead to it being prioritised in decision making over other permanency options which could better meet the needs of the child. It is vital that decisions about where to place a child are focused on their needs and how best to meet them. The adoption system cannot be viewed in isolation, but should be seen within the context of the whole child protection system. All elements of the system including are closely interrelated and impact upon each other. They need to work effectively together to find a safe, loving and permanent home for children, wherever that may be. For many looked-after children the right placement may be found with family and friends carers, in a foster home, a children’s home or living independently. Each of these placements, when they meet the individual needs, wishes and feelings of The Alliance is a broad coalition of organisations that work with children and young people who either have care experience or have been affected by the care system, and who come together to promote improvements in the care system in England. 1

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Alliance for Child-Centred Care—Written evidence children and are of high quality and properly supported, can provide the home that a child or young person needs. It is important therefore to identify the financial systems that act as disincentives to achieving the most appropriate ‘placement’ and legal status for the child. We need to ensure that any forthcoming legislation or changes to the adoption process work towards a system which has at its heart a drive to find the right ‘placement’ for each individual child. Whilst the reforms to the adoption process are welcome, to improve outcomes for all children in the care system the Government must rebalance its policy making and focus on reform across the entire system to ensure that it better meets the needs of all children who enter the care system. Members of the Alliance of Child Centred Care                      

Action for Children A National Voice Barnardo’s British Association for Adoption and Fostering (BAAF) British Association of Social Workers (BASW) CAFCASS Catch 22 Children England Coram Children’s Legal Centre Family Rights Group NSPCC National Association of Independent Reviewing Officers (NAIRO) The Care Leavers Association National Children’s Bureau (NCB) NYAS The Adolescent and Children’s Trust (TACT) The Children’s Society The Fostering Network The Who Cares? Trust Together Trust Voice Young Minds

July 2012

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Association of Directors of Children’s Services (ADCS)—Written evidence

Association of Directors of Children’s Services (ADCS)—Written evidence 1. Introduction 1.1. The Association of Directors of Children’s Services welcomes the opportunity to comment on proposals to legislate to improve the adoption process. Adoption is a vital part of the system for protecting children from abuse and providing caring and stable environments for those who can no longer live with their families. ADCS is committed to improving the process. 1.2. Over the last six months, ADCS has worked closely with government to examine the current system for adoption and make proposals for improvement. We strongly welcome government’s engagement with us on this issue and the openness with which we have been able to discuss potential ideas for improving both the timeliness of adoption decisions and the recruitment and assessment of adopters. In particular we welcome proposals to: .

place a expectation on courts and LAs that care proceedings will not last longer than 6 months,

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introduce an obligation on adoption agencies, including local authorities, to refer children to the National Adoption register after 3 months,

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amend the role of courts and adoption panels to remove duplication in decision making on adoption and care planning as recommended by the Family Justice Review,

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reform the process for assessing adopters so that the process is faster, without sacrificing rigour, and

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undertake research into adoption breakdown and the use of Special Guardianship orders to improve understanding of the benefits and challenges in these alternative forms of permanence.

1.3. Alongside the reform to the Family Justice system and the reforms of social work, we believe that these measures will substantially improve the system for adoption, both in terms of speed and in terms of the quality of decision making. Much of the necessary reform does not require legislation, or changes in guidance, though we indicate where some amendments might be useful below. Much of the procedural changes proposed in the adoption action plan reflects what is already best practice in local authorities and changes in guidance and duties will only go so far. 1.4. Directors of Children's Services have a system-wide responsibility for services for vulnerable children and we are keen therefore to present adoption in its wider context . As with all social work, the skills and practice of front line social workers makes the difference for children and families and their experience of the system. Reviews of

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Association of Directors of Children’s Services (ADCS)—Written evidence social work in general and of child protection in particular have emphasised the negative effect of guidance and targets on the use of professional judgement in a given case. A highly trained and confident profession is the most effective solution, rather than increased guidance. We indicate below where we think that restrictions should be removed from legislation or guidance in order to free up professionals to use their judgement. 2. Time taken to place children 2.1. The Association acknowledges the significant research evidence into attachment that shows that very young children need stable relationships with adults from a very early age in order to support their emotional and behavioural development. Adoption offers this stability where it can be accomplished sufficiently quickly. The older a child is when a permanent solution is being sought for their care, the less likely it is that a suitable adoptive family can be found, though this is not always the case. Where adoption is seen as the right solution for a particular child it is vital that decisions are taken in a timely manner by all the agencies involved in care proceedings. However, there are children for whom decisions can be made quickly, but finding adoptive families can be a long process. 2.2. It is important to note that adoption does not happen in isolation. Adoption is one possible end to a very complex process of assessing and managing risks to children from their families and carers. The age of a child when they reach the stage of being considered for adoption will be, in part, a consequence of the decisions taken prior to or during their time in care. 2.3. When considering variation in the time taken to place children for adoption between local authorities, it is important to note that the numbers of children considered for adoption in any year is very small and thus large fluctuations can be caused by one or two cases taking longer. This is not to say that poor practice does not exist, but that close interrogation can reveal understandable reasons for taking longer. Sibling groups or individuals with complex needs (or even sibling groups containing one or more child with complex needs) are more difficult to place, especially within a strict timescale, but not impossible. The accountability framework must not create a perverse incentive not to seek adoption for these children. 2.4. We commend the approach taken by the Department for Education and the Children's Improvement Board in undertaking diagnostic work that focuses on understanding and improvement. Understanding variation requires being able to identify which part of the system causes delay. In the past comparable performance information on time taken by local authorities and by courts has been poor or unavailable, making analysis difficult. Communication between agencies has been similarly patchy. The formation of Local Family Justice Boards and closer working between courts, local authorities and CAFCASS will provide the opportunity for the joint scrutiny of the Ministry of Justice data on court performance alongside that of the adoption scorecard produced by the Department for Education. This approach will be required if the six month time limit is to be fixed in legislation.

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Association of Directors of Children’s Services (ADCS)—Written evidence 2.5. The time taken for a child to be adopted begins when they first come to the attention of children's social services, and contributing factors include:  how long parents are given to demonstrate their capacity to parent;  what other permanence options are explored;  how long care proceedings and placement orders take to go through the courts;  how long it takes to find an adoptive family Each of these factors may introduce delay. Some will be necessary, others avoidable. More detail is given on each of these stages below. 2.6. Early intervention and family support Reform to the child protection system, placing emphasis on early help and on services for those “on the edge of care” may have the effect of delaying entry to care where it is eventually necessary and thus suitability for adoption. We highlight this tension between family support and permanent adoption not to advocate for one side or the other, but to emphasise the complexity of the system – such tensions must be resolved on a case by case basis with a good understanding of the circumstances and timetable for the child. The concept of a timetable based on child development is a helpful one, as it prompts consideration of the different needs of different age groups – while fears about attachment are relevant to a very young child, an adolescent may require different consideration. This requires skilled social work judgements supported by high quality supervision and local authorities are working to implement the recommendations of the Social Work Reform Board and the Munro review in this regard. Where care proceedings are unequivocally required, action must be taken decisively – research from Cafcass reports improvements in the timeliness of care applications since 20082. 2.6.1. Perceptions that adoption is the inevitable end point of the involvement with social services is not helpful in building the professional relationships necessary for effective social work. One of the results of the adoption targets introduced in 2002 Adoption Act was to encourage accusations that local authorities were taking children from families in order to meet adoption targets. We refute that this was ever the case, but the perception that it was makes it very difficult to engage with families. We would not wish to see any financial or other incentive that appears to incentivise adoption and risks creating perverse incentives that do not take into account the interests of the child. 2.6.2. For those children whose parents or carers cannot demonstrate improved parenting, there are a number of options. Adoption is by no means the only form of permanence suitable for these children. Many authorities have successfully applied for Special Guardianship Orders or kinship care arrangements that allow wider family members to care for the child. It is unclear from the national data how far special guardianship has been used instead of adoption and in which Three weeks in November... three years on... Cafcass care application study 2012 http://www.cafcass.gov.uk/pdf/Cafcass%20Care%20Application%20Study%202012%20FINAL.pdf 2

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Association of Directors of Children’s Services (ADCS)—Written evidence circumstances – while this would be interesting to know, it is most important to understand the relative outcomes and we look forward to the research being undertaken on both adoption breakdowns and the use of special guardianship. 2.6.3. There is, rightly, a legal duty on local authorities to consider kinship care arrangements prior to care proceedings. Where a kinship carer can be identified quickly who is suitable, this may avoid the need for longer proceedings necessary for formal adoption and thus offer a child a stable home more quickly. However, the need to engage with family members has been cited as a cause of delay in proceedings as potential carers are identified at a late stage and require assessment for their suitability before legal proceedings can continue. It would be helpful therefore, if explicit guidance was available to local authorities and the judiciary on how far kinship carers must be considered once proceedings have begun. 2.7. Care proceedings and adoption proceedings 2.7.1. The Family Justice Review's recommendations and findings of Justice Ryder's wide consultation and the collaborative work mentioned above should all dramatically improve the length of time care proceedings spend in court. Local authorities have their own part to play in those improvements, including improving submissions to court and the quality of evidence provided and these form part of the wider social work reform. As noted in the Cafcass study cited at 2.6, there are already signs of improvement in the quality of social work evidence. 2.7.2. We support the changes in regulations to amend the function of adoption panels by removing the best interest decision for adoption from the remit. Given the need for this decision to be confirmed by the court, this amendment removes duplication from the system. It should be emphasised that this does not mean that we support the abolition of panels and Directors highly value their contribution to the matching process. We are aware that others have continued to express concern about the removal of the best interest decision from panels. We do not share those concerns. We believe the Family Justice Review showed that the role for panels has little if any evidence of adding value to an already complex process. The process has many layers of checks and balances for the care plan within the local authority before the courts are asked for approval. 2.7.3. We strongly believe that it is wrong to separate the process of care proceedings and the later stages of adoption. By separating this process from the care application prepared by the local authority, delay may be introduced through additional legal processes and assessments and interruption in personnel managing the case. 2.8. Faster family finding 2.8.1. Once proceedings have begun, concurrent planning and fostering for adoption both provide ways of allowing the forming of attachments while decisions are being made, reducing one effect of delay. However, having these arrangements in place does not mitigate the need for local authorities and courts to do everything

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Association of Directors of Children’s Services (ADCS)—Written evidence possible to make decisions without delay, not least because the number of adopters willing to undertake this process is as yet not widely tested. Calls for foster carers to be encouraged to adopt should be tempered by the knowledge that there is a similar shortage of foster carers providing important care for those children for whom adoption is not a solution. 2.8.2. It is well known that there is a shortage of prospective adopters overall and particularly for certain groups of children, those with special needs or suspected developmental problems, sibling groups and some minority ethnic groups. 2.8.3. Ethnicity is important in terms of a child’s relationship with their adoptive family and ensuring a supply of adopters that reflect the ethnic background of the community and the care population is vital. But seeking a perfect ethnic match should not result in significant delay. It should be noted that it is the adopter’s sensitivity to the ethnic identity of adopted children that is important in making a match and that this does not require an exact ethnic match but the ability of adopters to reflect on how they might accommodate the child’s sense of identity. This may be easier for potential adopters from the same ethnic background of the child, but not exclusively. 2.8.4. Ethnicity and identity are only one of many factors to be considered in the matching process, and will be balanced by the adoption agencies undertaking the assessment and matching process. Neither seeking the “perfect” ethnic match, nor an ethnicity blind approach to matching will meet the needs of children nor allow the required professional discretion on the part of frontline social workers who know the child and family. 3. Recruitment, retention and assessment of potential adopters 3.1. There are a number of ways in which local authorities extend their reach in terms of finding families for children, including improved marketing and recruitment locally, forming consortia with other local authorities and voluntary adoption agencies and referring to the National Adoption Register. 3.2. We fully support the requirement for referral to the National Adoption Register for children waiting more than three months to be matched with potential adopters and work to improve the targeted marketing to potential adopters that have the skills and experience to adopt some of the more hard to place children. There is scope for this process to be supported by a National Adoption Gateway to share good practice on recruitment and marketing, to provide a signposting service for people considering adoption and to disseminate customer service standards. 3.3. There is some evidence that the assessment process has put off some potential adopters, though those who go through the process successfully value the rigour of the preparatory work undertaken. We have been working on a simplified assessment process, that retains the rigour of the current system but allows more flexibility in the questions asked and the way that information is presented. There is little information about potential adopters who do not go on to adopt, their characteristics and reasons

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Association of Directors of Children’s Services (ADCS)—Written evidence for dropping out of the process. There is a tension between asking the right questions to assess suitability, asking questions related to national data collections (such as the ethnicity or sexuality of potential adopters) and minimising the intrusion into potential adopters’ lives. 3.4. We recognise the difficulties in merging training and assessment and it is hoped that the new process will assist in separating the two aims of the preparation process for adopters. 3.5. We attach as additional evidence a technical paper prepared by the Association of Directors of Children’s Services and voluntary adoption agencies and submitted to the Department for Education making proposals for the improvement of assessment and of post-adoption support. While recommendations for improving assessment are underway, we are yet to have a formal response to the proposal for the adoption support passport. 19 July 2012

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Association of Directors of Children’s Services (ADCS)—Oral evidence (QQ 548-566)

Association of Directors of Children’s Services (ADCS)—Oral evidence (QQ 548-566) Evidence Session No. 9.

Heard in Public.

Questions 548-566

TUESDAY 30 OCTOBER 2012 Members present Baroness Butler-Sloss (Chairman) Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top Baroness Eaton Viscount Eccles Baroness Hamwee Baroness King of Bow Baroness Knight of Collingtree Baroness Morris of Bolton Lord Morris of Handsworth Baroness Walmsley Lord Warner ________________ Examination of Witnesses Debbie Jones, President, Association of Directors of Children’s Services, and Director of Children’s Services, Lambeth, Matt Dunkley, Immediate Past President, Association of Directors of Children’s Services, and Director of Children’s Services, East Sussex, and Andrew Webb, Vice President, Association of Directors of Children’s Services, and Director of Children’s Services, Stockport.

Q548 The Chairman: May I thank you very much for coming? It is a formidable team from the directors who have come to give evidence to us. We are also very grateful to you for extremely interesting written evidence that we received recently. We have just received some further evidence from you last night, which we are looking forward to. I have not read it yet, nor have the Members of the Committee, but the directors have really come up trumps in giving it to us. We have a lot of questions to ask you, as you know, so I hope you have lots of stamina. I start with Lord Warner. Lord Warner: Does the process of assessing prospective adopters take too long? Does the Government’s proposal for a six-month assessment process strike the right balance between

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Association of Directors of Children’s Services (ADCS)—Oral evidence (QQ 548-566) reducing delay and adequately preparing adopters, and what do you think are the real constraints on doing things even faster than six months? Matt Dunkley: If I may, I will make a start on that because my authority is one of the authorities trialling the new two-stage, six-month assessment and the new PAR form. It has been very successful so far—it is very early days—and we are seeing the fact that the first part of stage 1 of the process is adopter-led making quite a significant difference to the way adopters feel about it, and also making a difference to the speed with which some of those things are processed. We are also seeing that the second stage, the assessment stage, becomes more of a negotiation between the adopters and the agency, in terms of a discussion about how long that needs to be in their personal circumstances. Where people are ready for a very quick process, and the social workers judge that is possible and is the right thing to do, we are able to do that more quickly. We have seen a couple come through in four-and-a-half to five months where that has been the case. As you might expect, we have also seen a number of cases where the assessment is slightly more complex, and gets into areas that take longer to assess and to deal with. I think my view, from the very initial soundings, is that the framework is just about right with the two stages in the six-month deadline, as long as there is good, professional judgment about the right length of assessment for the individual adopters and not a kind of “one size fits all” or race to the finish line for the sake of it. It has to be based on good, professional assessment of the adopters’ needs and the way the assessment should take place. Lord Warner: You are a reasonable-sized local authority, are you not? Matt Dunkley: Yes, we are. Lord Warner: Does that mean that this is also about what your scale of operations is, if you are going to achieve this six-month timescale? Matt Dunkley: We cover a population of just over 500,000, so we are a smallish county but a largish authority. It does mean that we can sustain a reasonable-sized adoption team, and there might be different issues for authorities with smaller populations and smaller teams being stretched in a number of different directions. We have actually put additional resource into this. Our council is in very difficult times. It voted extra money into the adoption team to allow this to proceed successfully. So far, it looks as though the number of adoptions completed in the current year, which will end in April, might be double what it was last year. Andrew Webb: The issue of speed has to be determined by the individual adopter or the applicant. Very few people just wake up one day and decide to adopt. Everyone comes at the process at a different stage of understanding and different stage of reflection, and some people have very clear ideas about the sort of family they would like to create, the adoption they would like to go for, and then discover that those children are not available. Others have done a lot more research before they come in to local authorities and are much clearer about the nature of children waiting for adoption, and you have to deal with each according to their level of understanding. We also have had quite a lot of feedback in my authority from adopters who appreciated the opportunity to reflect halfway through the process. They get through the initial stage of, “Yes, it

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Association of Directors of Children’s Services (ADCS)—Oral evidence (QQ 548-566) all seems to be okay. You seem to be the right sort of applicant to adopt”. But then, considering the impact adoption would actually have on them, the rest of their family and their extended family, and thinking a bit more about what they have learned through the approval process and the training groups that we set up—and we do a lot of group training because it is very effective—it enables people to reappraise what it is they think they can offer a child and appreciate very much the opportunity to slow things down, recast their ideas, and then come back to us with a much clearer idea of what sort of family they hope to create. Q549 Viscount Eccles: How effective has the national Adoption Register been in expanding the pool of adopters and the acceleration that you mentioned? What do you think about the Government’s proposal for children to be referred after three months’ waiting, and will it substantially change the position? Debbie Jones: We believe that the Adoption Register, while being a good thing, will have had a comparatively limited impact on expanding the pool of adopters, per se. It has assisted in accelerating the matching process, because obviously you have a bigger pool there. In terms of expanding the pool—particularly when you appreciate that the Adoption Register is primarily about those children and young people that one cannot place, i.e. whose needs are perhaps a little bit more complicated—I think certainly the experience that we have had nationally, and indeed locally, would say it is not the answer to everything. In relation to the three months, in my authority we refer children to the Register before the three months are up, rather than waiting for that. If I may, I would also like to make an additional point on the speed of assessment. I would obviously confirm everything that my colleagues have said. I think it is an advantage that we each come from very different local authorities, so you do have some contrasts here. In my authority, certainly we would believe that adoption is the most significant decision that often a family, a prospective adopter, will take. Taking enough time is crucial, but too much time can actually undermine the process and undermine the decision-making, so at no point should speed be used to compromise quality. We need to be absolutely clear about that, and I am sure you have heard that. From my own authority’s perspective—which, although a big London borough compared to East Sussex, is obviously a very different cup of tea—through the consortia of arrangements we are able to ensure that economies of scale are therefore achieved. Matt Dunkley: Sorry, can I just add one thing on the adoption gateway into the Adoption Register and so on? I think there is an issue for local authorities to address on the possibility of perverse incentives about recruiting adopters. It is possible that a small local authority might decide not to actively recruit adopters, because it can make its adoption matches through other local authorities over recruiting adopters and then using the Adoption Register and through the gateway for those referrals. We have been having conversations between us in local authorities about how we can mitigate against the possibility of perverse incentives, and to get together as adoption agencies to make sure that that does not happen, that the maximum numbers of adopters nationally are being recruited and there is a good local spread, and I think we are very aware of that risk if we are not careful. The Chairman: Do potential adopters get held on to by, say, small local authorities who will not disgorge them, even though there may not be a child at that moment available? There is an

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Association of Directors of Children’s Services (ADCS)—Oral evidence (QQ 548-566) imbalance, is there not, between the number of children who have had a placement order and the number of people available to adopt them? Is there any sort of holding on? Andrew Webb: I imagine there must be a little bit of holding on. The amount of time, resource and human emotion a team invests in getting an applicant through to approval is huge, and if you think they are ideal, you might just hang on to them if you think there is a child who might be around the corner in your authority. My authority took a policy decision to over-recruit. We export adopters around the northwest region on a regular basis. There is a very small trickle of income associated with that through the interagency fees. It helps us keep the team viable, but also gives us first choice from a bigger pool, and that is quite deliberate, but we do not hold on to people beyond the three months. Viscount Eccles: Can I just follow that up? This seems very important. It is either realistic to think about a national pool or it is not realistic to think about a national pool. There are a lot of different pools, according to the circumstances of the authority and the co-operation with other authorities, and so on. Should this be solved from the bottom up—if I may be allowed to call authorities “the bottom”—as opposed to from the top down, which is whoever—the Department? Andrew Webb: I think referring to it as “the bottom” is fine. There is almost nothing a council does that is more rooted in its community than recruiting foster carers and adopters to look after its most vulnerable children. It is absolutely at the grass roots of local authority activity. Your service needs to reflect your local need. I imagine we would end up with a poorer picture overall if everything was nationally driven through a pool. The core needs to remain at a local level. There are many formal and informal consortia working, though. Neighbouring authorities get together, do recruitment together, they share resources and then they move apart and new consortia are formed, and there are some very formal consortia. But for the more difficult-toplace children, a national scheme does need to exist. There is little doubt in my mind about that. As a consequence, we see strange patterns in the national picture. We place children in London, and London authorities place children in the north-west, because the match is just unique. Q550 Baroness Hamwee: You have already begun to talk about the gateway. On the other side of the coin of avoiding perverse incentives, how will a gateway—you use the term “market”, which I think is correct—attract additional adopters? Can you say a word about resources and what the role of the gateway should be, whether it is about initial advice and guidance or something wider? Matt Dunkley: The creation of the gateway, which came from some work on a group that we were represented on, was a recognition of the fact that in marketing terms we have one week a year, Adoption Week, where there is a national campaign around adoption, and the gateway, if the marketing side of that was handled properly, could do two things. It could raise the profile and have more regular marketing around recruiting adopters. It could also do some of the firstprinciples exchange of information about adoption, which adopters tell us they like to do and sometimes prefer to do with someone other than the local authority they want to approach to be assessed as an adopter. Sometimes adopters are fearful of asking what appear to be idiotic questions or personal questions about, “Will I be disqualified if you knew this about me?” or,

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Association of Directors of Children’s Services (ADCS)—Oral evidence (QQ 548-566) “There is this in my family background. Is that going to be a problem?” The benefit of an adoption gateway—and I know there are national agencies that do some of this—is that, if it was all funnelled through one point, some of those basic questions and pieces of information could be exchanged, anonymously if necessary, so that people can get a better and a more realistic picture. The realism around adoption works both ways. You have people who have an unrealistic expectation of how easy it is going to be and how great a prospect they are going to be as adopters. Equally you have people who rule themselves out for absolutely ridiculous reasons that are never going to be an issue. You want to capture those people and say, “No, you are going to be a good adopter. We want you in. We want you as part of that”. We see the gateway playing some of that role. The slightly dangerous side of this would be if the adoption gateway became an adoption “porch”—as I have heard it referred to elsewhere in the DfE—and started to assume a role around some quality assurance judgment on adoption agencies, or gets further into the adoption field. We would not be in favour of that because we could see that would be quite a difficult role to do. It needs really good customer service standards because we do repeatedly get information from adopters that the first contact they had with an agency really put them off, and there is just too much of that evidence for it not to be true in some circumstances. However much as local authorities we want to say, “We think our teams are good”, we cannot verify that every authority in the country is doing it absolutely right. Therefore, we need really good customer service standards, a welcome for people, realistic exchange of information to address some of the issues that adopters say have put them off, and then an appropriate referral: “Here are a number of agencies in your area, including the local authority but also voluntary agencies, who you might want to approach, and we will give you their information”. As long as it remains a gateway and not a porch, we are very enthusiastic about it. Baroness Hamwee: Who is paying for it, or should be paying for it? Matt Dunkley: The contract has just been agreed, I believe, and is paid for by the DfE. Debbie Jones: Yes, it has. Q551 Baroness Knight of Collingtree: Can we talk for a moment about sibling groups. How difficult is it for local authorities to place sibling groups for adoption together? Should they be placed together in that way, and is there a real possibility of further delay that might be affecting an adoption if that is the case? Debbie Jones: This is a really complex area and we have put quite a lot of thought into it, not just as an association but I can assure you that local authorities, and indeed voluntary organisations, will have done the same. We have just in the last week published our latest safeguarding pressures phase 3 research, which demonstrates very clearly that sibling groups are one of those core cohorts that wait longest. One might say that is not rocket science, but it is quite good to have that evidence, and that evidence is from something like 75% of our local authorities. You would expect and we firmly believe that, wherever possible and wherever it is in the children’s interests, they should be placed together. That might mean waiting longer for the right placement but how long is too long? That is the kind of debate that we are getting into at the moment. Certainly the evidence shows that if the plans are made quickly enough—and some of the Family Justice Review changes that are being implemented now should expedite 86

Association of Directors of Children’s Services (ADCS)—Oral evidence (QQ 548-566) some of that—then children, including sibling groups, are placed more quickly. You then get into a very finely balanced judgment, around delay and placement in a permanent home, of what is in the best interests of a child or children. Certainly, what we hear from children and young people overall, particularly those who have been placed separately over many years back, is that the loss of contact with their sibling is a very major issue. Having said that, there will be those exceptional circumstances in which placement separately is in the interests of the child, but it always has to be driven by the interests of a child or young person. Baroness Knight of Collingtree: Is it sometimes the case that delays are caused by adopted parents being uncertain about their ability to take on more than one child? Is that something that causes delay? Debbie Jones: As part of the approval process and the assessment process, that kind of reassurance and the contact with other adopters is particularly important there, because it is incumbent on us, using all the resources at our collective disposal, to ensure that we provide reassurance where, indeed, it is reassurance that should be provided. There are of course some circumstances in which it would not be appropriate to push adopters. At the end of the day, we are in the business of finding the right families for our most vulnerable young people, and that has to be the first and foremost consideration. Andrew Webb: That is the evidence from 75% of local authorities. I can give you some anecdotal evidence from one. In the last four years we have placed for adoption two sibling groups, one of three, one of four, both with complex ethnic backgrounds. Baroness Knight of Collingtree: Three and four children? Andrew Webb: Three in one, four in the other. Both took longer than 12 months. Both took less than two years. Is that delay acceptable? The children had been kept together in their foster placements, so they came into care together and, while the core process is going on, you keep them together and, therefore, you make it so much harder to separate them the longer you keep them together in care. In those two examples, we did find adopters. We had to make all sorts of arrangements to make the placement work and then support it, but it can be done, and I would say the delay was absolutely worth every day in those two families’ cases. This is not a new problem. When I was a practising social worker, I can remember splitting siblings because one was so difficult to place it was making life for the other one impossible, and this is something we have to do on an individual basis. You heard the Deputy Commissioner refer you back to the paramountcy principle a minute ago, and this is absolutely where we are. Q552 Viscount Eccles: Rather than thinking about sibling groups, would we be right to worry about just saying “child”, and should we sometimes be saying “boys” and “girls” because of different characteristics and different behaviour and different outcomes? Matt Dunkley: There will be some sibling groups where gender will be an issue, in looking at the characteristics and whether the decision to place separately or together is the right one. Age is another factor. There are a range of factors. You also have sibling groups where there might be more than one parent involved, so you have half-siblings and so on, and there are a range of issues around attachment and all those things. The message is there is no hard-and-fast rule. You need to assess the children together and assess the position together.

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Association of Directors of Children’s Services (ADCS)—Oral evidence (QQ 548-566) I think the placement of sibling groups is one of the areas where we need to take a really long, hard look about whether we are doing enough to enable new adoptive parents to take that step, because I think there is a massive financial issue around taking on large groups of children. Part of the issues around the adoption passport, which we urged the Government to look at with all urgency, is whether there are things in the benefits and tax system they could do to help that would ease the way. I am not saying that finances are a make-or-break, but they are an issue for some families. Getting into the area of post-adoption support, the whole package of post-adoption support, whether you break the sibling group or whether you do not, is often going to be determined by the existence of those siblings. The resources involved in the post-adoption support of a large sibling group are often considerably more than an individual child, obviously. Equally, if you split them, then there is often therapeutic support or contact arrangements around the split that have to form part of the post-adoption plan. But it is an area where I think local authorities can look to Government and say, “Are you doing enough to help this? We can do so much with post-adoption support”. I do think the Government could be doing more. Andrew Webb: I just wanted to refer back to the point about adopters’ anxiety in taking on sibling groups. We do have evidence of adopters being approved for children of a certain age, certain numbers of children, and then, when it comes down to it, they choose a single child from a different age group and we sort out the matching later. Because of the reality of the complexity of some families, what people thought they could cope with when they were going through the adoption process, when they really look into the detail they find they cannot. You have hit on a point there. We do approve people for larger numbers than we place with them, because in reality they do not feel able to take on that challenge. Q553 Baroness Walmsley: I would like to move on to another potential cause for delay and ask you whether placements for adoption are ever delayed due to a desire for a perfect ethnic match, and is new legislation required in this area or does the current framework suffice? Debbie Jones: We would welcome a refinement to guidance, so that race and ethnicity should not be an unnecessary barrier to adoption for all children. However, we do not believe that more legislation is required and we are very clear on that point. Having been a social worker for a number of years and dealt with many adopters, what is always important is the sensitivity of the adopter to the race and ethnicity issue, rather than the particular, “The colour, the blend, is it absolutely right? Is there an absolute cultural match?” Certainly, make-or-break adoptions are rarely created by an absolutely perfect ethnic match. We are absolutely clear that we do not need any more legislation, but support, guidance and refinement, yes, absolutely. It should never act as a barrier. I can remember back many years ago when it was actually seen as absolutely the wall over which you could not go, and it should never be that. Baroness Knight of Collingtree: On that point I remember, once a long time ago, the adopters wanted to think of the child as their own. They were not actually racist but they wanted to have a child that could have been theirs and looked like theirs. I remember arguing about this point with them. Does that point still come up, or not? Andrew Webb: If you talk to people who were adopted by adults from a completely different ethnic background, they have a very wide range of stories to tell. On balance, the majority say that the closer the match the better, but the sensitivity to need is the greatest thing. There are

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Association of Directors of Children’s Services (ADCS)—Oral evidence (QQ 548-566) people who have grown up in rural communities, where it is so obvious that they are not part of that community that they have a lot of explaining to do for the whole of their life about why they are so different. As adults we can deal with rationalisation, but as children it is a lot harder. I think the idea that we should not take any notice of it, in order to speed things up, would be completely the wrong end of the spectrum. At what point do we say, “Trying to find a match is getting in the way of progress here”, and how many things can you have going in parallel so that, if you cannot find a match, there is a good family there? It is what adoption teams throughout the country are struggling with. What you do not want to do is get adopters’ expectations up that a child might be placed with them and then that child does not arrive. It is hard to imagine just how much a family will invest in the idea of a child coming to them. You cannot do too much in parallel, but you cannot be overoptimistic about a precise match. It slows some placements down, but I do not have any experience from the north-west, certainly, that it slows things down unduly. It is something that needs to be taken into account, with, if not a match of sorts, then a very clear decision about what support that adoptive family will get in order to deal with the issues which the child brings with them that are over and above issues that all children bring with them. Q554 Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top: How have local authorities responded to the changes in adoption panels? We are aware that they have changed. We are interested in your experience of that, and do you think the decision-making process has been enhanced or diminished by the changes? What do you think about the current system? We also wanted to ask: do you see the IROs as having a critical role in the new procedure? Matt Dunkley: If I may, I will have a first crack at the first part of that and invite my colleagues to contribute their experiences. The debate around adoption panels, and whether they are a cause of delay, a good or a bad thing and so on, is not a simple one. In my authority our experience of our adoption panel is that it is a force for good. It is very positive. In my authority they meet weekly in one part of the county or another, so they do not induce delay. The recommendation from the Family Justice Review, the duplication of court decisions and rubberstamping—if that is the right phrase—the decision-maker’s decision at a panel for adoption being the plan for a child being removed does make sense, although the early feedback is there are some complications in some parts of the country. I was talking to Andrew about this before we came in, as to whether he had experienced this. Some lawyers think that the decision-maker in the local authority, the person who recommends adoption as the plan to court, now has to go through a series of triangulations of their decision, in order to make it legally defensible from challenge once in court. We are working with the DfE as to whether this has created a new problem that we are now going to have to try to solve. In any event, most decision-makers would want someone else to moderate their decision and give a view on it. I was quite keen on the idea of using the panel in a voluntary capacity to do that, if it did not slow things down. I think there was some evidence that, in some parts of the country, panels slowed the decision-making down for children and that clearly needed to change. For good practice reasons, I do think the decision-maker’s decision probably needs somebody else to moderate it before it comes before a judge. We are all coming to arrangements locally to achieve that, but we need to overcome the civil challengeability barrier first to make sure we have not created a problem for ourselves.

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Association of Directors of Children’s Services (ADCS)—Oral evidence (QQ 548-566) Debbie Jones: Yes. I think that the experience that we have in a busy London borough, and the feedback I am getting from my staff indicates that that there is a fair bit of work to be done. What you do not want to do is dilute the decision-making in any way. Removing duplication is not the same as the risks of diluting it, and certainly the risk of legal challenge is something to consider. What I am advised has happened is that our adoption decision-maker has had his workload considerably increased as a result. I think this is work in progress. The decision is a right decision and we support it, but I think working on the detail now, and how this translates, is going to be very important. Do you want to add anything on that? Andrew Webb: Yes. From a slightly different perspective, I had a conversation with the Designated Family Judge in Manchester when this was coming through. We put together rather quickly a protocol for all authorities to use, which does not appear to have created any problems or any additional work, because the processes that present the case, at the point where someone has to make a decision—is adoption in the interests of the child?—is exhaustive, and it has been gone through in great detail by the court, the children’s guardian and so on. As long as the final decision, which is a very, very important decision obviously, is taken by the local authority at a senior level—the agency decision-maker takes that decision— rather than somebody more junior, it has not created any problems nor challenges yet. Q555 The Chairman: In a particular local authority, the decision-maker has to make the most important decision in relation to the child, which is the child leaves home and will go to be adopted, or to another permanent placement. Is it the same person who would do each of those, whether it is a permanent placement and then adoption? Clearly, that person at least needs a shoulder to lean on, so that they have a review. Who are you expecting to review it? Is it the IRO—as Lady Armstrong was asking—or will it be somebody else? We have not yet found out from anyone who has come to give evidence what will be the replacement of the adoption panel best-interests recommendation or what is actually happening in local authorities. Matt Dunkley: I can mention my local authority if that helps. My decision-maker chooses to triangulate her decision with the Head of Safeguarding Quality, who is not someone she linemanages, but also the Head of Locality social worker who she does manage, so two colleague senior social-care professionals. That is a creation of her own making. It is not prescribed anywhere. That is what she feels comfortable with, to test out her decision professionally, with colleagues whom she knows and trusts, before she presents it to the court. I guess the argument rests on, “The contestability is in the court, is it not?”—that is the underlying assumption. From what Andrew said, that seems to be accepted in the north-west. The legal advice we had about challenge was, I believe, around the issue of particularly whether extended family and other arrangements had been sufficiently considered before you go for adoption as the placement. The Chairman: Could we have a copy of your protocol? Matt Dunkley: Yes. The Chairman: We will find it very interesting. Could I just come back to the IRO? What position does the IRO have, if any, on that? Andrew Webb: The IRO will have reviewed the case. Therefore, the IRO’s views will be reflected in all the case material that goes to the decision-taker. Rather than triangulate and go back over old ground, the agency’s decision-taker in Stockport receives the papers from those 90

Association of Directors of Children’s Services (ADCS)—Oral evidence (QQ 548-566) two sources—the case planner and the reviewer—up through their line management, and takes that decision. It is a decision we take very seriously so that, if the decision-taker is unavailable, the delegation is upwards to me and not downwards to somebody else. Lord Warner: Can we be clear on what level this decision-maker is? Are they at different levels within different local authorities? I think part of the conundrum is: what level has this actual decision been taken at? Debbie Jones: The decision-maker is either at second tier, or in some authorities the director does it himself or herself, such is the seriousness of the decision. But it is important to stress the triangulation that has to go on in order to stress— The Chairman: Could you explain what that means for the uninitiated, like me. Debbie Jones: No, absolutely. Matt has already explained the triangulation that goes on in his authority. There is triangulation at a number of different levels, first in relation to the reviews of the case—so the Independent Reviewing Officers, who are line managed always separately from the caseworker. That process is happening at every stage of the decision-making. Then there will be other mechanisms. Heads of performance and quality assurance will have a role. In my authority, there may be a different management structure, but in every adoption decision taken that decision will have been tested robustly by the assistant director, who takes the decision, and his opposite number, who is responsible for quality assurance, and the Independent Reviewing Officer. The Independent Reviewing Officer would usually report up through that mechanism in order to keep the line management separate. Baroness Knight of Collingtree: I am struggling with trying to get my head around where each section comes in, and I would be very grateful to hear the three corners of the triangulation. It seems to me, from what you have just said, that there is a difference between local authorities in different areas with regard to this machine. Could you answer those questions? Matt Dunkley: It is important to remember that role of the panel only ended in September, so authorities are slightly feeling their way a bit. We have not gathered—and it could be something that we could do—systematic evidence about how authorities are doing this moderation of the decision-maker’s decision. I am not advocating this, but an authority could decide, at its purest, that the decision-maker makes a decision and then the court tests its validity through the court process. I think most authorities will want at least one other professional, usually offline in management terms from the person who takes the decision, to moderate it and say, “Yes, that seems sensible”, or not. In terms of the IRO—and this point is important—at each stage of the process of care planning, the IRO will be offering an independent view about what the best interests of the child are and how they could be best served. That is a continual process, but the actual “Okay, we are going for a care plan. We are going for adoption” decision is taken by a single person. At the moment, in the absence of a role for the panel, it is their responsibility, along with their director, to put in place the moderation arrangements for that decision, and I suspect it will vary between authorities. The Chairman: Viscount Eccles. This will have to be the last question because otherwise we are not going to finish our questions.

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Association of Directors of Children’s Services (ADCS)—Oral evidence (QQ 548-566) Viscount Eccles: This is very new, and of course it is in the context of Norgrove, is it not? I may be getting this wrong, and I wish you to correct me if I do. He really said the courts and the local authorities should sort themselves out, in such a way that they can come to the right decisions in a timely fashion, and they should not be relying on a third party to get them out of the fact that they cannot agree between themselves. Is that unfair, or is that really what Norgrove said? Matt Dunkley: I think what he said, more specifically, was that in some areas there was evidence that the role of the panel was adding no value and adding delay in some places because it was simply never overturning a decision-maker’s decision, sometimes adding weeks or months into the process of getting the decision before the court and, anyway, it duplicated the role of the court because the court had the final say on whether that was the right decision for the child or not. In his view, it was all about speed and duplication. What he did not do was prescribe what should replace that moderating role of the panel, and that is what we are inventing as we go along. The Chairman: Thank you very much. We shall have to move on. Q556 Baroness Morris of Bolton: You touched on kinship carers briefly in the last answer. In your written evidence you say that identifying potential kinship carers often comes too late in the process. How could kinship carers be identified earlier? You also say, “It would be helpful therefore, if explicit guidance was available to local authorities and the judiciary on how far kinship carers must be considered once proceedings have begun”. What form should that guidance take, in order to avoid delay? Andrew Webb: Mr Justice Ryder has been doing a considerable amount of work on implementation of the Family Justice Review recommendations, those that do not require changes to the legislation at the very least. We have had discussions with him about this issue. His proposal is that, wherever possible, when a case is first taken into the court arena there will be an agreement with the family about just wide how the extended family is. The family signs off a decision about what kinship carers might be considered at the start of the proceedings, so that what does not happen is that you get part way into the proceedings and somebody suddenly appears out of the woodwork and, instead of having things done in parallel, you have sequential assessments of people. You look at this and then you look at that, and then you look at the third, so there is a proposal there. The Family Justice Review is going to require us to put a lot more evidence and analysis of that evidence into court on day one than is currently the case in some cases. If that included a very clear, all-party agreement on which the kinship carers are that should have been assessed, and the outcomes of those assessments, then that would speed up this process in many cases. I imagine there will always be cases where, genuinely, somebody thinks of somebody late on. But the delay in court, the time that cases are going through court, is being used to reassess cases, and that is the biggest thing we will have to change. The assessment will have to be done at the outset and the concentration on evaluating the care plan is where the court process should be, rather than crawling over extended family. In our view that would be one way of dealing with it.

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Association of Directors of Children’s Services (ADCS)—Oral evidence (QQ 548-566) Baroness Morris of Bolton: That seems eminently sensible. In early intervention, before we even get to the court process, is that the sort of thing that would be being explored by the social workers? Andrew Webb: Absolutely. The number of authorities that are using family group conferencing which starts with “Who might be relevant to this family, this child?” is growing all the time, and local authorities’ gate-keeping processes should push social workers back into that question, “Are you sure you have been through this process thoroughly enough?”, unless of course there is a very clear and acute danger that needs to be dealt with, which is the case with some children. If you add together the categories of neglect and emotional abuse, that accounts for about 70% of the total number of children subject to child protection plans, so for all of those we ought to be looking at the whole family, the local community response, and kinship care. We have become locked into a way of dealing with kinship carers as foster carers, which is not entirely helpful. As an association, we are about to do a piece of work to look at broadening the way we use kinship carers. Looking at the international evidence, for example, some places use far more than us. I do not know whether there are unintended consequences of that and what the costs might be, but I think we need to look at it because the model suggests that some children who end up in public care could be better dealt with by engaging families in a different way, particularly that chronic neglect and emotional harm group. Matt Dunkley: Can I add a small point on that? This is a controversial issue with social workers, and their sights are often aimed at the guardians ad litem and Cafcass on this. We have had some very productive conversations with Anthony Douglas from Cafcass about how, through the family justice reforms, we could improve this situation. At its worst, to characterise the social workers’ view, they will arrive with a fully-formed assessment where they think they have done a reasonable extended family search, and so on, only to get to court and have the guardian say, “No, we need to go and assess this person you have already assessed again” and the judge saying, “Maybe we will look at them again because the guardian said so”. There is a strong feeling from social workers that their opinion is given less weight than that of the guardian. They have already done the assessment. The way of meeting that challenge—as I think Andrew has implied, through the work we have done with Mr Justice Ryder—is to give judges a sense of security that the quality of the assessments of extended family, at the point you are coming into proceedings, has been so good that they need not go back and continually reassess the options. There is a responsibility on us, as social work professionals, to make sure that that assessment is sufficiently robust that judges can have faith in it. The Chairman: Should the guardian not be discussing this with the social worker long before you get to court, so you should not be having the guardian saying to the judge, “I do not accept this. This particular person is better”? I am rather shocked by that. I have to tell you, when I was a judge it happened all the time. I made a great fuss about it, because it seemed quite wrong that it should be at that late stage. These things between the guardian and the social workers should really be resolved much earlier. I suppose that leads to a worry as to the relationship, in some local authorities, between Cafcass and the social workers charged with the case.

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Association of Directors of Children’s Services (ADCS)—Oral evidence (QQ 548-566) Andrew Webb: A simple point: the guardian is not allocated until proceedings are issued, so we are already in the court arena and the delay has started mounting up. This could be a very long answer, for which I apologise in advance. Family proceedings are very adversarial. Over 80%, and it may even be 90%, of the final decisions are simply about care. The threshold criteria—is this child being harmed? Has he been or is he likely to be harmed?— is dealt with very early on, and there is full agreement that it is an appropriate case of harm for the court to be looking at. There should be an adversarial process if there is dispute but, beyond that, what we have is a decision-making process about the care plan, which is adversarial. It becomes adversarial across the piece, between the guardian, the local authority and the family parties, and that needs to change and the current proposals should change that. One of the problems with knowing that is how the game is going to end is that it feeds back into pre-proceeding attitudes between families and local authorities as well. People perceive us as local authorities not as providers of help and so on, but as the authority to be fought that takes children away. That colours a lot of that work, and we need to think differently about that. Between ourselves and Cafcass, we are producing a guide to family proceedings for the new era. We just put the first draft together last week and presented it at a conference in Eastbourne, of all places—a high child population. Oh! I forgot we were on record here for a moment. That talks about the possibility, if resources permit, of using the guardian in a pre-proceedings phase—actually seeking advice on matters pre-proceedings—but there is both a trust issue and a resource issue before we get to that point. Q557 Baroness King of Bow: I want to ask about concurrent planning, and also to mention how helpful the document “Redesigning Adoption” is; very helpful indeed. I was going to ask if you think new legislation is required to facilitate more concurrent planning and fostering for adoption. Perhaps you do not think that as it is not one of your recommendations in here, although you do recommend a continuous process of training and education. I wonder if you could explain how that would increase concurrent planning, and also let us know if cost is an issue. When I asked for it my social worker said, “No, it costs too much. It is too labour intensive. We will not be doing it”. That is perhaps a small, anecdotal thing, but how does cost impact on this policy? Debbie Jones: I will start, in principle, and then leave the technical experts to respond in detail. We certainly do not think there is a need for legislation on this front. We have been clear about that. We also believe that concurrent planning—we are very much in support of it—is not the answer to everything. It is not a magic wand. Having experienced concurrent planning over a number of years, I have seen it work very effectively and well but I have also seen it as an excuse for just increasing more delay in the process in a perverse way, so I think the issue about increasing guidance, support and training is a very important one. Baroness King of Bow: Who is that for; is it just for social workers, or for everyone? Debbie Jones: Some of the changes that we are talking about are fundamentally cultural and behavioural changes that do not just apply to social work practitioners. They also apply across the piece and have to be explained fairly carefully, whether it is families, as well as staff, and indeed young people if they are involved, if they are of an age to understand. We believe it is a good thing if it reduces the time involved, if it is done properly and well. To be done properly and well, it needs to be properly supported.

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Association of Directors of Children’s Services (ADCS)—Oral evidence (QQ 548-566) Matt Dunkley: I would certainly concur with that. Brighton and Hove authority, which is one of my neighbours, had a concurrent planning team, which they abandoned in the end because the outcomes did not justify the investment. There were some complex reasons about that. At the time there was some difficulty with the judiciary around fairness, and so on, about the decision. More importantly, they were finding it difficult to persuade parents to go on that journey, with the risks that were associated for them. There is no doubt that concurrency, in particular, does transfer some of the risk to the adopters of the court’s decision, ultimately. You have to be aware of that, and a number of people have said very clearly to us they do not want to go into a concurrent planning situation for that reason. We do do fostering for adoption. We do that not across the board, as a principle, but based on the assessment of adopters and their needs. During the assessment of adopters we are always looking at potential matching with the children we have placement orders on. We have used it, for example, to approve people. While they are being assessed as adopters they are approved as foster carers. We have used them occasionally as respite carers for children who we think there is a potential match with, so that they have had a chance to see those children and see how it works for them. There is a real chemical thing in adoption match, between the feeling the parents have and the children have. It gives you an opportunity for that exposure, with no risk or damage to anyone if it does not work out. We have also used it with sibling matches in proceedings where we have not been able to get a placement order on a child who is the sibling of a child that the adopter has already adopted, so we have placed the sibling under fostering regulations, over a period—and under SGO, I have to say as well—with the long-term view that adoption could be the plan if we get to that point through the proceedings. You have to be ready to support that pretty intensively from the adoption team with the adopters, and that does have resource implications. You have to be flexible, based on the needs of the child, and be flexible about the adopter supply and not have it as a, “Right, we are going to do fostering to adopt now, so let us roll it out and this will be the case always”. It has to be a case-by-case analysis. The danger if you legislate, which we do not think is required, or if you say, “Okay, everybody has to do concurrency and has to do fostering to adopt”, is that it will not suit everyone. It has to be a needs analysis. That is what I hope good adoption agencies do. They are flexible enough to respond to the needs of their adopters and the needs of their children to make the best matches. Baroness King of Bow: Can you just explain, very quickly, how does it increase delay? Matt Dunkley: I believe the experience, certainly in Brighton and Hove where you had a concurrency plan, was that the proceedings could sometimes take longer because the courts took the view that you had taken their decision for them already. Therefore, it needed an extra layer of checking because you have jumped ahead, and so on. I may be characterising it, and I am not talking about my own— Baroness King of Bow: But the children were still placed far sooner with the parents they ended up keeping? Matt Dunkley: If the decision ended up with the adoption process, yes. Baroness King of Bow: If the court did not reverse it, yes.

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Association of Directors of Children’s Services (ADCS)—Oral evidence (QQ 548-566) Andrew Webb: All I would add is that it is hard enough to find people who want to adopt without that risk attached, and it is even harder to find people who are prepared to get to know a child with the possibility it might not turn into an adoption. It adds a lot of emotional cost in, rather than financial cost. But we cannot have sequential planning. We have to stick with parallel planning of various types. Baroness Walmsley: I am a bit concerned that the children might feel that they are on trial. Does that ever happen? Matt Dunkley: We obviously do not say to them at the outset, “You are going to these foster carers and they may adopt you” generally. It depends on the care plan. But yes, you certainly do not want a child in a position where they think they are with someone permanently and then that ends up not being the case. Absolutely, you do not. Baroness Walmsley: So you do not tell them? Matt Dunkley: For example, if you are using prospective adopters who are going through a process as the respite carers, the children will have a pattern generally of having some respite from their fostering placement, whatever their situation is. They will not necessarily see this couple as any more than another set of respite carers. You do not say to them, “We are just going to see if you make an adoption match”. I am sure you can imagine if we did. It does have the beauty of having a mask over it so that it can be done in a sensitive way. Q558 Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top: I have read your papers carefully, and you very strongly put adoption in the range of responses. Do you think that there is a hierarchy now expected of authorities and too much stress that adoption is the best permanent solution? Debbie Jones: That is actually a very difficult question in many ways. For us, finding the right solution for every child is the most important thing that we do. For an awful lot of children, adoption—finding a permanent, forever family—has to be the right decision. You only have to speak to young people who have been adopted. However, it will not be the right decision for all children and young people. We are very firmly rooted in everything that we do, and you have the Deputy Children’s Commissioner talking about paramountcy, and paramountcy goes through us—and through all social workers—like a stick of rock. Basically what we are saying is you will see very differential patterns across the country. In my own authority, placing children in a permanent placement, what we have seen is there have been an increasing number of special guardianship and residence orders, and actually that has been in the interests of children. It is not an either/or; it is about the best possible solution for that young person, which is why we do not talk in terms of hierarchies. We talk in terms of the right decision for children. Andrew Webb: If you take the national snapshot figures from last year, just under 7,000 children were placed in permanent placements and half of them in adoption—this is from care—just over 30% were placed in special guardianship, and the remainder, just under 20%, had residence orders. That is a very big change. SGOs jumped up from nowhere because they were not introduced until four or five years ago, but their use has gone up. I would say the evidence at the moment suggests that there is not a hierarchy, and that permanence is what people are going for.

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Association of Directors of Children’s Services (ADCS)—Oral evidence (QQ 548-566) Q559 Lord Warner: Can I move us on to local authority structures and finance? We had a gentle canter around the course at the beginning, on the scale and resource issues around the six-month assessment of adopters. Is there really a problem with the current adoption system—that it is too fragmented? What, if any, legal or financial barriers do prevent local authorities from working more effectively with each other across their boundaries, and would any changes to legislation be required to enable joint working that goes well beyond the current consortia arrangements? We have heard a lot about consortia, but it sometimes feels as a bit of balm spread on an open wound. Matt Dunkley: The answer to all those questions is either a yes or a qualified yes, except possibly about the need for legislation. You might be picking up a theme here. Some of the issues about local authority finance, and what anyone would regard as a world-class adoption system, are to do with how you fund that, in terms of the costs that you avoid by the good solution that you have. Reference has been made to local authorities being put off using voluntary agencies because of the fee; that adoption support is not invested in beyond a certain point, because it is expensive and we cannot necessarily afford to keep doing that for ever. The payback of getting adoption right pays back over 18 financial years and beyond and to society far longer, but local body finance does not allow you to draw down the money from 18 years’ time and spend it now. There is an issue, which things like social impact bonds and some of those things are trying to solve, about having to find some pretty big upfront sums, both in terms of what you pay for a placement that sticks, and having a kind of insurance policy for post-adoption support that is effective because that is a really big-ticket item. You have seen, from the written evidence from our three authorities, that we are all approaching that in very much the same way, looking at it as a lifelong commitment. Trying to cover your possible financial exposure of that is quite tricky because it could be enormous, and some of the sums are talked about in our submissions. The areas where I think we need to get together better in different ways are about spreading that financial risk more appropriately between authorities. We have talked about the interauthority fee being brought into line with the agency fee, to avoid a perverse incentive to not seek the best placement for the child. We have talked about ways in which we could finance post-adoption support so that it does not become a postcode lottery. Through the adoption passport you could have ideas like a personal entitlement, which is a minimum for postadoption support, that follows the child around wherever they are and that is cashed in with the local authority where you live, however that is achieved. That could be through some form of personal budget or other. All of that is going to require a chunkier, upfront investment, and a way of local authorities working together—whether you call it consortia or not—to create a level playing field for adopters between us, and we all share the ambition to do that. The local government finance regulations are not helpful to us in that but I think that is the way we have to look at it in the future, so that if you are an adopter, wherever you are, according to your post-adoption plan you have an entitlement to those services, wherever you live, for the child when you need it. That might be when they are a teenager, even though you adopted them 12 or 15 years ago. Q560 Baroness Eaton: I was going to ask you more about inter-agency fees, but you have really covered that. What I would like to ask you is apropos local government finance, and it is about the accountability of directors of social services because of the issue of being accountable

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Association of Directors of Children’s Services (ADCS)—Oral evidence (QQ 548-566) for finance in the council’s delivery of its budget, but also accountability for the outcomes for children. Could you explain and unpick that for us? Where does accountability sit? Matt Dunkley: We are just generally pretty much accountable for everything. That is what it feels like. Baroness Eaton: To whom? Matt Dunkley: Ultimately, to our councils and, through them, to the communities that we serve. We have a range of statutory duties that are described in the guidance and the 2004 Act, as Director of Children’s Services, and the lead member does as well. In practical terms, you only have to look at the turnover of the Directors of Children’s Services to see that it averages about 35% to 40% a year, and whenever there is a scandal it tends to be the director who goes. We are sometimes described as having the life expectancy of a daddy-long-legs in this career, so there is that. Where things are becoming more and more tricky for all of us is to sit that accountability alongside our accountability to deliver a balanced budget, which for all of us means delivering— in my case—15% cuts over the next three years to core services. That is on the back of 20% over the last two years, I hasten to add, lest you think I got off lightly, so 35% over the period I am talking about. In the advice we give to our members, how we advise them about getting the right balance of investment to continue to meet those duties is a professional challenge to all of us, I would say. Debbie Jones: Yes. The issue of accountability is very clear and it is very helpfully laid out in statutes and we have recently revised that guidance. However, alongside that—and I would agree with Matt—we have a responsibility and an accountability for delivering what we need to deliver, and identify risk, within the cash envelope that we have. Matt talked earlier about the problems with local government settlements, and all the rest of it, operating on an annual basis, but in terms of quantifying risk, i.e. the cost of a child coming into the care system, the cost of a child not becoming adopted, you can demonstrate. Most of us, particularly those of us who are seasoned campaigners—and you have three in front of you now—will have had a fair bit of experience in demonstrating over a period of time securing those budget savings. We have all done the big figure budget savings across a number of years and going forwards. It is not a competition but quantifying risk is really important and, because of our statutory responsibility, all of us would be very clear that none of it replaces protecting children when making the right decisions. However, you can do that within a cash envelope. You can quantify the risk that you are talking about and identify what will happen but it is not an either/or situation. Andrew Webb: I think there is probably no better place to carry that dual set of accountabilities than the Director of Children’s Services. I also manage adult services, so I can have in view the needs, resources, strains and pressures of the whole local authority area, for all people at one time, and I am very clear about the nature of the statutory duties for adults and children, but there are many ways of delivering services within that financial envelope. To have the ability to move resources around, to tweak things as pressures come up and go down, is ideal. I do not think if you went above local-authority level or to a lower level you would be able to manage the totality of public spend in the same way. Some authorities, the smaller authorities, struggle obviously.

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Association of Directors of Children’s Services (ADCS)—Oral evidence (QQ 548-566) Baroness Eaton: I am going to follow on with a very, very small question about the size of directorates now in the combination, as a clear example of social services and education. How knowledgeable are elected members about the implications of the tweaking that you just said you have to do? If you take something from education because you have a crisis somewhere, those people who are elected—who are responsible in a way to the public, in a different way— how are they aware of that? Andrew Webb: The arrangements in our authority at the moment are that I have five members to work with and it is very clear to each of them where the pressures are and, as the fivepeople directorate—elected members—they look at the priorities within the overall envelope of the council’s finances and the council’s explicit priorities. Baroness Eaton: Then they can justify when you have closed the community centre to their electorate because they know of the data. That is the sort of issue? Andrew Webb: Yes. Q561 Lord Warner: I did not really get an answer to my first question on the subject of the structures. You gave me some very comprehensive answers on money, and I just want to probe a bit more on this issue about whether some of these local authority adoption services are simply too small and the consortia are not really robust enough to overcome that. I should declare I was a director, many moons ago, of a very big authority. I had a 1.5 million population, so I could afford to pay—and we were not even in national pay-bargaining—for a good adoption agency with a volume of work and variety that would keep everyone interested. Some of these authorities are simply very small. I know it is always difficult for an association to answer for all their members, but could we get it up on the table a bit about this issue of scale and whether consortia will deliver the bacon? Andrew Webb: Yes. In the north-west there are 22 authorities that range from the core cities down to metropolitan areas with not much more than 100,000 population, and the level of consortium working is quite interesting. There is one overarching consortium called Adoption 22, which covers all of them, which does a lot of internal trading. Beneath that there are partnerships between authorities who are now sharing recruitment processes, so the neighbouring authorities of three or four are getting together to recruit. There is work going on to develop, effectively, a single service with slightly different front ends across twos and threes of authorities. The world has moved on, and consortia are changing all the time. When I look at the range of activity that people are doing at joint activity, there is clearly no need for any more legislation because everything anyone seems to want to try they can do, so I would not go in to forcing things. The issue has to come back to, in a local area: are we recruiting adopters and are children who require adoption being moved through fast enough? That has to be the test rather than: are authorities too large or too small? But certainly, as I said, the types of consortia are now huge. Debbie Jones: The consortia issue is not the answer to everything and I think that is probably at the bottom of what you are saying. Consortia are probably now better run, dealing with the economies of scale issue, than they were previously. However good your shared arrangements are—and it is now easier to achieve that—we believe, as an association, that there is a case for investigating equalisation into local authority and inter-agency fees that we touched on earlier. I

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Association of Directors of Children’s Services (ADCS)—Oral evidence (QQ 548-566) think that bit has to come in alongside whatever is done along the consortia arrangements, in order both to rationalise size but also to rationalise cost and to get rid of those perverse incentives that Matt talked about earlier. Matt Dunkley: Yes, and I think I would add to that that the Children’s Improvement Board, who are looking at sector-led improvement, have recently adopted a document looking at the adoption scorecard and adoption performance. I think based around as we settle more on what defines good adoption performance, the logical extension of that improvement work will be that, if you are shown not to be performing well with the adoption indicators, then it will be to pair up with someone who is doing well or you lose your right to do it. There is a much sharper performance framework now around adoption that I think will lead any reluctant authority into that position where, if they are small and not performing, they will have to pair up with somebody larger who is. The Chairman: To produce a sort of protocol for this, then? Debbie Jones: This is a piece of work through the Children’s Improvement Board. Would it be helpful for us to— The Chairman: It would be very helpful for us to see it, yes, thank you very much. I am getting worried about time so, Lord Morris, would you like to go to the next question? Q562 Lord Morris of Handsworth: Yes, thank you, Chair. I am still exploring the local authority dimension here in terms of staffing but, primarily, would like to get your views about quality and retention. The question is: do social workers have sufficient training on adoption when undertaking undergraduate degrees and how quickly do good adoption social workers move on either to management positions or, indeed, to other branches of social work? Andrew Webb: Can I answer the first part of that? The answer is, around the content of undergraduate degrees, almost certainly not enough. The social work profession is in the process of fairly radical reform at the moment, and we have introduced an assessed and supported year in employment, so a graduate with a social work degree now has to do a year of supported practice before they are fully licensed. The expectation is with the introduction of the national College of Social Work that post-qualifying training and development will be a much stronger part of everyone’s professional life. We are in the middle of a process of professionalising social work to a greater degree. Most professions have a requirement that you learn a certain amount to get your basic qualification and then make progress through to become a specialist, and that is what we would like to see here. The adoption services, in my experience though, tend to recruit from existing social work practitioners rather than newly qualified staff and, in my experience for the last 20 years, the adoption and fostering teams have been the most stable teams I have been responsible for, but I cannot speak for— Q563 The Chairman: I am just about to ask the next question. We are running out of time. You are facing quite a grilling and you have been going since about 11.10 am, so we have three more questions. I am going to ask the Members to be sparing in asking supplemental questions and perhaps ask the three of you to choose one of your team to answer, unless you disagree. If you disagree then that is fine, but I want to ask you about Independent Reviewing Officers. As you probably know, there is quite a feeling that IROs are not seen as sufficiently independent; 100

Association of Directors of Children’s Services (ADCS)—Oral evidence (QQ 548-566) that comes to us again and again. What steps do you think are needed to improve and strengthen the monitoring work of IROs? I am sure you are going to agree on this. Andrew Webb: We could take up all the remaining time deciding who is going to answer this one. The theme of “We do not require any more regulation, thank you” applies to this, in my view. The IRO’s independence is quite clear. In the majority of services that I am aware of they take that independence seriously. They are managed offline from the operational teams as required and put an appropriate amount of challenge into the system. The question though is: what is an appropriate amount of challenge? That is where I think people disagree. The role of the IRO is to validate care plans and challenge that the regulations have all been complied with to test the quality of thinking, not to run cases. Some IROs would like to get far more involved, as indeed, over the years, many judges have wanted to get far more involved in running cases. But our view is that this is an appropriate level of challenge and I think the IROs themselves, most of who are not part of the IRO organisation, have appropriate levels of safeguarding for their independence around the local authorities or they would tell us because they tend to be seasoned practitioners. The Chairman: We have had some reports from the IROs and that is not entirely their view. I think they feel they are rather more constrained and not able to play quite as substantial a part. I wonder if, Mrs Jones, you would like to answer. Debbie Jones: I would like to respond to that because we have heard that view. It is not a new view and I think most directors would sense-check whether that is the view, both in their own authorities and, as an association, we have been quite clear that we need to double-check that because the independence of the IRO is absolutely crucial, in terms of the challenge and the review and the decision-making in relation to a child. If there is a feeling that IROs feel that they are being bullied or forced into acquiescence, in my experience of most IROs, you could not possibly force them into anything like that because that is their nature. They value their independence very highly, and they tend to be some of our most experienced and skilled practitioners that we actively encourage to get into that role. It is part of the triangulation that we talked about earlier, but obviously us saying that to you—and we would say that—would not necessarily provide you with the reassurance or, more, the evidence that you may be seeking. I can only tell you that we robustly challenge ourselves and our members, both internally and externally. The Chairman: Breaking my own advice to the rest of you, we have been hearing from the Deputy Children’s Commissioner this morning—I think before you came in—that with the reduction in the judiciary’s overinvolvement in care plans it will give the IRO a rather more important role post the care proceedings. That is what we were being told. Is that something that you see? Andrew Webb: I do not think the role will be more important. It will remain as it is, which is to review cases that have not gone to a permanence decision and where children remain in care, so no. The Chairman: Okay. In which case I think we had better move on to Lady Hamwee. Q564 Baroness Hamwee: Yes, post-adoption support: The report of the expert working group does say a lot about what this might involve. Sorry, I have left out the crucial reference, 101

Association of Directors of Children’s Services (ADCS)—Oral evidence (QQ 548-566) which is to an adoption passport—what it might comprise, how it might be resourced. Unless there is anything you want to add—and I might suggest that, if you do, that comes to us in writing afterwards, if you would like—shall we just leave that and I will not ask you to repeat what is in here? But could you say something about whether this should be coupled with a statutory duty on local authorities, and other agencies, to provide post-adoption support? Can I also pick up on a reference that Mr Dunkley made to the local government finance regulations? I think you said something like, “They do not assist us in this” and, since our remit is to look at any changes to legislation that might be required, that just rang a bell. It is just something that I might ask you about. Again, with your permission, Chairman, perhaps that should be followed up in writing. The Chairman: Yes, but give us your oral view promptly, if you would. Matt Dunkley: Guess what I am going to say about statutory duties. This could be one where, if it was framed in the right way, a statutory duty might be helpful. What is important is a principle that an adoptive carer carries with them an entitlement, through the passport, to access to services in a timely way, wherever they are, that are commissioned through the adoption agency where they live. Enabling that financially, when you are talking about future costs in 10 and 12 years’ time, sometimes with children placed at birth that have issues in teenage years—paying for that—is quite tricky. The kind of thing that we have been kicking around between us, about how we might do it, is whether you could amend the financial regulations to allow that to be capitalised—so making it capital expenditure rather than revenue—and whether there would be ways that the Department could assist us, in terms of the way in which that money could be ring-fenced, or in some way made into a literal passport that you carry around wherever you are. It should not be beyond the wit of man, or local authorities, to be able to work that out but at the moment there are a number of barriers you would have to overcome. Andrew Webb: Our three authorities put in a very short notice and sketched out a response to this question earlier about post-adoption support, so there is lots of information in there. One of the biggest concerns to adopters—this leads on to the next question—is when things have gone well for a number of years and pretty well all contact with the placing agency has ceased, quite rightly, and then problems start emerging, often in adolescence—oppositional behaviour, and so on—but are the consequence of early childhood problems and attachment. What we need to do is get better at very quick responses, with good quality child psychiatry and good quality parenting advice. The children, whose placements are in jeopardy, after several years following adoption, need to go absolutely to the front of the queue on this, and get the best possible advice, and a lot of places do not have the expertise required to work intensely with that level of complexity because the issues are— The Chairman: How do your adopters know that they have somewhere they can go? Andrew Webb: Adopters from 10 years ago will not. Adopters most recently will, because there is a plan that sets some of this out. But, again, after three years you tend to move on and we need to be better at mobilising very high quality resources when things start to go wobbly. Q565 Lord Warner: Why is it so difficult to produce reliable statistics on adoption breakdowns, and what can we do to improve the process and provide more robust data in the 102

Association of Directors of Children’s Services (ADCS)—Oral evidence (QQ 548-566) future? It is actually in local authorities’ interest to produce this because, probably, it might show a rather good performance by local authorities. Why are we so bad at it? Andrew Webb: Partly because adoption draws a line in a child’s life and it starts again, so the basic principle of adoption is to do that, and certainly in historic adoptions we have tended to say, “Parents, over to you”, and the parents have said, “Fine, over to us” and walk away. I did a piece of work in a previous authority looking at the most difficult adolescents in our care system, and a significant proportion of them had been adopted but not through that authority. They had moved into the area at some point in the child’s life, two or three moves since the adoption was made, which is what you would expect families to do. The local authority’s links between that teenager and its origins had gone completely. But I do think you have a very good question: why do we not do it better? I think that we need to come up with an answer. Lord Warner: If you have any thoughts after this meeting it would be really helpful to have them on this, because it is a big issue. Debbie Jones: Adoption breakdown is often not construed as adoption breakdown, particularly with children who have been in families for a very long time. Families then will be dealt with, as Andrew has indicated, as families with problems, and I think part of our issue is that once an adoption order is made—certainly after three years—you are in a different situation. I think we have to conceptualise this differently. The issue of an adoption passport will make that easier for us, but we also have to balance it against the idea of introducing the concept of normality and family life and an adopted child becomes a permanent member of the family. Q566 The Chairman: I had better bring it to an end. We are enormously grateful to you because you have had a real grilling, and any further written evidence that you felt like giving us we should receive with gratitude. We are very, very grateful to all three of you. May I perhaps say, Mrs Jones, I thought you were excellent on Radio 4 this morning. Debbie Jones: Thank you very much. The Chairman: I would also like to say to Mr Webb it is a particular pleasure to see you, because my brother was a councillor in Stockport for many years. Mr Dunkley, thank you. All three of you, thank you very much indeed.

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Association of Directors of Children’s Services (ADCS)—Supplementary written evidence

Association of Directors of Children’s Services (ADCS)— Supplementary written evidence PRE-LEGISLATIVE SCRUTINY OF DRAFT LEGISLATION ON ADOPTION 1.0 Introduction 1.1 ADCS is the national leadership organisation in England for directors of children’s services appointed under the provisions of the Children Act 2004 and for other children’s services professionals in leadership roles. The statutory role of director of children’s services (DCS) was created by the Children Act 2004 to establish a single point of leadership and accountability for services for children and young people. 2.0 Key messages 2.1 ADCS welcomes the intention behind the draft legislation to help reduce delay in placing children for whom adoption is in their best interests with prospective adoptive families as early as practicable whilst awaiting the authority to place the child for adoption. However, we do not believe that more legislation is necessary; the Children Act 1989 already makes provisions for this. 2.2 We agree that a child’s religious persuasion, racial origin and cultural and linguistic background should not be an unnecessary barrier to adoption. However, rather than remove entirely the provision to give consideration to the child’s religious persuasion, racial origin and cultural and linguistic background, we propose that these considerations are instead included in the ‘welfare checklist’ – under section 1 (4) d of the current Adoption and Children Act 2002. 3.0 Detailed response Clause 1: Placement of looked after children with prospective adopters 3.1 This clause will impose a new duty on local authorities in England to give preference to the placement of a child in a ‘Fostering for Adoption’ placement if one is available. 3.2 ADCS welcomes the intention behind the draft legislation to help reduce delay in placing children for whom adoption is in their best interests with prospective adoptive families as early as practicable whilst awaiting the authority to place the child for adoption. However, it is already legally possible for children to be placed under the Children Act 1989 with carers who are local authority foster carers, but who are also prospective adopters and have been identified as prospective adopters for the particular child(ren) in question. We do not therefore think that more legislation is necessary. 3.3 Concurrent planning can reduce delay when done properly and if it is well supported. Concurrency does transfer some of the risk to the adopters of the court’s decision. Thus prospective adopters who are already approved foster carers must be fully alive to the possibility that the permanent placement of a child with them might not come to fruition. Preparing and supporting prospective adopters for this possibility is resource intensive.

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Association of Directors of Children’s Services (ADCS)—Supplementary written evidence 3.4 There is a possibility that legislating in this way will result in the unintended consequence of deterring some prospective adopters from coming forward. It is hard enough to find people who want to adopt without this added risk attached; it would be even harder to find people who are prepared to get to know a child with the possibility that the placement may not prove to be a permanent one if the court’s decision is not adoption. 3.5 Fostering for adoption must be applied on a case-by-case basis underpinned by robust needs analysis. Clause 2: Adoption agencies: repeal of requirements to give due consideration to ethnicity: England 3.6 Section 1(5) of the Adoption and Children Act 2002 requires adoption agencies to give due consideration to a child’s religious persuasion, racial origin and cultural and linguistic background when placing him or her for adoption. ADCS would welcome a relaxation or refinement to the guidance but we are not convinced that the requirement to give due consideration to these important factors should be repealed entirely. 3.7 We agree that a child’s religious persuasion, racial origin and cultural and linguistic background should not be an unnecessary barrier to adoption. However, adopters’ sensitivity to the ethnic identity of an adopted child is an important consideration in making a match; this does not require an exact ethnic match but the ability of adopters to reflect on how they might accommodate the child’s sense of identity is important. 3.8 Rather than remove entirely the provision to give consideration to the child’s religious persuasion, racial origin and cultural and linguistic background, we propose that these considerations are instead included in the ‘welfare checklist’ – under section 1 (4) d of the current Adoption and Children Act 2002. 3.9 This would allow for a child’s religious persuasion, racial origin and cultural and linguistic background to be appropriately considered, alongside other factors and used to create a ‘shortlist’ of prospective adopters, but not used as an exclusive condition for the shortlist. Placement should then proceed on the basis of ‘best fit’. November 2012

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Professor Ravinder Barn (Royal Holloway, University of London) and Dr Derek Kirton (University of Kent)—Written evidence

Professor Ravinder Barn (Royal Holloway, University of London) and Dr Derek Kirton (University of Kent)—Written evidence Transracial Adoption in Britain: Politics, Ideology and Reality 1. Transracial adoption 1.1 Transracial adoptions (TRA) by white parents are situated at the intersections of family and public policy. Debates on racial integration are juxtaposed with child rights and the private sphere of the family. In Britain, the practices of transracial adoption and ‘racial matching’ continue to invite fierce debate and discussion. Several factors including the ongoing disproportionate representation of minority ethnic children in the public care system, the ‘unavailability’ of suitable minority ethnic adoptive parents, concerns about adoptees’ racial/cultural identity and the ‘suitability’ of white parents to raise racially competent children form the backdrop for such debates. For the last decade or so, political attention has been focused on permanence for children in care and adoption in particular. Within these wider debates, the allegedly low adoption rates of minority ethnic children, the ‘delay’ in finding suitable adoptive families, the ‘rejection’ of suitable white adoptive couples, and ‘ethnic matching’ are presented as some of the key concerns. This document seeks to unravel the evidence base around TRA, and ‘racial matching’. 2. Minority children and disproportionality 2.1 The disproportionate representation of minority ethnic children in public care in not a new phenomenon but has been an ongoing concern since the 1950s (NCH 1954, Fitzherbert 1967, Rowe et al 1973, Bebbington and Miles 1989, Barn 1993, Owen and Statham 2009). Research evidence reveals a multiplicity of factors that mediate in the process of entry into care. Such factors include poverty, lack of family support, child abuse and neglect, parental ill-health, and family breakdown. The most recent government statistics reveal that there are currently 65,520 children and young people who are currently looked after in England (DfE 2011). Of these, 77 per cent are of White ethnic background, 9 per cent are Mixed, 7 per cent are Black, 5 per cent are Asian, and 2 per cent are of other ethnic background. 2.2 The vast majority of children in care are placed in foster family settings. In March 2011, this amounted to 48,530. With regard to adoption, government statistics show that 5,470 were placed for adoption. Of these, a total of 3,050 were adopted during the year ending 31 March 2011 (including 60 babies, 2,170 who were 1-4 year olds, and the remainder were over 5). In terms of ethnicity, the vast majority of those adopted were white (84%) compared to lower proportions of other ethnic groups such as mixed parentage, Asian and Black – 10 percent, 2 per cent and 2 per cent respectively (DfE, 2011). 3. Adoption Reform 3. 1 The gathering process of adoption reform has drawn heavily on the allegedly ‘low’ (though they have been historically high over the past decade in terms of adoption from care) adoption rates and the markedly lower rates for minority ethnic children. A second plank has been the

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Professor Ravinder Barn (Royal Holloway, University of London) and Dr Derek Kirton (University of Kent)—Written evidence focus on timescales – framed as ‘delay’ – and again the slower route to adoption for minority ethnic children. The most commonly advanced explanation for this in media coverage, political discourse and policy statements is that social workers are preoccupied with the blood tie and in seeking a (near) ‘perfect ethnic match’, they contribute to the rejection of white prospective adopters. 3.2 However, while certain headline statistics appear to support this view, closer scrutiny reveals a more complex picture. While lower rates are sometimes presumed to apply to all minority ethnic children, rates of adoption for children of mixed parentage are similar to, or slightly above their representation in the care population (10 and 9 per cent respectively), whereas those for Asian (2 and 5 per cent) and Black children (2 and 7 per cent) are indeed markedly lower. Put another way, while 15 per cent of white children leaving care during the year to 2010 were adopted, the corresponding figures for mixed parentage, Asian and Black children were 17, 3 and 4 per cent respectively (DfE 2011). 3.3 Further breakdown of categories shows that among Asian children, it is those from Pakistani and Bangladeshi backgrounds who are least likely to be adopted, whereas rates for Indian children (especially when young) are not significantly below average. While rates are generally lower than average for Black African/African-Caribbean children, this is much more so for those of Black African origin. Owen and Statham (2009) demonstrate that these patterns have, with slight variation, persisted for several years. What is striking here is that the groups where adoption rates are lowest are precisely those where there are often cultural or religious reservations or objections to formalised adoption (Crabtree et al 2008). This was recognised in the Prime Minister’s Review (PIU, 2000) and helped support the introduction of special guardianship, but does not currently feature in policy debate. On timescales, there are, for the most part, few significant differences related to ethnicity. In comparison with white British children (919 days from entry to care to legal order), adoptions for Asian children are quicker (835), those for children of mixed parentage slightly longer (996) but those for Black children substantially so at 1302 days. 3.4 This more nuanced picture is often lost amid more general claims regarding minority ethnic adoption. Owen and Statham (2009) for example, express some surprise at their finding that children of mixed parentage have the highest rates of adoption of any ethnic group. This is of course, linked to the fact that a significant number are adopted into white families (Selwyn et al, 2010). Owen and Statham’s (2009) study also casts doubt on the assumption that lower adoption rates equate to languishing in care. Not only are rates of reunification higher for some (notably Asian) minority groups, but it is noteworthy that those ethnic groups with the lowest adoption rates are also those who often spend the shortest periods of time in care. Such statistics, no doubt, hide further complexity (including adverse effects for some children) and highlight the need for further research into care careers and permanence, but serve to warn against simplistic assumptions on the consequences of ‘non-adoption’. 3.5 Similarly, while research studies have sometimes suggested that plans change away from adoption more frequently for Black and Asian children (Selwyn et al, 2010), the official data released on changes of plan do not point to any such consistent pattern (DfE 2011, Ofsted 2012).

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Professor Ravinder Barn (Royal Holloway, University of London) and Dr Derek Kirton (University of Kent)—Written evidence 3.6 In spite of the nuanced picture around ethnicity and adoption, politician sound bites and media headlines suggest that white parents are being denied the opportunity to offer suitable adoptive homes to minority ethnic children in need. 4. Are white families available to adopt minority ethnic children? 4.1 Much of the current reform agenda is premised on the notion that proscription of transracial placements is pivotal to low rates of adoption from care. Delay has become a significantly racialised concept, almost invariably the favoured example for critics of ‘barriers’ to adoption. This has included being cited as a major factor in the recent fall (Times editorial, 29 September 2011)., even though official statistics show that the fall has been almost entirely among white children (DfE, 2011)). Both media and politicians have enthusiastically taken up the grievances of white families as a stick to beat ‘politically correct’ social workers, generating regular stories of prospective adopters deemed ‘too white’ and ‘too middle class’, even while most approved adopters are both white and middle class. 4.2 Seemingly, most such narratives arise from situations where applicants are turned away typically by local authorities on the basis they are not regarded as an appropriate potential match for the waiting minority ethnic children. There is little firm evidence in this area. A survey of members by Adoption UK (2011) found that roughly a quarter had been turned away by adoption agencies, of whom 13 per cent (i.e. 3 per cent of the sample) were told that this was due to their lack of potential for ethnic matching. While this survey of largely approved adopters may underestimate the scale of ‘rejection’, it scarcely supports the notion that a focus on ethnic matching represents the major barrier to adoption. Moreover, neither the survey nor wider critical commentaries address the nature and extent of adopters’ ‘offer’, either in terms of ethnicity or the many and often complex needs of children awaiting adoption. A senior manager of a voluntary adoption agency has commented that ‘our experience is that white applicants who offer to adopt black children are interested in babies or toddlers’ (Liz Webb, Assistant Director TACT, letter to Times 4 November 2010). Yet these are often likely to be the children for whom ethnic matches will be most easily found (Selwyn et al, 2010; see also Hawkins-Leon and Bradley, 2002 for similar findings in the US), raising questions about how far more transracial adoption would increase the number of children placed as opposed to ‘competition’ for the most desirable. 4.3 As discussed above, experience from the United States found that while a legally enforced colour blindness increased transracial adoption, the effect was very modest (Evan B Donaldson 2008). While it might be argued that any increase is valuable, there is little doubt that the scale of interest is exaggerated by proponents. This is also evident in the regular claims (including by Prime Minister David Cameron and by Martin Narey, Coalition Government’s Adoption Advisor) of many adopters being ‘driven abroad’ because of domestic restrictions, claims that not only misrepresent much interest in international adoption, but overlook the historically small (and falling) scale of international adoption in the UK. 4.4 In addition to questions regarding the likely number of prospective transracial adopters, there are also issues surrounding what expectations there may be of them. Policy discourse is somewhat contradictory on this point, essentially putting forward three different positions. The

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Professor Ravinder Barn (Royal Holloway, University of London) and Dr Derek Kirton (University of Kent)—Written evidence first is one that foregrounds avoidance of delay and the sufficiency of love and otherwise demands little or nothing in relation to ethnicity – it is not in the best interests of children for social workers to introduce any delay at all into the adoption process in the search for a perfect or even partial ethnic match when parents who are otherwise suitable are available and able to provide a loving and caring home for the child. (DfE, 2012) 4.5 A second related position might best be termed ‘minus ethnicity’. This is set out in various places within the Adoption Statutory guidance, with references to adopters who can meet ‘most’ of the child’s needs, where the missing element is implicitly any needs relating to ethnicity. However, in contrast to these ‘undemanding’ discourses, the guidance elsewhere sets out a third position, in which the importance of identity, culture, heritage and racism are all discussed both in terms of applicants’ awareness and the support that could be offered to them (DfE, 2011). More generally, policy discourse wavers between the downplaying of differences required to justify a tough stance against any perceived over-emphasis on ethnic matching, and acknowledgement of the latter’s advantages. In the Preface to the guidance, Children’s Minister Tim Loughton argues that an ethnic match may be a ‘significant advantage’ before going on to say that it cannot be a ‘deal-breaker’. As one of the above quotes demonstrates, seemingly significant advantage cannot translate into any form of ‘purposeful delay’, however short. 4.6 Thus, there are glimpses of a more sophisticated understanding of transracial adoption, its challenges and how best to meet them. Worryingly, however, they fall far short of serious debate on ‘cultural competence’ and racial/cultural socialization (Vonk, 2001, Barn, 2013 forthcoming) or the requisites for successful transracial adoption as set out in Roorda’s (2007) Multicultural Adoption Plan. Moreover, they are clearly subordinate to the desire to break down ‘barriers’ to transracial adoption and this leads to at best grudging recognition of challenges. This is apparent in the inconsistencies outlined above, and when Narey (2011) for instance, dismisses the idea that once supported white families may (still) struggle to meet the needs of minority ethnic children as ‘just preposterous’. 5. How can the pool of adopters be increased to meet the needs of minority ethnic children in need of permanency in the form of adoption? 5.1 Though often subordinated by other concerns, the recruitment of adopters for minority ethnic children has been an important thread within debates on the latter’s ‘best interests’. Given the widespread if not universal, acceptance of ethnic matching as a preferred option, the core question has been that of a ‘shortage’ of minority ethnic adopters, its extent and causes. 5.2 As transracial adoption was challenged in the 1970s, so too was the taken for granted nature of the shortage and attention was increasingly turned towards the practices and performance of adoption agencies. Early projects such as the Soul Kids campaign in 1975 and more so the establishment of the New Black Families Unit in 1980 enshrined a critique of traditional adoption agency recruitment practices, seeking a more ethnic-sensitive and less formal approach. 5.3 The relative success of such initiatives, through to contemporary successors such as Action for Children’s Adoption Black Families (Ridley and Wainwright, 2010) has called into question

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Professor Ravinder Barn (Royal Holloway, University of London) and Dr Derek Kirton (University of Kent)—Written evidence how far the ‘shortage’ is ‘inevitable’ and how far it may be overcome with sufficient commitment and imagination. Survey data has indicated that (some) minority ethnic groups may have a greater interest in adoption than white peers (Rule, 2006). Indeed, although there are no reliable data available, it may well be that some are over-represented relative to population, while falling short of the number of looked after children from similar ethnic backgrounds. 5.4 However, research and practice experience have identified a number of ‘barriers’ to recruitment. For some minority ethnic groups, these include material issues such as below average incomes and housing constraints and in this context it will be interesting to see how far government commitment to facilitate adoption through ‘upsizing’ within local authority housing impacts on minority ethnic families (Savage, 2011). In the case of lower incomes, this places a premium on willingness to publicise, provide and strengthen adoption allowances, conditions equally applicable to special guardianship allowances. For some minority ethnic groups, demographic factors have been highlighted, such as relatively young populations and/or a lower ratio of adults (of adopting age) to children (Frazer and Selwyn, 2005), although their impact vary dependent on the size of relevant looked after population. ‘Cultural’ factors or those arising from racialised divisions are also relevant. In some cases, these may take the form of discomfort with, or opposition to, formalised adoption (Lowe and Murch, 2002; Frazer and Selwyn, 2005) but otherwise may impact on expectations and experiences of the adoption process, its inquisitorial assessment and battery of checks. While the perceived discriminatory treatment of white families attracts most media attention, minority ethnic families report similarly poor service responses (Frazer and Selwyn, 2005). Recognition of this has led to agencies (spearheaded by specialist projects) working to create a more informal approach, employing minority ethnic staff and working through community and sometimes faith groups (Kaniuk, 1991; Ridley and Wainwright, 2010). Rule (2006) also highlights the importance of an integrated approach to such links across the range of child welfare services. 5.5 Research on recruitment has found that while this is inevitably influenced by the ethnic geography of particular areas, much also depends on agency proactivity or passivity (Barn et al., 1997). In this regard, wider studies have found practices highly variable, with some agencies making no targeted efforts to recruit minority ethnic families despite recognition of difficulties (Dance, 1997; CSCI, 2006). Practices would also seem to be quite variable in terms of the use of voluntary adoption agencies for matching, some of whom have very good records of recruiting minority ethnic families. 5.6 It is difficult to predict what impact the current reform agenda may have in this area of work, and as described earlier, policy can be seen as somewhat contradictory. On the one hand, there are exhortations to actively recruit minority ethnic adopters (DfE, 2011:61). However, these sit uneasily with the repeated warnings against any delay for the ‘perfect ethnic match’ or exclusion of white adopters. These goals are not of course mutually incompatible, but the dominant thrust of policy and performance management suggests that agencies will be judged more on timescales and ‘openness’ to transracial adoption than on minority recruitment or delivery of ethnic matching. That said, much will depend on agencies’ and workers’ own commitments. Research in the US has shown that while the MEPA/IEP framework required ‘diligent efforts’ to recruit adopters whose backgrounds reflected those of children in public care, this had not been well implemented (EB Donaldson, 2008:8). In the UK, meanwhile, the

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Professor Ravinder Barn (Royal Holloway, University of London) and Dr Derek Kirton (University of Kent)—Written evidence Consortium of Voluntary Adoption Agencies (2011:9) has expressed some concern about whether in light of the government’s emphasis on avoidance of delay that what it describes as ‘some excellent initiatives’ can be sustained and developed. Crucially, and perhaps reflecting a hardening stance since the issuing of the 2011 Statutory Guidance, the Adoption Action Plan makes no reference to improving minority ethnic recruitment, concentrating exclusively on the removal of barriers to transracial adoption (DfE, 2012: 21-22). 6. Conclusion 6.1 Transracial adoption calls into question our ideas of racial and ethnic boundaries, identity and belonging. In Britain, the disproportionate focus on transracial adoption as the panacea remains a concern. The asymmetry between adoptive parents’ ideal adoptee and what is available in reality presents a major obstacle to the adoption of children in need. Given this context, and the fact that colour-blind adoption policies in the USA have not resulted in any significant growth in TRA, it is highly unlikely that such policies, to the exclusion of other efforts, can lead to the reduction of minority ethnic children in the care system in Britain. 6.2 The misconception of social workers’ efforts to find racially and culturally similar families for minority ethnic children as segregationist and racist is also a worrying trend. Equally, it is imperative upon social workers to ensure that a balanced approach is taken in the adoption of minority ethnic children and that crude matching is avoided. It is also important that a range of supportive measures are adopted to firstly obviate the need for minority ethnic children to enter care, and secondly to seriously explore varied possibilities including kinship, guardianship, and long-term foster care as valid options to achieve permanency. Unless and until politicians and policy makers begin to understand the nuanced nature of permanence and stability for minority ethnic children in care, simplistic and popular notions of TRA as a ‘one-glove-fits-all’ strategy will prevail. Such a notion is not only misguided, it prevents the development of other possible solutions. References: Alexander C, ‘Cohesive identities: the distance between meaning and understanding’, in Wetherell M, Lafleche M and Berkeley R (eds) Identity, Ethnicity and community Cohesion, London: Sage, 2007 Bagley C and Young L, ‘The identity, adjustment and achievement of transracially adopted children: a review and empirical report, in Verma G and Bagley C (eds) Race, Education and Identity, London: Macmillan, 1979 Bagley C, International and Transracial Adoptions: A Mental Health Perspective, Aldershot: Avebury, 1993 Barn R, Black Children in the Public Care System, London: Batsford, 1993 Barn R, Sinclair R and Ferdinand D, Acting on Principle, An Examination of Race and Ethnicity in Social Services Provision to Children and Families, London: BAAF, 1997 Barn R, ‘Race, Ethnicity and Transracial Adoption’, in I.Katz, and A. Treacher (eds), The Dynamics of Adoption, London: JKP, 2000

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Professor Ravinder Barn (Royal Holloway, University of London) and Dr Derek Kirton (University of Kent)—Written evidence Barn R, Interculturalism in Europe: Fact, Fad or Fiction – The deconstruction of a theoretical idea, In Farrar, M. (eds), Debating multiculturalism 1, London: Dialogue Society, 2012 Barn R, ‘Doing the right thing’ – Transracial Adoption in the USA, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2013, forthcoming. Bebbington AC and Miles J, ‘The background of children who enter local authority care’, British Journal of Social Work, 19(5), 1989 Brooks D, Barth R, Bussiere A and Patterson G, ‘Adoption and race: implementing the multiethnic placement act and the interethnic adoption provisions’, Social Work 44:2, pp 167178, 1999 Commission for Social Care Inspection, Adoption: Messages from Inspections of Adoption Agencies, London: CSCI, 2006 Crabtree S, Hussain F and Spalek B, Islam & Social Work: transforming values into professional practice. Bristol: Policy Press, 2008 Dance C, Ouwejan D, Beecham J and Farmer E, Linking and Matching: A Survey of Adoption Agency Practice in England and Wales, London: British Association for Adoption and Fostering, 2010 Department for Education (2011) Statistical First Release, Children looked after in England (including adoption and care leavers) year ending 31 March 2011 Department for Education (2012) An Action Plan for Adoption: Tackling Delay, London: DfE Department of Health (2000) Adoption: A New Approach (Cm5017), London: DH Divine D, ‘Defective, hypocritical and patronising research’, Caribbean Times, 4 March 1983 Evan B. Donaldson, Finding Families for African American Children: The Role of Race and Law in Adoption from Foster Care, New York: Evan B Donaldson Adoption Institute, 2008 Farmer E and Dance C, An investigation of family finding and matching in adoption – briefing paper, London: Department for Education, 2010 Fitzherbert K, West Indian Children in London, London: Bell and Sons, 1967 Frazer L and Selwyn J, ‘Why are we waiting?: the demography of adoption for children of black, Asian and black mixed parentage in England’, Child and Family Social Work 10:2, pp 135-147, 2005 Fenster J, ‘Transracial adoption in black and white: a survey of social worker attitudes’, Adoption Quarterly 5:4, pp 33-58, 2002

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Professor Ravinder Barn (Royal Holloway, University of London) and Dr Derek Kirton (University of Kent)—Written evidence Finney N and Simpson L, ‘Sleepwalking to Segregation?’: Challenging Myths about Race and Migration, Bristol: Policy Press, 2009 Gill O and Jackson B, Adoption and Race: Black, Asian and Mixed Race Children in White Families, London: Batsford, 1983 Harris P (ed), In Search of Belonging, Reflections by transracially adopted people, London: BAAF, 2006 Hawkins-Leon G and Bradley C, ‘Race and transracial adoption: the answer is neither simply black or white nor right or wrong, Catholic University Law Review 51:4, pp 1227-1286, 2002 Hearst A, ‘Multiculturalism, group rights and the adoption conundrum’, Law & Society Review 36:2, pp 489-504, 2002 Ivaldi G, Surveying Adoption: A Comprehensive Analysis of Local Authority Adoptions 1998/99 – England, London: British Agencies for Adoption and Fostering, 2000 Jackson B, Adopting a Black Child: Family Experiences of Inter-Racial Adoption, London: Association of British Adoption Agencies, 1975 Johnson N, ‘Building an integrated society’, in Wetherell M, Lafleche M and Berkeley R (eds) Identity, Ethnicity and community Cohesion, London: Sage, 2007 Kaniuk J, ‘Strategies in recruiting black adopters’, Adoption and Fostering 15:1,pp 38-42, 1991 Kirton D, ‘Perspectives on race and adoption:the views of student social workers’, British Journal of Social Work 29:5, pp 779-796, 1999 Lowe N and Murch M, The Plan for the Child: Adoption or Long-Term Fostering, London: British Association for Adoption and Fostering, 2002 Rushton A and Minnis H, ‘Trans-racial family placements’, Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 38:2, pp 157–159, 1997 Modood T, Multiculturalism, Cambridge: Polity, 2007 Narey M, The Narey Report: A Blueprint for the Nation’s Lost Children, The Times 5 July 2011 NCH ‘The problem of the coloured child: The experience of the National Children’s Home’, Child care Quarterly, 8(2), 1954 Ofsted, Right on Time, Exploring Delays in Adoption, London: Ofsted, 2012

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Professor Ravinder Barn (Royal Holloway, University of London) and Dr Derek Kirton (University of Kent)—Written evidence Owen C and Statham J, Disproportionality in Child Welfare: the prevalence of black and minority ethnic children within the 'looked after' and 'children in need' populations and on child protection registers in England, London: Department for Children, Schools and Families, 2009 Parekh B, A New politics of Identity: Political Principles for an Interdependent World, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008 Pearce J, Adoption UK statement on Ofsted Report, Adoption UK, 3 April 2012 Performance and Innovation Unit, Prime Minister’s review of Adoption, Issued for Consultation, London: PIU, 2000 Quinton D, Rethinking Matching in Adoptions from Care, London: British Association for Adoption and Fostering, 2012 Quiroz P,’From race matching to transracial adoption: race and the changing discourse of US adoption’, Critical Discourse studies 5:3, pp 249-264, 2008 Rattansi A, Racism: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007 Raynor, L, Adoption of Non-White Children: the Experience of a British Adoption Project, London: George Allen and Unwin, 1970 Ridley J and Wainwright J, ‘Black’ families for ‘black’ children?: An Evaluation of Action for Children’s Practice in Ethnically Matching Black, Asian and Dual Heritage Children for Adoption, London: Action for Children, 2010 Roorda R, ‘Moving Beyond the Controversy of the Transracial Adoption of Black and Biracial Children’ in Javier R, Baden A, Biafora F and Camacho-Gingerich A (eds) Handbook of Adoption: Implications for Researchers, Practitioners and Families, Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2007 Rowe J and Lambert L, Children who wait, London: Association of British Adoption Agencies, 1973 Rule G, Recruiting Black and Minority Ethnic Adopters and Foster Carers, London: British Association for Adoption and Fostering, 2006 Savage M, Find prospective adopters bigger homes, councils told, The Times, 18 November 2011 Selwyn J, Quinton D, Harris P, Wijedasa D, Nawaz S and Wood M, Pathways to Permanence for Black, Asian and Mixed Ethnicity Children, London: British Association for Adoption and Fostering, 2010 Small J, ‘The Crisis in Adoption’, Journal of Psychiatry, 30, 129-142, 1984

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Professor Ravinder Barn (Royal Holloway, University of London) and Dr Derek Kirton (University of Kent)—Written evidence Thoburn J, Norford E and Rashid S, Permanent Family Placement for Children of Minority Ethnic Origin, London: Jessica Kingsley, 2000 Times editorial, Adopting Common Sense: Bureaucratic barriers and prejudices have disgracefully forced down adoption rates. Children older than five now have little chance of being taken out of care, The Times 18 April 2011 Tizard B, Adoption: A Second Chance, London: Open Books, 1977 Vonk E, ‘Cultural competence for transracial adoptive parents’, Social Work 46:3, pp 246-255, 2001 24 June 2012

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Barnardo’s—Written evidence

Barnardo’s—Written evidence Summary Barnardo's has been a registered adoption agency since 1947 and is the most established provider of family placement services in the UK, with 32 adoption and fostering services spread across all four nations. Barnardo’s welcomes the Government’s recently published Action Plan for Adoption and the legislative proposals that have been announced as part of the forthcoming Children and Families Bill. We support the aim of the reform agenda and its focus on achieving a less bureaucratic and more proactive adoption process. In particular we welcome the focus on:   

reducing the delay for children; seeking to increase the opportunity for more children who need the stability of adoption to be placed and supported in a timely manner and; the recognition that children being placed for adoption are some of the most vulnerable children and that improvements need to be made in the range of support available to them and their adoptive parents.

Background Do we have the right structure for adoption? The adoption system cannot be viewed in isolation, but within the context of the whole child protection system of which it is one part.3 All elements of the system including: child protection, children’s social care and adoption and fostering are closely interrelated and impact upon each other. They need to be more closely integrated to allow for a more seamless planning process, consideration of the child’s long-term permanency earlier on and ultimately better decision making. To improve the adoption process, the care system from which children who are to be adopted emerge, needs to be more focussed on the needs of the child and more efficient, skilled and professional. The legislative framework is, on the whole, largely sound and will be strengthened further by the proposals that have been announced as part of the forthcoming Children and Families Bill which Barnardo’s welcomes. However, cultural factors prevent the spirit of the legislation being translated fully into improvements in practice on the ground. There are also some operational issues within the system which prevent it from working as effectively as it could. For example, financial disincentives prevent LAs from assessing and 3

The Munro Review of Child Protection: Final Report - A child-centred system, May 2011.

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Barnardo’s—Written evidence recruiting potential adopters more broadly than their own immediate needs, (i.e ‘X’ local authority only needs 10 carers and will therefore not assess anyone they are not likely to use.) This means that potential adopters get turned away when alternatively they could be signposted to voluntary agencies or even assessed by the LA first. Should we be concerned about the falling number of adoptions? Yes. The falling numbers of adoptions are a significant cause for concern as the evidence from research shows that adoption has better outcomes for children, particularly in terms of stability (there are less breakdowns in adoption placements compared with others although the differences decrease as the child’s age at placement increases).4 Of course, not all looked after children are potential adoptees, many children return home to live with their families, and some are older teenagers who go onto independent living. Even for those children who remain in care, adoption is only one permanency option: special guardianship, residency orders, and foster cares are other potentially long-term solutions that may be more appropriate, dependant on the child’s circumstances. Despite this, the proportion of children adopted from care could and should be higher. Selwyn et al’s study of 130 children in a local authority found an attrition rate of 26% (children for whom it had been decided that adoption is the most appropriate plan but who were never adopted).5 Delays in the process of actually getting children to the stage where they can be considered for adoption means that for some children adoption is never an option; Barnardo’s is calling for this to change. Why are the numbers falling? Barnardo's has been a registered adoption agency since 1947. During that time and particularly in the past 25 years, there has been considerable change in the field of adoption. The increasing availability of birth control and abortion, together with changing social attitudes and better support for families has meant that the number of children adopted has fallen consistently, from more than 21,000 in 1975 to 10,400 in 1981 and 5,300 in 2000. Adoption today is an option for children with a much wider range of needs than in the past. Many of the children now placed with Barnardo’s families have experienced considerable disruption and trauma in their early lives, and often have emotional and behavioural problems which makes finding durable placements for them more difficult. In the past, adoption provided a `clean break' for children from their birth families. Recently, there has been growing recognition that children not only need to know about their origins, but may also want to maintain some links with members of their birth family. This has not only been a deterrent for many potential adopters but has meant that the system tends to operate Triseliotis, J, (2002), Long – term foster care or adoption? The evidence examined. Child & Family Social Work, 7: 23-33. Selwyn et al (2006), Costs and outcomes of non- infant adoptions. London: BAAF and Beihal (2010) Belonging and Permanence: outcomes in long term foster care and adoption. London: BAAF. 4 5

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Barnardo’s—Written evidence in the interests of the birth parents than in the interests of the child, which has impacted upon the number of adoptions. The Adoption and Children Act 2002 introduced a new provision for special guardianship orders which were intended to provide additional security for children for whom adoption is not appropriate but who still need an alternative permanent family. However, there is also anecdotal evidence which suggests that special guardianship is considered the “soft option” by the courts as the decision goes through the courts more easily, usually with everyone’s consent. The increase in Special Guardianship orders has also likely contributed to the decline in the number of adoptions.

Legislation What impact did the 2002 Act have on the adoption process? The 2002 Act brought the adoption legislation into line with the Children’s Act, notably with the provisions around the primacy of the child’s welfare. The Act introduced a welfare checklist and placed a strong emphasis on the avoidance of delay which undoubtedly increased the prominence given to permanency planning and family finding. The 2002 Act was accompanied by a DCSF training programme rolled out to all LA’s which significantly raised awareness of the lifelong impact of adoption and the need for a framework for adoption support and services for all parties. The Act was also accompanied by ring fenced money (adoption expenditure increased from £33m in 1994/5 to £159m in 2004/5) to Local Authorities for three years which added significant impetus. This funding also enabled Local Authorities to embed the notion of lifelong impact by providing for the appointment of adoption support workers / teams. The renewed emphasis on adoption and the financial and political investment in it following the 2002 Act resulted in adoption figures initially increasing from 3,400 in 2002 when the Act was passed to 3,800 in 2004/5. Have all aspects of the 2002 and 2006 Acts been implemented appropriately and successfully? The variability of local practice has meant that the 2002 and 2006 Acts (and accompanying Guidance) have been implemented to different degrees across the country. The 2002 Act made the welfare of the child the paramount consideration; however, on the whole, the system still very much reflects the rights of the parent. There is still the culture within the system of prioritising contact with birth family and not an appreciation that maintaining contact may not always be in the child’s best interests. 118

Barnardo’s—Written evidence

Instead of being used as a permanency option for the children for whom they were designed older children or BME children in the main – Special Guardianship Orders have increasingly been seen as an order enabling younger children to be cared for by relatives or foster carers as judges see adoption as draconian. Barnardo’s is aware of anecdotal evidence which suggests that adoption is seen as draconian by judges and that special guardianship is considered the “soft option” by the courts, as the order goes through the courts usually with everyone’s consent. Barnardo’s agrees that there is a need for further scrutiny of the use of special Guardianship especially in those cases where adoption had been the Local Authorities plan. Although the 2002 Act acknowledged and provided a framework for support in relation to the lifelong impact of adoption on all parties, the degree to which this has had a tangible and consistent impact on practice is questionable. The need for continuing support after adoption became part of the assessment process for children and families, but local authorities are not necessarily obliged to offer such support, nor is the payment of adoption allowances mandatory. The adoption support framework was only partially followed through in most authorities. In Barnardo’s experience, many Local Authorities did not embrace the opportunity and challenge of assessing and preparing adoption support plans. Local Authorities have been reluctant to advertise the right of all parties to apply for an assessment of support need as they do not want to create a demand for services they are not resourced to meet. This became more acute when the ring fenced money provided by the then Department of Children, Schools and Families, was withdrawn. Since then many authorities have cut back on their provisions of support services for adopted adults and birth relatives of adopted adults. The recent survey of adopters conducted by Adoption UK highlights this.6 There is evidence to suggest that the role of the Adoption Support Services Adviser (ASSA), is not understood, not used or not promoted effectively enough. If the role is to have its desired impact then there needs to be clearer communication and promotion about the role and its function. The attempt within the Act and associated guidance to increase a multi agency provision has been of very limited success. The responsibility for adoption placements has remained, in the main, with Children’s services and the ‘turf wars’ between health and education services for provision of resources for support has continued. Is further legislation required to improve any aspect of the adoption system? Barnardo’s does not feel that further legislation beyond that included in the Children and Family’s Bill would necessarily solve the issues that impact on the adoption system. Instead, time and energy need to be invested in addressing the cultural and resource barriers which prevent the system operating effectively and in the best interests of the child.

6

It takes a Village to raise a child: Adoption UK Survey of Adoption Support, June 2012.

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Barnardo’s—Written evidence An understanding of the needs of children to form stable attachments and of the negative impact caused to children by delays and disruption to the system needs to be strengthened and embedded in Local Authorities’ practice. There should also be greater recognition of the adoption system’s social return on investment and how an effective and efficient adoption system would bring with it significant savings that cut across many service areas from health to education to employment. Any costs and savings need to be viewed beyond annual children’s services budgets. Can you as a respondent identify a problem and tell us if, and if so where, the legislation (including regulations), needs to change? As above

Time taken in placing children Is excessive time taken in placing children? Do some groups of children take a disproportionate length of time? Yes, excessive time is taken placing children. The most significant delays, however, take place early on in the process, in reaching the decision that the child should be taken into care. This is particularly concerning as there is extensive evidence to show that the longer a child is abused/ neglected, the more damage is done and consequently the more difficult it is to find a stable adoptive placement for them.7 One study showed that the chances of being adopted reduced by nearly half for every year of delay.8 Yes, some groups of children take a disproportionate length of time. There is evidence which shows that factors such as age, ethnicity, disability, ‘damage’ and a child’s strong ties to their birth family can contribute to pessimism amongst professionals of a child’s “adoptability.” Some local authorities are deterred from making an adoption plans for sibling groups or where plans are made they are often delayed, because of the assumption that it would be too difficult to find a suitable placement.9 Ethnic minority children wait longer for adoption to be recommended as the best option and may then wait longer to be placed while a suitable adoptive match is sought.10 In one study of 7Rutter,

M (2000) Children in Substitute Care: some conceptual considerations and research implications. Children and Youth Services Review, 22, 9/10, 685-703; and Rees, C.A. and Selwyn, J. (2009) Non-infant adoption from care: lessons for safeguarding children. Child: Care, Health and Development 35,4:561-567. 8 Selwyn, J, Frazier, L, and Quniton, D (2006) ‘Paved with Good Intentions: The Pathway to Adoption and the Cost of Delay’, British Journal of Social Work,36,561-576. 9 Saunders, H and Selwyn, J (2010) Adopting Large Sibling Groups: Experiences of Agencies and Adopters in Placing Sibling Groups for Adoption from Care. Bristol: Hadley Centre for Adoption and Foster Care Studies, University of Bristol.

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Barnardo’s—Written evidence BME children who experienced delay, attempts to find a family of similar ethnicity was a factor in delay for most (70%) of their cases.11 Successful matching on ethnicity generally involved the local Authority being prepared to move rapidly to widen the search beyond their in- house families. Adoption Register figures highlight the difficulties in placing children with disabilities. In 2010-11 of 72 children referred only 30 placed permanently and only 16 of these for adoption. At Barnardo’s we have positive experience of recruiting foster carers who are committed to permanency but do not trust the level of support they and the children would get if they became adopters. What aspects of the adoption process, including pre-process care proceedings, take most time? The most significant delays take place early on in the process, in reaching the decision that the child should be taken into care and then that the child should be adopted. There is insufficient planning for permanency at an early stage when a child enters care. Once a decision has been made to place a child for adoption, statistics show that about threequarters (74% in 2011) are placed within 12 months. The Adoption data set, performance tables and Adoption Scorecards contain detailed information about the specific points at which delays occur in the system for every LA across the country. Barnardo’s recommends that the Committee look into this.12 Do the various parts of the system – local authorities, adoption agencies, courts and others – work effectively together? Taking into account the significant variation in practice, on the whole the different actors in the adoption system do not always work seamlessly together. The attempt within the 2002 Act and associated guidance to increase a multi agency provision has been of very limited success. The responsibility for adoption placements has remained with Children’s services and the ‘turf wars’ between health and education responsibilities for provision of support resources has continued. There are some operational issues within the system which prevent it from working as effectively as it could. For example, financial disincentives prevent Local Authorities from assessing and recruiting potential adopters more broadly than their own immediate needs, (i.e ‘X’ local authority only needs 10 carers and will therefore not assess anyone they are not likely Selwyn, J. Harris, P., Quinton, D. Nawaz, S., Wijedasa, D. and Wood, M. (2008), Pathways to permanence for black, Asian and mixed ethnicity children: dilemmas, decision making and outcomes. Bristol: Hadley Centre for Adoption and Foster Care Studies, University of Bristol. 11 Farmer et al. 12Dept for Education (2011) Adoption and Special Guardianship Data Pack, and Dept for Education (2012) Adoption Scorecards. 10

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Barnardo’s—Written evidence to use.) This means that potential adopters get turned away when alternatively they could be signposted to voluntary agencies or even assessed by the LA. There is clearly significant scope for closer partnership working between local authorities and voluntary adoption agencies to improve adoption services, and adoption support services. Local authorities have been reluctant to use Voluntary Adoption Agencies because of their perceived extra cost, despite research which refutes this.13 Local authorities should make more use of voluntary adoption agencies, such as Barnardo’s who have specialist expertise and experience in finding families for difficult-to-place children, to help reduce delay and break down barriers in the system. Voluntary adoption agencies have responded positively to increasing demand for placements and with appropriate funding would be able to increase their capacity to recruit and prepare families. Could the adoption process be speeded up, whilst ensuring that necessary safeguards are preserved? Yes. Barnardo’s is delighted by the recent announcement from the Prime Minister that the Government will consult on a change in regulations to facilitate the placement of babies taken into care with families who can go on to adopt them. Legislation to make fostering by approved adopters “standard practice” for infants under one should see a reduction in the number of foster placements prior to adoption and a reduction in the consequent disruption caused to the child. Such a change will, however, need to ensure that timely, careful and skilled assessment, preparation and support is in place so that unplanned temporary foster placements do not drift into adoptive placements, de facto. There is also still a pressing need for local authorities to look again at the length of time it takes for them to decide a baby should be removed from their birth parents. This must be guided by the needs of the child; as for babies - damage is done in days and weeks and they can ill afford the months granted to some birth parents to demonstrate a willingness and ability to change. This will require skilled assessment and understanding of child development and attachment by early intervention staff. This will ensure that work with parents maintains focus on the child’s welfare as the paramount consideration. There must, then, be a cut off point to the support given to parents, after which, if the parents are not able to provide adequate care for their child, alternative permanency plans are followed through. Parents should not be given repeated opportunities to show that they are able look after the child. In half the cases where recommendations for children to remain with birth parents followed specialist parenting assessments, children were eventually removed.14 Ward et al suggest that social workers lack of training in child development and the impact of neglect and delay, contribute to protracted decision making. Selwyn and Sempkik (2009) Adoption and the Inter Agency Fee. Adoption Research initiative. Dept for Education and Skills. Ward, H. Brown, B. Westlake, D and Munro, E.R. (2010) Infants suffering, or likely to suffer, significant harm: a prospective longitudinal study. DFE Research Brief DfE- RBO53. 13 14

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Barnardo’s—Written evidence

Planning for permanency needs to be high on the agenda for every child from the beginning of their contact with children’s services and adoption needs to be kept on the table as an option for children regardless of their age, ethnicity or special need. Local authorities need to work with voluntary agencies more effectively to ensure that all options are considered simultaneously rather than sequentially. Also, better recruitment and support at the outset for potential adopters would result in fewer dropping out of the system and so reduce delays in findings suitable adopters. How widely used is concurrent planning? What are its advantages and disadvantages? Concurrent planning is not used widely. It is often viewed with suspicion by courts. Lawyers for birth relatives argue that it pre empts the decision and is biased against birthparents. Where the plan for a child is over-invested in one placement outcome (e.g adoption) then there is no back up plan should it fail. The Government is placing increasing emphasis on the benefits of concurrent planning, however, the success of this approach will hinge on effective training and support for workers and concurrent carers - the uncertainties involved in the process undoubtedly affects how the carer’s attachment to the child develops. The model appears costly to agencies, and Barnardo’s recommends that the financial plans for this model are reviewed, including the implications for carers needing to leave their employment before they are eligible for adoption leave and payment as this will create barriers to recruitment. What are the reasons for the variations in time taken to place children by different local authorities? The variations are due to the different emphasis being placed upon adoption by different local authorities, and to the adequacy or otherwise of their systems for conducting end to end monitoring of the process from first contact through to adoption and adequately resourcing the independent reviewing process . There is also considerable variation in delays from court to court.

The number of potential adopters Are there enough potential adopters coming forward? Are there shortages in particular ethnic groups?

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Barnardo’s—Written evidence There are not enough potential adopters coming forward. This is partly influenced by the ages of children available, the lack of user-friendliness of the system generally, and some cultural issues for ethnic minorities. How do we ensure the best “fit” for a child, and is trans-racial adoption relevant to this issue? The legislation and guidance in this area are adequate and clearly state that the child's need for a family should take precedence over ethnic matching. However, there is evidence that concerns about poor quality of information and assessment for all children’s needs is most acute for BME children. There needs to be improvements in practice to ensure matching is fully informed by children’s needs and not unduly impacted on by financial considerations.15 Why do some potential adopters drop out during the adoption process? Barnardo’s has found that if potential adopters make it through to the assessment process, many are likely to be approved; however, many potential adopters are likely to be ‘lost’ at the enquiry/ information stage. Whilst some of these enquiries will be turned away appropriately, there are also many that might have continued to the assessment process, if they had received the appropriate support. Applicants not presenting as already ‘ready’ seem to be turned away by some agencies. Local authorities tend only to focus on recruiting for their own needs (only assessing potential adopters that would match the children in their care) as they are reluctant to cover the cost of assessing a potential adopter that they are unlikely to need. Willing potential adopters can be turned away from Local Authorities without even being assessed and without being signposted to voluntary agencies such as those provided by Barnardo’s where they could be supported to find a suitable match. For these reasons, Barnardo’s has developed a proposal for an adoption matching portal which the Children’s Minister is currently considering and which Barnardo’s recommends to the Select Committee on Adoption Legislation. Please see Appendix 1 for an explanation of this portal. Have the changes to eligibility introduced by the 2002 Act impacted the number of potential adopters?

Selwyn, J. Harris, P., Quinton, D. Nawaz, S., Wijedasa, D. and Wood, M. (2008), Pathways to permanence for black, Asian and mixed ethnicity children: dilemmas, decision making and outcomes. Bristol: Hadley Centre for Adoption and Foster Care Studies, University of Bristol. 15

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Barnardo’s—Written evidence Barnardo’s would speculate that that the acceptance of non married and single sex couples must have had a positive impact on the number of potential adopters. However, we do not have the data readily available to analyse this. The provisions for adoption support services have not had the impact that was intended on the number of potential adopters. After the implementation of the Act – those agencies who were offering adoption support teams and services did see that as a powerful ‘selling’ point when recruiting applicants. However, as is explained above, the offer of these services varies from place to place. It is still the case that more effective support for adopters will be key to increasing recruitment What will be the likely effect of the measures proposed in the Department for Education’s ‘Action Plan for Adoption’? Barnardo’s welcomes the Department for Education’s Action Plan for Adoption. However, there are concerns that the pressure to evidence increased adoption and shorter timescales may, in the absence of changes earlier on in the child protection process, potentially lead to poorer practice. For example, legislation (proposed to come into force 1/9/12) to prohibit the adoption panel considering the plan for adoption, is being introduced without any improvement being made to permanency planning earlier in the process.16 Whilst there may have been a case for removing the ‘should be placed for adoption’ from the panel (as this is late in the planning process) there is little evidence of panels, per se, delaying progress.17 To ensure that the loss of the panels is not detrimental, there is a need to ensure that there is robust implementation of the Care Planning guidelines and that the Independent Reviewer Officer’s role is strengthened and that universal systems are in place. 18 The successful reform of the adoption system is contingent on the implementation of the recommendations of the Munro Review and the Norgrove Review relating to training, development and skilling up of the workforce and the judiciary. Does the number of agencies inhibit the number of potential adopters recruited? It isn't the number of agencies which inhibit the number of the potential adopters, but the lack of an open market. Adopters can get "stuck" with one agency and similarly, children can be stuck with one local authority. The action plan proposes a partial resolution by requiring all children and adopters to be referred to the register after three months but it lacks teeth and doesn't address the issue of the lack of a level playing field for commissioning adoption. Please see Appendix 1 for Barnardo’s proposal of a more universal matching model. Does the recent increase in knowledge about early child development affect the balance between children’s rights and parental rights? Yes. The Adoption Agencies (Panel and Consequential Amendments) Regulations 2012. Right on Time exploring delays in adoption (2012) Ofsted ref 120010. 18 The Children Act 1989 Guidance and Regulations Volume 2: Care Planning, Placement and Case Review (2010). 16 17

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Stability needs to be seen as a safeguarding issue. The judiciary needs to be much more aware of this knowledge and work to children’s timescales, not parents’. As it currently operates, the adoption system does not satisfy the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) which states that the best interest of the child shall be the primary consideration in all actions concerning children. Article 9 explicitly states that the right of the child to maintain personal relationships and direct contact with both parents on a regular basis must only be respected if such contact is not contrary to the child’s best interests. Findings from research by Ward et al which suggest that parents wishes are more likely to be respected than the needs of the child, further illustrate this point. Parents should not be given repeated opportunities to show that they are able look after the child. In half the cases where recommendations for children to remain with birth parents followed specialist parenting assessments, children were eventually removed.19

Court proceedings Do court proceedings take undue time in the adoption process? Yes. Currently, unnecessary delays mean that some children are waiting an average of 55 weeks for their case to go through the courts.

Would the recommendations of the Family Justice Review substantially alter the position? Yes. Barnardo’s welcomes reforms recently announced by Government to reduce the time it takes for a child's case to go through the courts so that from 2013 all such cases will be completed in six months or less. However, Barnardo’s has been calling for Government to take urgent additional action to introduce short-term measures to reduce delays for children who are currently stuck in the system, especially babies under 18 months. There is also an urgent need to challenge the work of the courts so that delays are not caused by a lack of available sittings. How effective are provisions for the representation by guardians of children in court proceedings? In view of the proposed legislation to remove the requirement of panels to agree the plan for adoption, it will be even more crucial to increase the training and support for the Independent Reviewing Officer so that this role becomes more effective and pro-active in the process.

Ward, H. Brown, B. Westlake, D and Munro, E.R. (2010) Infants suffering, or likely to suffer, significant harm: a prospective longitudinal study. DFE Research Brief DfE- RBO53. 19

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Barnardo’s—Written evidence Independent Reviewing Officers need to be actively safeguarding the child’s need for stability to ensure that everything is being done to ensure decisions are being made as early as possible. At a much earlier stage, Independent Reviewing Officers, need to be following cases through and ensuring that paperwork is accurate so as to reduce delays. How effective have placement orders been in facilitating the placement and adoption of children compared with “freeing orders”? Placement orders have worked well, however Barnardo’s is aware of issues where the LA has recommended a placement order be granted, but the court has granted a Special Guardianship order instead. Some have also argued that the blurred distinction between care order and placement order is unfair to birthparents. How common is it for care proceedings and placement order proceedings to be heard together or consecutively? What are the advantages and disadvantages of this approach? Care proceedings and placement order proceedings practically always occur at the same time.

Post-adoption support How, if at all, has the 2002 Act impacted upon the provision of post-adoption contacts and support? The 2002 Adoption & Children Act gave a clear message about the need to provide adoption support, to whom it was to be provided, and a framework for assessment and planning. The awareness of and commitment to this is extremely variable even at the placement stage and at a time of financial cut backs these support services are vulnerable. Are measures needed to enhance post-adoption financial and other support for (i) adopted children; (ii) adoptive parents, (iii) birth families? Yes to all. The right support can be critical for sustaining adoption placements, particularly for disabled children (e.g guaranteed breaks, co-ordination of support services, access to specialist help etc.), older children with complex and behavioural needs, and BME children ( whatever the ethnicity of the adopter themselves, they may require support to understand and develop the cultural identity of the child).

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Barnardo’s—Written evidence Support, such as that provided by Barnardo’s Link Adoption Service, should be offered to all new adopters for as long as they need it, not just for the first three years, as some may require extra help as children become teenagers. The Link Adoption Service provides support services for people whose lives have been affected by adoption across south east England, working in conjunction with five local authorities. Link provides a broad range of support services including a helpdesk that provides a range of local information and advice staffed by experienced practitioners and adopters, events for adopted children and young people, therapeutic counselling service which is staffed by over 100 experienced counsellors who provide counselling and guidance to those affected by adoption, telephone counselling service which offers remote access to our therapeutic counsellors and a support scheme for birth mothers or family members involved in care proceedings. It is staffed by our therapeutic counsellors who offer structured support and advice.

Other permanent placements What has been the effect of the introduction, in the 2002 Act, of ‘special guardianship’? The success and spread of special guardianship has been dependant upon LA’s policy and practice. In the last three years, 9,600 children in England ceased to be looked after through adoption and 3,600 through special guardianship. Four LAs, including two very small ones, had no SGOs at all during between 2007 and 2010, but for eleven others special guardianships numbers are almost equal to or greater than numbers of adoption orders. 33% of children who left care aged 0 to 4 between 1 April 2007 and 31 March 2010 did so through adoption and 9% through special guardianship. 20 What is the best way to ensure permanent and consistent placements for children? Barnardo’s is calling for stability to be seen as a safeguarding issue. Achieving stable, consistent and loving placements for children (including with their birth parents) should be the over riding objective of social work intervention. Barnardo’s believes that in order to increase the use of adoption, access to good quality adoption support services is vital for prospective adopters considering adoption, to give them the confidence and parenting skills they will need to avoid problems in the long-term, and to prevent adoptions from breaking down. As outlined above, what agencies do in providing post-placement support is important in preventing disruption.

20

Dept for Education (2011) Adoption and Special Guardianship Data Pack.

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Barnardo’s—Written evidence Would earlier interventions in cases of children with difficulties have an effect on the number of children who need to be adopted or otherwise permanently separated from their birth family? It is likely that earlier intervention would both increase the number of children with an adoption plan and the number subsequently adopted. It would also ensure that parents who were able to change could achieve that change within a timescale which more effectively met the needs of the child. Parents who do change sufficiently to care for their children should have ready access to support so that their competence is maintained. Similarly Special Guardians and Adoptive parents need ready access to a range of postplacement and post-order support.

Monitoring Do ‘adoption scorecards’ provide an appropriate means for monitoring the performance of local authorities with regard to adoption? Barnardo’s welcomes clear performance thresholds and minimum expectations for timeliness in the adoption system which the scorecards provide. However, the system must be monitored to ensure that children are not being placed in inappropriate adoption placements in order for LAs to meet the desired performance threshold. The scorecards must be used in conjunction with appropriate staffing, good statutory guidance and min standards so targets do not compromise informed practices. How robust are current systems for monitoring the i) number of adoptions made, ii) the number of children awaiting adoption, and iii) the amount of delay experienced by those awaiting adoption? The current systems are adequate in collecting the data needed to answer i) and iii) above. It is not easy at any one time to be clear about how many children are waiting, and more particularly no real system for identifying numbers of sibling groups , age breakdowns etc. There is also inadequate data collected on how many children’s adoptions disrupted and how many children have their plan for adoption changed. Appendix 1: Proposal for an Adoption Matching Portal Jonathan Ewen Lead Director, Children in Care, Barnardo’s The model Local authorities will refer all children to the Portal when:

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Barnardo’s—Written evidence 

 

(Stage One) the independent reviewing officer decides adoption is part of the plan, and will provide basic information. (Basic information equals: age, special needs, siblings to be placed together, ethnicity, geography21 greater than 60 miles from local authority head office). (Stage two) a final hearing date has been set for the placement order (Stage three) a placement order is made.

NB: with the exception of concurrent placements and foster parent adoptions, no child can be placed for adoption except through the portal All adoption agencies will:  refer all adoption approvals to the Portal with summary information (summary information equals: age, marital status, ethnicity, range of children to be considered). NB: no adoption agency can make a match for their adopter with a child except through the portal. At stage 3 however it will be expected that local authorities will immediately notify the wish to place with one of the families known to them (and who have been referred to the portal). The government will:  establish a cross sector body to meet annually and agree fee levels. (Possibly three levels depending upon the level of need of the child). The Adoption Matching Portal will:  summarise the future needs for placements from information given at stage one. (In order to inform future planning by adoption agencies of their recruitment needs);  provide tentative matches by linking basic child information with summary information from adoption agencies. (In order to be ready to move to formal linking as soon as the placement order is made);  confirm formal links for consideration at stage three;  provide statistics on children referred, links offered and made, and placements and;  arrange for invoices to be made and receipts to be paid. What Issues Will an Adoption Matching Portal Address    

Levels the playing field. As a cross sector body is setting the fee level to one which reflects the common costs of adoption for voluntary adoption agencies and local authorities, sequential commissioning becomes unnecessary. Immediate matches possible The first match can be the best match It incentivises agencies to recruit much more widely as there are no artificial barriers like

This is set to ensure that when social workers make placements they will not be involved in travelling from one end of the country to the other but neither will the local authority be able to specify such a tight geographical limit for the placement that it will most likely be with their own carers, thereby encouraging the bypassing of the portal. 21

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Barnardo’s—Written evidence “X” local authority only needs 10 carers and will therefore not assess anyone they are not likely to use  ”Y” voluntary adoption agency only gets children offered after all the alternatives are exhausted Agencies who welcome carers and correctly recruit those who are most needed are likely to grow their work thus rewarding successful practice in line with government objectives. 



July 2012

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Barnardo’s—Oral evidence (QQ 187–233) Evidence Session No. 3.

Heard in Public.

Questions 187–233

TUESDAY 10 JULY 2012 Members present Baroness Butler-Sloss (Chairman) Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top Baroness Eaton Viscount Eccles Baroness Hamwee Baroness Howarth of Breckland Baroness King of Bow Baroness Knight of Collingtree Baroness Morris of Bolton Lord Morris of Handsworth Baroness Walmsley ________________

Examination of Witness Jonathan Ewen, Barnardo’s (North-East).

Q187 The Chairman: Mr Ewen, we are extremely grateful to you. We apologise, but we started a bit late with Coram and we certainly did not want to lose the opportunity to talk to them. We are particularly delighted that you are here to give evidence. What we will do in the coming hour or so is ask you a number of questions, but we would also be grateful if you could back that up by providing further written evidence. As I say, we may well come back to you or to another part of Barnardo’s as our further evidence goes through. I invite Lady Howarth to ask you the first question. Q188 Baroness Howarth of Breckland: Good morning, Mr Ewen. We have had a lot of discussion about whether adoption is falling in real terms when SGOs and residential orders are taken into consideration. Should we be concerned about the falling number of adoptions when the total number of permanent placements are taken into account? Should we really be worrying about permanency rather than adoption? 132

Barnardo’s—Oral evidence (QQ 187–233) Jonathan Ewen: There are two significant questions here. The answer to the first one is that for a number of reasons we definitely should be concerned about the fall in adoption. Perhaps I may come back to those in a moment. I think that we should be looking at permanency across the board, with adoption as part of an overall system of how children are looked after and, indeed, how we respond to children in the community when there are problems. It is helpful to think of adoption as being at the end of a pipeline. If you start the pipeline with all children, then children who are in need of safeguarding, the pipeline narrows as you get to all children who are in care, and then finally you end up with children who are adopted. If we get the adoption system working really well, that has an effect on the whole of the system. That is because what we do for those children makes a difference to what we do for all children. It is important to see adoption as part of a pipeline, and for that reason, any fall in the numbers being adopted is a cause for concern. The second reason we should be concerned about the fall in adoption is set out in the research, and I will give you the references in our written evidence. I would probably get them wrong if I gave them to you now because I do not have Dr Carol Homden’s encyclopaedic knowledge of all the research. We know that the outcomes from adoption are better. We also know that in fostering, if the child knows for a fact that that is their permanent home, the outcomes are comparable. However, that is very hard to achieve in fostering, so I think we can accept that the outcomes from adoption are better. The third reason we should be concerned is that there is such a wide variation between local authorities in the rates of children being adopted as a percentage of children leaving care. They cannot all be right, and therefore it follows that there must be an optimum number of children who need adoption. Given the criteria for children coming into care from whom children are being chosen for adoption from that care population must be more or less the same in courts throughout the land, it must follow that if some local authorities have a higher percentage of children being adopted, it means that children in other local authorities where there is not the same high percentage must be missing out on the opportunity for adoption. I would therefore say that overall the fall in the number of children being adopted is a cause for concern. Q189 Baroness Howarth of Breckland: Going back to your description of the funnel for children, where do you think quality assessment is needed in order to make sure that a child gets the right outcome from the process? Jonathan Ewen: This relates to some questions that may come later. Our view is that there needs to be an intensive concentration on children who we know are likely to be at risk. Harriet Ward has done some research—a piece of work I can remember—which shows in her sample that something like 50% of the children who are likely to be at risk of significant harm were identified at birth and 100% were identified by six months. That is the point at which significant input needs to take place. Barnardo’s, as one of the larger adoption agencies since 1947, also does a lot of intensive work with families. There is no doubt that intensive support at the earliest possible point is necessary if we are going to deal with the issues that these families have. That is the point at which we should be investing considerably more in the way of resources. We know at that stage that some of these issues are fairly intractable. If we have parents who have already had children removed from them and taken into care, if they have mental issues or there is domestic violence, we know that that is going to be problematic. We really need to work intensively with them at that point. We also know from the research that,

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Barnardo’s—Oral evidence (QQ 187–233) of those parents who are going to change, the vast majority will do so inside six months. There is a timespan, and if we take that together with what we know about the development of very young children—their need for attachment and stability during this crucial period and how they develop—it is a false economy not to invest heavily at that point. Q190 Baroness Eaton: From your experience, has the introduction of special guardianship orders been a success? Do you have any concerns about their current use? Jonathan Ewen: We do not have hard evidence about what is happening, but what we do know is that while they were envisaged as being likely to be helpful for slightly older children, they seem to be being used for younger children. There is also some suggestion—it is anecdotal so I could not produce any evidence on it—that they may be used as a kind of soft option rather than the permanent separation of adoption. That could give rise to some concern, but we do not have any definitive evidence. Q191 The Chairman: That is interesting because it was not thought that special guardianship would be used for younger children. It was thought that the orders would be used for those children who wanted to keep some sort of contact with the natural family. Why do you think local authorities are going this way, because in the end it is the judge who will make the decision? Jonathan Ewen: I think that there are a number of factors. We are aware of a number of cases where the local authority has wanted to go for adoption but the final order made has been for special guardianship, so it may be the judges. The Chairman: It may be the judiciary. Jonathan Ewen: Yes, the judiciary has made those decisions. I think it is connected to a much broader question related to some of the cultural factors that affect adoption permanency and how we work with birth parents. The overall tenor of that is that parents’ rights are being respected whereas the needs of the child are perhaps not. I refer back to Harriet Ward’s research. One of her findings was that while proper attention is paid to parents’ rights and duties, the needs of the child are being ignored. Guardianship is an option that solicitors for the parents may well argue for and it may be seen as a softer option for the courts, and indeed for social workers applying for them rather than for adoption. Q192 Baroness Walmsley: I wonder if I could pursue this business of special guardians. Pardon my ignorance, but who are these special guardians? Are they members of the wider family or fosterers? Who are they? Jonathan Ewen: Again, I would have to confess that I am not an expert on this area, but largely they will be members of the wider family. Q193 Baroness Walmsley: I have the next question, which is a broad one. Does the current adoption system work effectively? In particular, is the number, size and variety of adoption agencies a problem? Would greater standardisation of resources, policies and practices on a regional or even national scale increase efficiency and help address current variations in performance? What would be the advantages and disadvantages of such an approach?

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Barnardo’s—Oral evidence (QQ 187–233) Jonathan Ewen: In answer to the first question, I do not think that the current system works particularly well, and the reason for that is because it is so fragmented. From the child’s point of view, in a local authority there is still sequential looking for resources. The authority will look to its own resources first, then to the local consortium and subsequently to the national register. However, they will still look at other local authorities, and only as a final choice will they look at the voluntary adoption agencies. One of the obstacles for local authorities is the perceived difference in price. When we talk to the directors of social services, by and large they accept Julie Selwyn’s research which shows that the cost is by and large the same for local authorities and voluntary adoption agencies, at around £34,000. If you talk to middle managers in the same local authorities, they do not believe a word of it, and they are the people who actually hold the purse strings. An added complication is that if you are a local authority manager you have a year-on-year budget, so even if you were to decommission some of your own services you would not get back whatever is spent in the on-costs, which are located in the treasurer’s department and elsewhere within the local authority. Managers are immediately inhibited about looking externally even if they believe and understand that the true costs are liable to be the same. For that reason, from the child’s point of view, the fact that they are going through a sequential process—which I do understand has been speeded up as a result of the Government’s attention to the adoption scorecard and pressure on local authorities—means that the likelihood is that this will still be looked at sequentially. If we look at it from the adopter’s point of view—only recently I dealt with a letter from a particular adopter—it is clear that most adopters are not aware of the proliferation of different agencies to whom they could apply. If they apply to their local local authority and that local local authority only adopts 10 or so children each year, or even if a larger number are adopted but the family is not seen as being ready to move into adoption immediately, it is not in that local authority’s interest to invest in assessing that family. The authority will actually dissuade some people from coming forward to be adopters because they do not match its immediate needs. There is a very imperfect market both for the children who need the adopters and for the adopters who want to be approved. There is imperfect knowledge because people do not know what else is available and the system is imperfect in the sense that local authorities do not know what else is out there. For those reasons, I do not think that the current system is working very well. The Chairman: That leads neatly into the question to be put by Lord Morris. Q194 Lord Morris of Handsworth: I think that there is general agreement about the importance of the relationship between the agencies, local authorities and, of course, voluntary adoption agencies. But any relationship has to be managed and there are factors which can affect that. What, if any, are the financial or institutional barriers to more effective working partnerships between local authorities and voluntary adoption agencies? Jonathan Ewen: I think that I have probably covered most of that in my answer to the previous question, but the key factor is lack of knowledge and the lack of an open market. In Britain the market is segmented 156 times by each local authority. What that means is that each local authority will have only a limited pool to look to for matching to begin with, and adopters will have only those children who can be accessed through their agency available to be

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Barnardo’s—Oral evidence (QQ 187–233) matched with them. That leads to a very imperfect market. What I think is needed is to open up the market so that it becomes a much freer exchange. One of the crucial elements of that is the financial one. The financial barriers are quite considerable. At the middle management level, local authorities do not recognise their own costs, so either they make swaps with other local authorities for nothing or they dissuade adopters that they cannot use from coming forward; of if they do pay, they pay very much under the market rate—not the market rate, but the amount that it actually costs them to do an assessment. All of those factors contribute to it being a very inefficient system. Q195 Lord Morris of Handsworth: I want to explore how the relationship is managed. Is it purely on a voluntary basis? Jonathan Ewen: There are all sorts of different models. As you heard earlier from Carol Homden, they have an embedded partnership with a number of different local authorities. The majority of voluntary adoption agencies will be approached on a one-off basis through the adoption register or by other means. They will be approached and asked, “Have you got a placement for this child?” Q196 Lord Morris of Handsworth: Are there any codes of best practice to be followed in managing the relationship between local authorities and the voluntary agencies? Jonathan Ewen: There is best practice in commissioning arrangements, but that is still problematic when you try to run commissioning arrangements with what tend to be fairly small voluntary adoption agencies. If you have a local authority that places only 10 children each year and a small adoption agency that perhaps approves only 20 or so adopters each year, you still might not get a perfect match. Even the commissioning arrangement might not be the best arrangement. What is needed is much greater freedom within the whole market so that the best match between the adopter and the child can be achieved. That is done by making sure that you have the greatest possible access to the widest possible number of matches. Q197 Baroness King of Bow: This is the most key point in everything we are looking at. Can you explain to us how to turn those 156 individual markets into a single free market without introducing some sort of national adoption framework? Jonathan Ewen: We have a proposal that has gone to the DfE and which will be appended to our evidence. In effect, it is a development of the way in which the register works at the moment. But if local authorities were required to put all the children they have on to a central register, and not to do so at the point at which the placement order is agreed but at an earlier stage—and giving notification of which stage it is—and if all adopters had to go to that central register, it would be possible. Basically, it would be a bit like a dating agency using a fairly simple computer system that would allow you to match. It would be quite easy to put in parameters like distance because you would not want social workers travelling all around the country. The third necessary feature would be an agreement about the fee for an adoption placement, which would be the same for local authorities as it is for voluntary adoption agencies. Then there would be no paradoxical disincentive for anyone to go for a particular match. In fact it could be done in a blind dating manner so that you would not know who a particular adopter was from. What the child needs is the best possible match; the agency is less important. What that system would potentially do is free up the market for adoption, and those agencies that are 136

Barnardo’s—Oral evidence (QQ 187–233) particularly good at recruiting and supporting carers, and could demonstrate that by the number of matches and how quickly their adopters received matches, would get more people applying to them. Similarly, those probably small local authorities that have only a small number of adopters would cease to recruit themselves. They would hand them over to another local authority or simply buy openly in the market from people who are much more effective and efficient at recruitment. Q198 The Chairman: Leaving that to one side, you were saying that some local authorities might cease to do it, but what about some of the smaller voluntary agencies? Ought there to be as many agencies as there are, or should there be a national register of children and a national register of potential adopters that could be accessed? Would or should they reduce the number of voluntary agencies? Jonathan Ewen: I think that it is likely that that would happen. To be honest, the very small agencies would find it difficult to compete. It is likely that they would combine with other agencies by passing over their current adopters. Q199 The Chairman: I appreciate that Barnardo’s is very large, but looking at it as objectively as you can, would that be a good idea? Are there too many voluntary agencies for rather too few children? Jonathan Ewen: That is a difficult question to answer. Even if you are a small adoption agency, if you have 10 adopters and you manage to place 10 children, that is 10 children who would not otherwise have homes. I would be very reluctant to say that any adoption agency should cease to function. One of the blessings of having a multitude of different adoption agencies is that that offers more scope for innovation. If we go back a number of years, children with disabilities, for example, were never considered for adoption. That was an innovation from a voluntary adoption agency which decided to try to place children with disabilities. There may well be niches of expertise and knowledge in the smaller adoption agencies that it would be a great shame to lose. What I would suggest is that they might combine rather than go out of business. It would be an enormous shame if that happened. Q200 Baroness Howarth of Breckland: However you do this, there is still a financial problem in terms of the annual budget. There has been a suggestion about bonds so that the larger agencies carry some of the costs until the on-costs come back to local authorities. Do you think that the Government really need to put, if you like, money where their thoughts are about adoption so as to ensure that the costs are met up front? For commissioners, this is a real problem. Jonathan Ewen: It would be enormously helpful to have the money up front. You incur costs as soon as you start recruiting and doing the assessments and you are unlikely to get any income for six or nine months, or maybe not until the next financial year. So that would be enormously helpful. From the local authority’s point of view, if you were to separate out its provision from its commissioning, that would make a big difference. The authority would then be competing on a level playing field. It is the lack of a level playing field that is the major problem, although it would also be very helpful to have money up front.

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Barnardo’s—Oral evidence (QQ 187–233) Q201 Baroness Howarth of Breckland: But for them the provision and commissioning would still remain in their budget; they would still have those on-costs. Even if you separate out and create a level playing field, they would still have the problem of the annualised budget. Does that not still have to be dealt with either at the Government level or by some sort of other process? Jonathan Ewen: It does, and schemes like the invest to save programme can be very helpful. There is a problem here for local authorities, particularly in these straitened times. While it does not help the immediate budgetary problem, we know from Nina Biehal’s research that 25% of children identified for adoption do not subsequently get adopted. A study undertaken in the northern region of the 12 most expensive children in each local authority showed that a number of them had previously been failed adoptions. We can certainly hypothesise that children for whom adoption is identified but who are not subsequently adopted are likely to be very expensive. I accept the point that that will not make any difference to year-on-year budgeting, but that budgeting is not something that is set in legislation. It is usually determined by a local authority’s rules rather than any legislative requirement. Q202 Baroness Knight of Collingtree: Following on from that, we are interested in the feeling that it is currently taking far too long to get adoptions through. I can see at least three valid reasons for why that is such a bad thing. First, delay is very distressing and stressful for a child, even for a very young one. Secondly, it puts adoptive parents off when delays keep happening. Thirdly, the child gets older with every delay. I do not know if Mr Ewen would agree with this, but I would be interested to hear his comments. Jonathan Ewen: I absolutely agree with all three points. I talked to one adopter who felt heartbroken about the fact that the two children she adopted had been waiting for the final placement order. She could have cared for them during that time, instead of which she had to wait until the children were older and therefore missed key events in their lives. The age at which children are available for adoption is very important. What lies behind this is a cultural approach that goes back to the research I referred to by Harriet Ward. Far too much emphasis is put on parents’ rights and duties rather than on the needs of the child. Q203 Baroness Knight of Collingtree: Do you mean on the rights and duties of the adoptive parents? Jonathan Ewen: No, I am talking about the natural parents. That leads to a reluctance on the part of local authorities. There is nothing to prevent local authorities placing children with a view to adoption with people who have dual approval. Nothing prevents concurrency taking place now, but there is a reluctance to take that step because it is seen, potentially by the judiciary but also by social workers, as prejudging what the final outcome will be. If the culture were to change so that an emphasis was put on understanding the damage being done to children by these delays, that would help to bring about change. Again, as I understand it, there is no legal reason that prevents local authorities placing children much earlier with a view to them being adopted when the court finally agrees it. The adopters must bear the risk that ultimately the child might not stay with them, but it would help to ensure that children are placed at a younger age in what will be their stable home.

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Barnardo’s—Oral evidence (QQ 187–233) Q204 Viscount Eccles: Is there a perception that the media get in the way of how the culture is formed and the way people think about it? Jonathan Ewen: I think that the media blow hot and cold—it goes both ways—so I am not sure how much they play into it. What possibly does play into this is a misperception about what the UNCRC says. I have heard a professor of social work say that the job of the social worker is to balance the rights of the parents against the rights of the child. Forgive me, I am not a lawyer, but my understanding is that that is not the case. The job of the courts is to have as the paramount consideration the welfare of the child. It is the first consideration in the UNCRC as well, so I do not think that there is any conflict. However, there is a perception that the UNCRC actually encourages people to balance the rights of the family. I am not sure that the media play a particular part in that because on the one hand they rail against social workers taking children away that should not be taken away while on the other hand they rail against how long it takes for children to be adopted. Q205 Baroness Knight of Collingtree: I feel that in his responses to the last two questions, Mr Ewen has made the most important points that would speed up the whole operation of adoption. I want to ask about one other factor. I understand that there have to be accepted safeguards that must be looked at. What are those safeguards? Jonathan Ewen: I am sorry, but I am not quite clear on this. Do you mean safeguards with regard to adopters? Q206 Baroness Knight of Collingtree: Yes, I use that word because I understand that before an adoption can be judged to be correct, wise and right, there have to be certain safeguards for the child, and perhaps for the adoptive parents as well. What are those safeguards? Jonathan Ewen: Part of the assessment process of adopters is to ensure that they are proper people to look after children. That is one of the objectives of the whole assessment process. However, I am not sure if that is the question you are actually asking. Q207 Baroness Knight of Collingtree: I wonder whether there is an accepted set of safeguards; whether they change according to the couples who want to adopt or if other things weigh more heavily. For instance, is it ever considered that siblings might be helped to remain in touch, because I think that that is very important? If it can be done, a child should know if it has a brother or sister and can sometimes see them. All of these things come into the decision of whether adoption is right or wrong, and I can see them changing according to the circumstances of different couples. Jonathan Ewen: I think that your point about siblings is absolutely right. Certainly, part of the plan for the child will include a plan for contact—or not—with any siblings the child might have. That would be part of the plan for the child in order to safeguard its future. I guess that that almost answers your question. Q208 Baroness Hamwee: I wonder if I could put to you a question that I also asked the representatives from Coram. This is not an attempt to divide and rule or cross-examine you— it is nothing like that—as I just want your take on it. After explaining what it is, the statutory guidance on concurrent planning states: “This enables a relationship to develop which is

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Barnardo’s—Oral evidence (QQ 187–233) supportive to the parents.” Do you feel that the guidance deals adequately with the paramountcy of the child’s interests? You do not have the guidance in front of you, so if you want to respond in writing, I would be happy with that. Jonathan Ewen: I know that when Brighton and Hove ran concurrency in the area, it found that intensive intervention and use of contact while the child was placed with an adopter who was also approved as a foster carer was helpful in moving those parents on, so that they could either accept that the adoption was in the best interests of the child or at least have a better idea, the next time they had a child, of how to care for the child. I am not sure if that is a complete answer to your question. Baroness Hamwee: It is a very helpful and consistent response. Q209 Baroness King of Bow: The first part of the question is this: in your experience, do adoption panels contribute to delays? Are the regulations to limit the role of adoption panels which will come into force in September likely to have a negative or a positive impact on the best interests of the child? Jonathan Ewen: I do not think that adoption panels per se contribute very much to delay. However, what I would say about them is that they are rather late in the process. By the time a child’s plan for adoption is put before a panel, it is very late in the day. Instead of it happening at that point, we would argue for a vastly enhanced role for independent reviewing officers who would look at the issue of stability as a safeguarding issue. We believe that securing stability for the child, given all we now know about child development, should take place as soon as we become aware of a young child who is at risk of significant harm. A far more active role should be played by the independent reviewing officer to twin-track from the earliest point the possibility that adoption may be an outcome for a child, and to ensure that there is an intensity of input at that point that seeks to do everything possible to see whether the parents are able to change in a way that allows them to care for their child. We would argue strenuously that damage can be done to a very young child in days and weeks, not over months, so intervention is crucial. The IRO therefore has a crucial role in ensuring that it is fast-tracked. One of the things we discovered when we were working on the DfE contract, which I am sure Coram has told you about, is that although lots of attempts were made at tracking different bits of the system, it was rare to come across someone who tracked the system from end to end, from first contact with the child right the way through to adoption. No one actually monitored and tracked in that particular way. Without that kind of detailed focus on a child who is at risk of significant harm, I believe that matters will drift. In fact, we found that something like 77% of the local authorities we looked at were well over that six-month period I have talked about— from first contact to when they made the decision that the child needed to be removed, and of that 77% some went well over the period. It was not just six months and a day, but nine months, 10 months or a year before the decision to remove was made. It is not the panels per se that cause delay and they undoubtedly provide a good control mechanism far down the track, but at that point it is too late. The DfE and the Government are quite right to remove that function from the panel, but my concern is that unless at the same time there is a drive to enhance the role of the independent reviewing officers to make sure that they take on the responsibility for quality control and monitoring from the very earliest point, there could be risks.

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Barnardo’s—Oral evidence (QQ 187–233) Q210 The Chairman: Can I come back to you on that? As you say, the adoption panel comes in at rather a late stage, but it brings together a group of people who have different perspectives on what may be needed for the child. If the panel is taken away, at the moment nothing is to be in its place. Are not local authorities likely to put something in its place? Will an IRO be the person the local authorities think of, or will they produce something as good as the quality control that the present adoption panel is exercising, albeit too late? On the assumption that the adoption panels go in September, which is one of the things that really concerns us at the moment—we have heard differing evidence about it—the question is what should be put in their place. Alternatively, should there be nothing in their place? Jonathan Ewen: I think that the point you are getting at is absolutely right, but we see the IRO as having a duty to ensure that the right consultation with the right expert opinions takes place at an earlier time so that there is a clear view of the needs of the child at that particular point. Q211 The Chairman: Mr Ewen, do you have any confidence that that is going to happen by 2 September, when the adoption panels are no longer there? Jonathan Ewen: No. Q212 Baroness King of Bow: Just to be clear on the question. In your view, Mr Ewen, are these regulations likely to have a positive or negative impact on the best interests of the child? Jonathan Ewen: I probably do not view them as being as negative as perhaps the Chairman has suggested they might be because the panel meets so late in the day. What actually happens in these panels is that the experts who are sitting around the table, such as the paediatrician and so on, will have been consulted prior to the panel meeting anyway, so their input is already available. I do not think it is disastrous, but there are potential risks if there are no other quality control mechanisms and other mechanisms to ensure that those opinions are actually sought. There are risks, but I do not see the regulations as being disastrous. Baroness King of Bow: That is helpful. Q213 Baroness Howarth of Breckland: Would it have been better if the Government had had an analysis of that quality monitoring structure before making the decision to remove the panels? As I understand it, in many places the IROs are under extreme pressure with caseloads which at the moment are quite unmanageable. They are connected to the local authority, which in my personal view is itself a flaw. I am not against local authorities because I have spent a lot of my life in them, but the IROs cannot be as independent as they might be. But, as you say, somewhere within the structure there has to be someone who does the monitoring. There is a danger that it might end up at the court, which will produce further delay, and it goes against the Norgrove recommendation that judges should not be monitoring cases. Do you think that my analysis of the dangers is close to the mark or far from the mark? Jonathan Ewen: It is close to the mark. I think that there is a risk. I chaired panels for nine years and I am not convinced, at the stage at which they occur, of how much they actually contribute. The individual contributions of the members of the panel who have been properly consulted as part of the preparation for the plan coming before the panel are invaluable and important, but I am very dubious about what the panel, sitting there and deliberating whether

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Barnardo’s—Oral evidence (QQ 187–233) adoption is in the best interests of the child at the point at which the case is also going before the court, actually adds. Q214 Viscount Eccles: How long does it take to arrange a meeting of a panel? If someone says, “We need a panel”, does it meet a week, a month or six months later? Jonathan Ewen: Normally, there are standing appointments throughout the year. The last time I chaired a panel, it was just moving from monthly to fortnightly meetings, and I understand that the authority where I chaired them is now moving to weekly meetings. They happen very frequently. I am not aware that going before the panel is a specific primary cause of delay. There are other causes. Judith Masson’s research suggests that 45% of papers, when first presented for care proceedings, are not complete, so that further work needs to be done before even the care proceedings can go forward. There are other more significant causes of delay. Q215 Baroness Morris of Bolton: Thank you very much indeed. You and Dr Homden have already touched on the issue of the overall shortage of adopters, especially when trying to ensure diversity within the pool of adopters. Why do you think there is a problem and what could be done to overcome it? Further, how can we retain people once they are in the pool? Jonathan Ewen: Once people are in the pool and are being assessed, I think that 75% of them go through, so there is a fairly good strike rate once they are actually in the pool. I refer to some of the reasons I cited earlier. If people are greeted by a local authority that says, “We are unlikely to have a child who will be suitable for you”, that puts them off. The fragmentation, if you like, in the market for assessing adopters is a contributory factor. Another is the age of children becoming available. If the age of children was much lower through some of the steps we have been advocating in terms of intensive work being undertaken at the very earliest point, I think that that would make a difference. By and large, most adopters want to adopt as young a child as they can get, but through the process of assessment they become aware that only older children are likely to be available, so at that point they say, “Yes, we will have an older child.” If we were able to lower the age at which children become available for adoption and if the use of concurrency was much more widespread—placing children under fostering regulations with a view to them being adopted by people who have also been approved as adopters—that would make a significant difference. Q216 Baroness Morris of Bolton: I suppose that you also need to manage expectations. In one of your previous answers you referred to what would be almost a national dating agency. That would increase the opportunity to be able to match a child. Jonathan Ewen: Absolutely. The national gateway for adoption is a step in the right direction. I understand that it will produce information on how long adopters with particular agencies have to wait before they get a match. If that information was publicly available, those adoption agencies which are recruiting the right adopters would have much shorter waiting times, which in turn would create a beneficial circle because people would want to go to them. Q217 Baroness Morris of Bolton: Is concurrency discussed with adopters when they get into the pool? Is it something that is presented as a possibility? Do potential adopters know about it?

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Barnardo’s—Oral evidence (QQ 187–233) Jonathan Ewen: Probably not across the board. Because we work closely with Coram, which has pioneered so much of the concurrency work, we are talking to our adopters about it. However, it is new to many of them. Indeed, it is new to a lot of people although it has been around for a long time. I do not think that enough is known about concurrency. Q218 The Chairman: Does the national gateway address this problem? Jonathan Ewen: I think that it will go some way towards addressing it, but it will not overcome completely some of the existing structural barriers. It will improve the flow of information, but it will not necessarily make it a completely open market. Q219 The Chairman: To what extent could one try to increase a general pool of those prepared to be both foster parents and adopters? I understand that you look for that in a family specifically in concurrent planning, but I wonder whether it would be possible to look for families who are prepared to do either—or is that really pie in the sky? Jonathan Ewen: I suspect that Dr Homden could answer that question far better than I can because she has more experience of recruiting concurrent carers. Q220 The Chairman: I think that you were present when she or the other speaker said that the approach of foster parents and adopters is rather different. Adopters are looking for permanency in a way that foster parents are not necessarily. I wonder whether they could try to recruit more wonderful people who are prepared to give up a child if that is necessary. That looks like a possible way forward, if more of such people can be found. Jonathan Ewen: I think that you would be looking for adopters who would be prepared to consider fostering. The people who go into fostering as their primary motivation, by and large, unless they fall in love with a child who is with them, are not going to be the people who want to adopt and enlarge their family. The Chairman: So it may be that one asks adopters, “In the meantime, would you be prepared to be fosterers? You may find a child that you will be allowed to keep.” Jonathan Ewen: Yes, you might need to do that. Q221 Baroness Howarth of Breckland: Presumably the key is that if a foster parent has a permanent relationship with a child they have been fostering, we should not have local authorities intervening and saying, “You cannot keep the child,” just because they have other structural issues. This is something that has emerged quite clearly. There are local authorities that do not want to let go of good foster parents, so they do not want to leave a child even if it has formed a permanent relationship with its foster parents. This may not be widespread, but we have had quite a lot of anecdotal evidence. The Chairman: I heard it as a judge several times. I would ask why a child was not going to stay permanently with its foster family. The response would be, basically, “They want it, but it does not suit us,” although they did not put it in those words. We have some reluctance on the part of local authorities to overcome on this. Jonathan Ewen: Yes.

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Barnardo’s—Oral evidence (QQ 187–233) Q222 Baroness Knight of Collingtree: We have heard again and again about the difficulties due to the lack of very young babies; they just are not out there. Last week I read about a group of people who, while not intending in any way to hamper a woman’s right to have an abortion, have set up a movement that tries to say to them, “Have you considered the possibility of giving your child a life as an adopted baby?” Would you support that? Jonathan Ewen: My understanding is that before anybody can have an abortion, they receive some form of counselling that would include looking at the range of options open to them. That would include adoption. Q223 Baroness Knight of Collingtree: So you think that enough is being done already? Jonathan Ewen: I think so, yes, but I am not an expert on that. Q224 Viscount Eccles: Does the representation of children by guardians in adoption proceedings work effectively? Jonathan Ewen: I probably do not have enough evidence about how it works in practice. We have some anecdotal suggestions that perhaps some guardians are culturally opposed to adoption, but I could not offer any evidence on that. Q225 Baroness Howarth of Breckland: Do you think that there are some members of the judiciary who are even more opposed to adoption? Jonathan Ewen: We believe that to be the case. Baroness Howarth of Breckland: It would be worth looking at that and pursuing it. Jonathan Ewen: We think so. Q226 The Chairman: Who do you think would probably be able to help us on the position of guardians in adoption proceedings? Of course we are going to ask CAFCASS about it—we have Anthony Douglas coming to see us shortly. Jonathan Ewen: It has a vested interest. The Chairman: However, I wonder if there might be someone who could give us a different perspective. Jonathan Ewen: I think that the Association of Directors of Social Services could probably offer a view. The Chairman: That is an interesting suggestion. Thank you. Baroness Hamwee: I was wondering how one assesses which members of the judiciary are against adoption. The Chairman: Well, I am horrified because judges should not be sitting on adoption unless they are supportive of the concept of adoption. The idea that there are judges sitting on adoption who do not approve of it is something I shall take back to the present President of the Family Division. Viscount Eccles: Perhaps we are verging on a private discussion within the Committee. The Chairman: Yes. 144

Barnardo’s—Oral evidence (QQ 187–233) Q227 Baroness Hamwee: I wondered what the question might provoke. Mr Ewen, I want to ask you about the position with regard to monitoring children where there is a placement order in force but they are waiting for a match. Do you want to say anything about that? Jonathan Ewen: I think that Dr Homden answered this question and I agree with what she said. What is also needed is for the IRO to actually sit in on the looked-after review that is held every six months. However, information about children who are waiting should be part of the information that very senior managers in each local authority should have in front of them because it is a cause for concern. Every child who does not have a stable, loving and caring home is potentially at risk, so it is really important that that should be escalated. However, that is something for local authorities to do. Q228 Baroness Hamwee: Comment was made earlier about the position of the IROs being part of local authorities. Is there any problem around that? Are they adequately independent in this particular context? Jonathan Ewen: We would definitely argue that IROs should be independent and cut free from local authorities. This relates to an earlier question about guardians ad litem. There is a potential for duplication between the two roles. I do not think that it occurs at the moment because of the way in which the IROs actually operate, but if their role was strengthened so that they operated far more as the advocate and supporter of the child, and the need for the child to obtain a stable, loving caring placement as soon as possible, there might be a greater conflict. Q229 Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top: I want to move on to post-adoption support. When do you think there should be support? Are the current mechanisms working well enough? Should we be thinking about a statutory duty on local authorities to assess families on whether they are going to need post-adoptive support? If that were to happen, who should pay for it? Jonathan Ewen: I think that it is problematic. The 2002 Act introduced the idea of postadoptive support, but it has largely been observed by its breach. There is a need for it and it would make a difference to adoption. I think it would actually make a difference to the number of adopters willing to come forward if they were aware that adoption support would be available. I think that the idea of a statutory duty to provide is a possibility which should be explored, but it is an exercise in crystal ball gazing as to whether it would be the most effective step. However, something needs to be done about post-adoption support. Q230 The Chairman: Does anybody else want to ask about that? Mr Ewen, from your perspective in the north-east—in Newcastle, I think—is there anything you would like to put to us that we have not asked you about? I refer in particular to any issues that affect you in the north-east. I know that you are in fact operating for placements right across the UK, but is there anything you would like to add? We have five minutes left. Jonathan Ewen: Perhaps I can make a general observation. One of the practices we came across in the north-east with Judge Taylor on the circuit there is the establishment of very good relationships and a forum with the local authorities—

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Barnardo’s—Oral evidence (QQ 187–233) The Chairman: Is that in Teesside? Jonathan Ewen: Yes. There are very good relationships with the local authorities and senior managers meet in a forum. That has made a considerable difference to how well the system works for children in terms of what orders are made in court. There was a particular issue about contact and how disruptive very frequent contact could be for very young children. As a result of a discussion, that has changed. It is a positive example of practice being improved through close working between the different parties. Q231 Baroness Howarth of Breckland: You have mentioned research several times, but what I find when talking to social workers around the country is that often they are unaware of the research into what works. An organisation that I have recently left put a lot of effort into making sure that people were given that knowledge. We talked earlier about the impact that Messages from Research had 10 years ago. Do you think it would be helpful to give the evidential base another big push? Jonathan Ewen: I think that it would, but with some caveats. Research has been published on all sorts of things for an awfully long time, but it is incredibly difficult to translate it into changing practice. I am afraid that it is probably easier to change practice by saying, “This is how you need to do it”, rather than by winning hearts and minds. I believe in research myself, but only rarely does it bring about change. Senior managers have read Julie Selwyn on how much it costs, but that has not changed what people on the ground think. They say, “I do not believe it.” The problem is that just showing people the research does not always work, I am afraid. Q232 Baroness Howarth of Breckland: But the evidence on moving children about came recently from Australia and is going into the judicial circuit. It has changed behaviour. So it can happen, can it not? Jonathan Ewen: I am in favour of much greater knowledge and I welcome the fact that Harriet Ward is producing some training material for the judiciary. That is a positive move. I am not decrying it; I am just saying that, by itself and without additional effort to ensure that it is embedded so that people change as a result, research by itself is not effective. That is all I am saying. I apologise if I gave the wrong impression. Q233 The Chairman: May I say on behalf of the Committee that we are enormously grateful to you for single-handedly coping with all our questions. Your responses are enormously valuable to us. But we should like some written evidence from you, and it may be that as you settle down to provide it, you will think of points that we failed to ask you about. Please do add them to your submission. The more comprehensive your evidence is, the better. The north-east view would be particularly useful because we would all like to learn about what has been going on in Teesside as well as about any other good initiatives. Perhaps I should have asked this earlier. Are various local authorities in the north-east joining up on adoption, or is each local authority still coping with its own load? Jonathan Ewen: They are still doing it individually, but there are various moves under way. To some extent they have joined together on fostering through joint commissioning between the north and the south. In the past there was a move to try to get all the Cleveland authorities to

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Barnardo’s—Oral evidence (QQ 187–233) work together after they split up, but that did not actually take place. Nothing is happening currently. The Chairman: Even so, perhaps we could have some written evidence, and once again our very real thanks to you for your marvellous effort today.

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Jonathan Ewen, Lead Director, Children in Care, Barnardo’s—Supplementary written evidence

Jonathan Ewen, Lead Director, Children in Care, Barnardo’s— Supplementary written evidence North East Local Authority- Court Liaison Hosted: Judge Taylor Local Authority Lead: Jane Humphreys (DCS Stockton) Attended by: Safeguarding Leads, Legal representatives, occasionally Adoption Managers for Durham, Darlington, Stockton, Hartlepool, Midlesborough, Redcar and Cleveland. Detail: This is run as an informal meeting, although minuted and with an agreed agenda, normally of approximately two and a half hours duration. It takes place approximately six monthly. The most recent meeting considered  the new process for the plan for adoption to come to court without the process of prior panel recommendations and agency agreement  how helpful it would be for reports required by court to be in a format which would facilitate them being used for other purposes The flavour of the meeting is very open with opportunity for robust exchange of views. It is highly valued by the local authorities who attend and has achieved significant change in court practice, which has made a marked difference to the participating local authorities. Two examples include:  

a significant reduction in the level of contact ordered in response to the Las highlighting the adverse effect on young children and the shear organisational and cost burden such orders impose. Parents being informed at the first hearing of the application for a care order that any relatives who might be possible carers should be identified immediately as if they were introduced later in the proceedings they would not be considered. This has avoided successive relatives being introduced at a late stage of proceedings, requiring assessment and thereby delaying the hearing and final placement of the child.

24 July 2012

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Barnardo’s—Further supplementary written evidence

Barnardo’s—Further supplementary written evidence 1. Background Barnardo's has been a registered adoption agency since 1947 and is the most established provider of family placement services in the UK, with 32 adoption and fostering services spread across all four nations. In addition to family placement, Barnardo’s also provides a national and international service to help adults access their personal adoption and care records and provides post adoption services for adopted adults, birth parents and birth relatives. Two draft clauses from the Children and Families Bill were laid before Parliament on 7 November 2012 for pre-legislative scrutiny by the Select Committee on Adoption Legislation. The draft clauses:  place a duty on local authorities to give preference to a “Fostering for Adoption” placement  remove the express duty on adoption agencies to give due consideration to religious persuasion, racial origin and cultural and linguistic background, when matching children with prospective adopters. This change reinforces the existing emphasis on the welfare of the child and the impact of any delay The House of Lords Select Committee on Adoption Legislation has requested that Barnardo's assist them in their pre-legislative scrutiny of these clauses. This document details Barnardo’s response. 2. Draft Clause 1 (“Fostering for Adoption”) Barnardo's welcomes the Government’s emphasis on reducing delay and achieving permanency in light of the impact permanent placement delay can have on child development and outcomes. We agree that the practice of ‘Fostering for Adoption’ will enable children to be placed with their likely adoptive families sooner. There will need to be an ongoing improvement in the understanding of contact planning that prioritises the needs of the child in these situations and is purposeful in line with the care plan and the legal stages. We believe that ‘Fostering for Adoption’ could be an extremely effective model for reducing delay particularly for very young babies but perhaps not for older children. Therefore, this will possibly only impact on a very small number of children in the care system and more needs to be done to recruit adopters of older children or children with special needs. Although we accept that no adoption placement is without risks, we believe that ‘fostering for adoption’ must only be used when social workers believe that the extreme weight of probability is that the outcome for that particular child will be adoption. The emotional wellbeing of the child and the prospective adoptive must be protected as much as possible. If this does not happen, prospective adopters who go through a ‘Fostering for Adoption’ process

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Barnardo’s—Further supplementary written evidence which does not result in adoption may find it too difficult to go through the process again. At a time when recruiting prospective adopters is very difficult, we are worried about a system which may deter adopters in the future. However, there could be some unintended consequences with prioritising those who are willing to ‘Foster to Adopt’. Feedback from our services show that in their experience, many prospective adopters have been on a traumatic and emotional journey which has led them to wanting to be adopters and the possibility of having a child placed with them and then later returned to their birth parents could be too difficult. This does not make them any less suitable adopters, however, we would be concerned that where prospective adopters opt not to take the risk of being a ‘Foster carer for the purposes of Adoption’ for these understandable reasons, this could prejudice their chances of being considered as adoptive parents for young children. 3. Draft Clause 2 – (due consideration to religious persuasion, racial origin and cultural and linguistic background, when matching children with prospective adopters). Barnardo's agrees that any delays in placements must be removed. However, removing this express duty on adoption agencies is unnecessary. Legislation does not need to be revised as it already emphasises the needs of individual children as of paramount importance and altering it will not necessarily bring about the intended consequence required. What is actually needed is better training and guidance for social workers and decision makers on making the right decisions for the child. This is vital to enable social workers to use their own judgment and act with confidence to make decisions for each child based all the information. We do not want local authorities to now focus more on a quick match than the right match for the child. For some children, racial, religious and cultural matching is extremely important, but for others it should take less importance than other considerations. This can only be determined through clear, bespoke, and thorough assessments of a child’s needs. This will be achieved by better trained social workers who specialise in adoption having the knowledge and experience to ask the right questions early in the process and assess what sort of match will be best for the child. Also key is the right placement being available. There must be a national recruitment drive for foster carers and adopters from a wider range of cultural and religious backgrounds with good associated and tailored pre and post placement support. This will help increase the likelihood of children being placed in the right environment to meet their own needs, and thus reduce the amount of placements that break down. November 2012

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Stephen Bashford—Written evidence

Stephen Bashford—Written evidence My partner and I are in the process of being approved as suitable adopters. Over the past nine months we have had to attend 6 full day sessions spread over a 12 week period and subsequently have had upwards of a dozen meetings with our social worker to discuss issues relating to those sessions and complete the necessary paperwork. In parallel we have had to write essays on our family background, how we were raised, traumas in our life, on sex abuse, on how to manage loss as well as visiting prospective schools etc. We have also had the opportunity to attend a 'party' which was held for 40 children seeking adoption. All this work has been of great value as it has taught us a great deal about the range of issues we will face when adopting and caused us to reflect on how we would cope and in consequence on the type of children we should exclude from or include in our consideration. It has been suggested by the Government that the process of adoption should be sped up. Whilst I would agree that for the child the process needs to be made far more rapid, particularly once they have been placed in care, I strongly believe that to speed up the prospective adopters period of preparation would be a great mistake. It takes time to absorb the training and to adjust ones idealistic perception of what is adoption to match today's reality of loss, neglect and abuse; that nearly all children being placed for adoption will have suffered. We have had to ask ourselves searching questions relating to whether we could cope with raising a child who has suffered sex abuse, who possibly has suffered fetal alcohol syndrome, or who was known to be violent etc as well as how we would manage our household finances, our relationships with existing friends and families. None of these questions can be addressed quickly as they each need careful consideration. In fact we have found that the timetable challenging and at time have seriously questioned whether it was realistic to be going to panel in December. If the process were to be compressed into a shorter period it would undoubtedly remain possible to 'tick the boxes' relating to training, and statutory forms etc but it would not give time to absorb, think, reflect and accept (or not) the challenges that adoption poses. This then risks a greater proportion of adoptions failing as the adopters will have had less time to understand the consequences of adoption, to develop an understanding of their limitations and strengths, and so are far more likely to be matched inappropriately. I ask you not to impose a 4 month, 6 month, or indeed any maximum period in which the prospective adopters must complete the process of being approved. It is not a process but a profoundly important and humane life decision. It is also perhaps worth remembering that a baby gives you nine months warning and time for preparation and in many instances the parents will have been thinking for far longer about having a family. Time is needed to understand the extra implications of adoption a hurt child. 10 November 2012

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Florence Bellone—Written evidence

Florence Bellone—Written evidence Years ago, after unsuccessful fertility treatments, my husband and me applied for adoption. Incoherent and contradictory explanations of the social worker, insane comments on birth family ties and the assertion that there are always more children to be adopted than candidates to be adopters let us very confused, as we thought that adoption was made for children without a family. We had prepared ourselves for a long wait because it is known that no many children are abandoned today in modern societies. We finally understood that the proposed children were mostly forcibly taken away from parents, sometimes parents with problems but not unloving parents. It has been many episodes before we could understand that this situation was not a local one but a legal national situation. Being a press correspondent for French speaking medias and reading a lot of papers, I felt not very proud of having seen nothing. In fact I had ignored a few clues in the press, keeping my mind on widely reported news. After months of researching the press and available documents, I decided to investigate this invisible machine with aim to produce documentary pieces. Because nobody abroad would believe me when I said that children and new born babies were forcibly adopted, I had to bring evidence, case per case, from social services referrals, assessments, case conferences, courts proceedings, etc... to illustrate my reports. From this experience I made this submission.

1) The children and babies made to be adopted are mostly arbitrarily taken away from their parents. Three years of investigation made me conclude that national adoption is working in the same underground way that the 70 years Migrant Children program. I just wish it won’t take another 70 years for the decision makers to realize it. Most children and babies are removed on the base of fake allegations built by social workers and “experts” chosen by them, and when there are no allegations, the decisions rely on subjective psychological or psychiatric evaluations. Every single human particularity is becoming a “symptom” or a “mental health issue”. If people would rely privately on what rely the court experts to understand parents, they would be deemed a dangerous cult. “Learning difficulties” is also one of the amazing reasons to make people prohibited of having a family. This is equivalent to race clean up and race purity philosophy. In family courts, social services stories are called evidence and at every stage of the proceedings, most people involved seem obsessed by one outcome : care or adoption depending of the age of the children. I have been demanded much more evidence when reporting than social services are when removing children. Also, solicitors provided to parents by local authorities are very rarely fighting for the parents. On some orders, it is written that both parties agreed with everything when the parents did actually never agreed and certainly not for the adoption of their children. They often refuse to give orders and judgements to the parents, especially those who cannot understand very well the law. When they finally get some paperwork, they are out of time to appeal. Out of time permissions for appeal are now often refused on the base of the child being estranged from his parents for too long.

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Florence Bellone—Written evidence 2) Foreign families too feed the adoption market and they are no official warnings. The vast majority of children taken away are British but I came across many cases where children are taken away from foreign families. They stay in the UK and are treated like colony prisoners rather than to be sent to social services in their countries. In court, solicitors for local authorities embark in showing that “now, those children are British”. Inversely, case conference reports show the anger of local authorities when social services of another countries protect British families who fled the UK to save their children from adoption. It looks that the UK adoption and child protection system is a reference that the whole world should be submitted too. However secret family courts ensured that the whole world public won’t be aware of forced adoption. I have never seen warnings for non compliance to state standards parenting like you have warnings against stealing, killing or even speeding on the road. 3) International law is fooled (and not only the article 8 of the European Convention of Human Rights). Taking away children of the poorest families to give them to middle class families has unfortunately always existed everywhere in the world. Now middle class families are also trapped through the lucrative and devilish appreciation of “medical experts”. Whoever becomes targeted by social services, what is called forced adoption in this country is legal and based of the manipulation of Human Rights and international texts like the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. A good example is that story (widely reported in the British medias) of an English baby born in France and snatched by British social workers, with complacency of local French judges and discreet help of a British honorary consulate. A British solicitor was able to show in High Court that the usual place of residence of a baby who was never present in the UK is not the UK, allowing his return to France. Obviously, it was enough for social services at the first place to tell their counterparts that they had “concerns”. But they preferred a little war of principles, I can’t even think they were counting one more or less baby for adoption. 4) Social management is increasingly an economical sector. Children should not be made to generate profits. But during the last decade at least, the system grew providing a new economy based on new child services and involving the private sector : adoption agencies, fostering agencies, foster families (parenting for money), psychiatry and psychology (typical disciplines based on appreciation rather than scientific evidence), solicitors and other corporations obviously defending their purse and records but certainly not caring about children. Many of the most recent foster families come from a bankrupt situation and surfaced to wealth by cashing a money which could be used to help the most vulnerable and less educated people to surface to social integration, working life, and better parenting. I have seen a document written by a foreign lobby eager to have its government imitating the British system of adoption. Its points out the involvement of the private sector as an advantage. Some of the British adoption agencies are owned by equity societies. This gives every adopted child a value on financial markets, even if complex to calculate with precision, and brings the notion of child protection to the one of profit from the child. 5) The pregnant woman : merely a child container and adoption provider.

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Florence Bellone—Written evidence I have goose flesh when I go in a maternity, it’s like if I was visiting a death row except that there is no criminal. The mother gives birth and later, a midwife shut down the light in the delivery room, another seize the baby, the police keeps the parents of leaving. This should be shown to adopters and to the public. In no society pregnant women have been so despised and dragged to that lower level of interest. The source of little babies for adoption is the preventive punishment of pregnant women. They can’t keep a child, sometimes because they have been raised themselves in care ! The child is deprived from the maternal milk despite evidence of its immunization role for the future adult. Couples are forced to separate if one of the partners only is rejected by social services, a blackmail which is actually not leading to the return of the child to the other partner. Many of the new mothers are barely out from their own childhood, which shows that a child is perceived as a very short term value, rather than the root of a full life. I am confident that this modern catastrophe will blow up and lead to the usual apologies but waiting for that time, to raise children means to live under referral fear like in a totalitarian society. This is very well reflected in the super monitoring plans of the “Working Together to Safeguard Children” draft document from the Education department. The social workers I have seen in operation are obviously recruited for their capacity to hunt human beings and play secondary police. In fact true police is more often disgusted to be used for seizing children. Social workers might be brainwashed but my feeling, when they ask the mom they will soon kill “to work with the professionals”, is that they get rid of their own misery on the back of their fellows. This is in fact the manipulation of the dark side among ordinary people which allowed any kind of tyrannic method to go on. But the frightening thing is that numerous judges hide behind the technicality of law to caution this abomination. I have heard several time solicitors for local authorities and judges as well favoring the Human Rights of people waiting for adopting the children of others ! This is a distortion of those Human Rights for which so many citizens and politicians fought. The only good adoption law for me would be the abolition of forced adoption, a human rights drama which is maybe explaining the level of violence and despair built up in this country.

I take further some questions/sub questions with their letter a, b, c... from this enquiry : Background a) Do we have the right structure for adoption? One problem is that adoption is dealt with in secret. Family problems might be sometimes tragic but they don’t endanger the national security. They are part of everybody’s life, therefore, they should be dealt with openly, democratically. If you think that adoption is right, you have no reason to hide anything, and no reason to hide the identity of the child to whom you are making such a gift as new good parents. The anonymity as “the best interest of the child” is purely subjective and only shows the concern for adults to be scrutinized. It is obvious for babies. For older children, all the ones I have spoken too or even formally interviewed complained about being not allowed to say anything against being separated from their parents. They also massively complained about social workers and guardians speaking in their names to say the contrary of what they really want to tell the judge. Children know what is manipulation 154

Florence Bellone—Written evidence and child protection staff know that children know. Children told me that they have been bullied and threatened that their parents would be jailed if they didn’t comply. Adults who have been forcibly adopted when babies told me that even good adoptive parents would never heal the trauma of having been taken away from birth parents who didn’t abandon them. The good standards of education supported by the good social standard of the adopters are not compensating the trauma when adoptees realize that their situation is due to a miscarriage of justice, it is only raising the number of people developing hatred for the society and the establishment. The “best interest of the child” is that the child sees no secret in his destiny and doesn’t face a shocking surprise as an adult. Inconsequent adopters might hope that this will not happen to them but basically, I don’t think many people would adopt in full consciousness of what they are made to do. b) Should we be concerned about the falling number of adoptions? Why are the numbers falling? From 2011, Martin Narey comments started to be very present in the daily press. This was partly presented as an answer to the campaign anti forced adoption. Social networks allowed forced adoption victims from everywhere to communicate. The birth parents trying or accepting contacts with their children are diabolized on official websites like the BAAF one. However there is no hope for authorities to be able to change the deep instinct of the human being. Human Rights of the abductor will never prevail those of the victims for the vast majority of people. It is fairly easy to manipulate the emotional mess created by the fact of being childless when it comes to potential adopters. People might be happy to be told that “it is right to take the children of loving families if they are not good parents and are deemed so by the state”. But hundreds of centuries of human heritage regarding motherly love and family love as a whole will never be erased by policies. The same for authorities telling potential adopters that they won’t do this for them but for the children. Parents are not a Charity. Parenting will never be a charitable action, it is one of our most rooted instinctive mission. And birth parents might be not gifted for education, the bond between their children and themselves is still the same. The society can help balancing the poverty and lack of education and its consequences on children but not by suppressing their families. Those who say the contrary are the ones in need of therapy. And to call “working with families” taking away their children doesn’t fool anybody. Legislation We don’t jail people in case they would become criminals. It probably would generate many new killers. It should be the same regarding destroying a family. Family law is a current exception to law and need transparency, witnessing by the press, public family court trials and of course, no adoption decision made without parental consent unless violence, slavery or rape is committed. Yet violence and abuse needs to be injected common sense. Children saying that they had been slapped lead to an enquiry in the family, which is totally ridiculous and detrimental for the child, even if slapping is not a good method. Of what I could see, it leads the child to a fake sense of power, then to a true torment of guiltiness and finally, to the drama of the separation.

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Florence Bellone—Written evidence Adopters too should be dealt with transparency, I would even say supported by the transparency of the situation. They have a right to know what they do. They cannot rely on social workers opinions no more than the birth parents. Their adoptive children will know the truth soon or later and will waste a lot of of their life trying to puzzle what was done to them and who did what. Injunctions on exposing and reporting should be abolished, thought reporting certainly need decency and dignity. A strong state is not shameful of what he does (in democracy). To jail parents who broke the gagging order is a sign of being aware that there is something wrong to hide at all costs. How parents could shut up if they take their children ? The present situation is pure repression for no crime. Also preventive removal of children (especially new born babies who are the top class merchandise for adoption) should be outlawed even if they won’t be adopted. We don’t have a right to speculate on “risk of neglect or future emotional harm”, the latest being almost unavoidable if you are education conscious parents. The House of Lord is mostly from generations who have been educated with more principles and sometimes more harshness than today. If they apply the social services criteria to their own families, I wonder how many of them could be sure that they would have been kept their parents. Crystal clean families don’t exist. The social workers I have seen assessing families are not cleaner than everybody else. They behave with no heart, no humanity, guidelined brains and ideological psychology. Midwifes are made accomplices of their action to not quote the whole chain of health staff. I have seen health staff and even police fearing the social workers whatever they think by themselves. Cafcass guardians and social workers pressure parents to trust them, to trust “professional”. “Trusting professionals” is part of the cases to tick in psychological reports. But the most genius sophisticated legal system will never make people trusting the hand killing them. It is sometime hard to say if the “professionals” are so brainwashed that they believe what they say, if they fear for their job, if they don’t care as long as they make good money or if they free out their power on their pairs. Children available on the adoption market are down to this. Time taken in placing children Speeding adoption is just a way of getting rid faster of parents and keeping the children traumas for later in life. The number of potential adopters f) Does the number of agencies inhibit the number of potential adopters recruited? This is a typical business question. This is exactly the kind of element which should not intervene in the process of helping a child. g) Does the recent increase in knowledge about early child development affect the balance between children’s rights and parental rights? Recent knowledge ??? How did the humanity develop to now ? Are good families something new and on the credit of UK child protection services ?

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Florence Bellone—Written evidence Court proceedings a) Do court proceedings take undue time in the adoption process? If the police find and arrest criminal parents, they have a trial with jury and are sentenced for the crimes committed. Innocent parents, even not gifted for parenting, should not be dragged to court at all. Adopters should not rely on court proceedings for obtaining a child. This is totally immoral and cannot last in history. b) Would the recommendations of the Family Justice Review substantially alter the position? In its 224 pages, the words “birth parents” are written once (page 42 - yet they are not the subject of the sentence.) This is not family justice at all. e) How common is it for care proceedings and placement order proceedings to be heard together or consecutively? What are the advantages and disadvantages of this approach? I attended a social services meeting with a pregnant lady. They explained that both would be made in parallel. They were starting the adoption process in case the lady would fail to be allowed to be a mother, so that no time would be wasted. This is like preparing the rope in the minute you have got a missing person. For another case, the “permission to oppose adoption” hearing” and the “adoption” hearing were one and single hearing. At the end of it, the solicitor for the adopters to be read a letter from them. This letter was never shown to both parties like the rest of the bundle. This didn’t bother the judge who had asked for copies of each party bundle to be given to the other one. The adopters to be wrote that they won’t allow any contact with the birth mother. They spoke of the child as “theirs” and cleverly quoted details showing that their social status was much superior to the one of the birth mother. These people were clearly fighting the birth mother (on the say of social workers as they never met her). All I can say is that I had to hear this with my ears otherwise I won’t have believed it. Post-adoption support b) Are measures needed to enhance post-adoption financial and other support for (i) adopted children; (ii) adoptive parents, (iii) birth families? You should see the face of mothers when after loosing their baby, the Cafcass guardian propose them a support program... by Cafcass ! Inter-country adoption

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Florence Bellone—Written evidence Here a 50 minutes German documentary (in 5 parts). It is not about Migrant Children, Argentine Plaza de Mayo grand-mothers, Chinese little girls or Franco catholic nurses. It is an example of a very modern and democratic foreign adoption situation. The Hague Convention is not working. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cf2_N0-Hdss http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UsDxGX-9ijs&feature=relmfu http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGDI2v7_D5U&feature=relmfu http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&feature=endscreen&v=2vNCuXkaxew http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kgo-Pj-OuWQ&feature=relmfu

Other permanent placements Social workers say that they do all they can to keep the children in the family but refuse grandparents almost on the same rate than parents. In the case of a foreign family, they denied other cares from the country through Skype ! They are so many cases that some solicitors specialize in securing grand-parents guardianship to save the children from adoption. d) Would earlier interventions in cases of children with difficulties have an effect on the number of children who need to be adopted or otherwise permanently separated from their birth family? This is what is happening now and for the past 3 years. Thousands of babies are going from in utero to the social services. Some local authorities have backlogs of babies of several hundreds. Monitoring a) Do ‘adoption scorecards’ provide an appropriate means for monitoring the performance of local authorities with regard to adoption? That this idea comes to be written is just frightening. This sound as setting up an industrial surrogacy business. Right now social workers are adamant that there are not anymore adoption targets... 19 July 2012

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Pete Bentley—Written evidence

Pete Bentley—Written evidence Summary Sheet - Evidence of Pete Bentley (evidence submitted as an individual) I have worked all my professional life in Social Work in particular work involving children and young people concentrating almost entirely on Adoption and Fostering. I worked initially as a Social Worker with a Local Authority in the North East of England, then for over 15 years I was the the North East Regional Consultant for the British Association for Adoption and Fostering. During the past 15 years I have been the independent Chair of Adoption Panels and Permanency Panels for Voluntary Adoption Agencies and Local Authorities. I currently am the independent chair of two Local Authority Adoption Panels. I have also in the past authored a number of independent reports for the Courts mainly in Care Proceedings. In addition to this cover sheet my evidences comprises three other documents. A ) My main evidence which offers responses to the questions posed by the committee in its call for evidence. My responses are numbered in accordance with the 'bold' headings. B) A document containing emails I sent to the Chair of the Committee just as the Committee was commencing its work. C) A document contain my evidence to the Commons Education Committee submitted earlier in 2012. I include this information because it provides further detailed background information to the responses I make in my main evidence. Summary of some of the main points in my evidence I am concerned at the effect on public and politicians perception which I believe was significantly influenced by very strong, and in my view often misleading statements, made by significant individuals including the Governments adviser on adoption . There are delays in arranging and achieving adoption both in some Local Authority processes and particularly in the Court process that need to be minimised. Generally I support the Norgrove recommendations as long as they are fully implemented 'in one go' and properly funded. I also in many areas support the governments 'action plan for adoption' and the expert groups report 'redesigning adoption'. I draw attention to ensuring that services to assist birth parents to parent their children are sharpened and provided in such a way that there is no postcode variation. I also draw attention that in moving towards earlier adoption in the life of a child particular attention should be paid to ensuring our system is compliant with Article 8. I believe that in introducing the Regulations ( SI 2012 no 1410) on Sept 1st 2012 the Government has not properly understood the consequences and in effect by passing responsibility to the Agency Decision Maker is taking a huge risk that the quality of the process will reduce and also quite possibly lead to increased delay ( not less). As I was writing this summary the government has stated its intention to consult on contact issues as well as the placement needs of siblings. It is very ironic, in my view, that one of the legal responsibilities of 159

Pete Bentley—Written evidence an Adoption Panel prior to 1st Sept is to give advice to the agency on contact issues Adoption Agiences Regulations 2005 at reg (18)(3)(a). Likewise until the 1st Sept panels also routinely gave advice on the placement needs of siblings. I make a suggestion that a named social worker be responsible for the child over the involvement of the LA in the process. Pete Bentley - July 2012 (The views I express do not necessarily reflect those of any adoption agency. ) Pete Bentley - Main Evidence I will not refer comprehensively to all relevant evidence. Other responders will very likely cover these issues. Suffice to say that I believe the oral evidence of BAAF and Corum as given to the Committee is very persuasive. I do refer to various paragraphs in ‘An Action Plan for Adoption – tackling delay’ (referred to as AP) and the Ofsted report ‘Right on Time – exploring delays in adoption‘ ( referred to as ‘the Ofsted report’).I refer a number of times to the 20011/12 Annual report of the Adoption Register. I also refer on occasion to oral evidence given to the committee and refer to the relevant question number (when it is available to me). 1) Background a) Do we have the right structure for adoption ? We have the right structure for adoption. When it works it works very well. The problem is not legislation it is related to practice. Local authorities are very driven by local culture and also often by the personalities, professional preferences, and experience background of people in key posts. In respect of the best way to reduce delay and increase individual responsibility for a child I would suggest that consideration be given to a system similar to the now essentially ‘abandoned’ system whereby the Children’s Guardian was appointed at the start of proceedings and was as an individual responsible to the Court for work with the child and recommendations to the Court about suggested outcomes / orders. The ‘problem’ is that the Guardians duties are finished when proceedings cease ( eg at the making of a placement order). I would suggest consideration be given to a solution involving an allocated named social worker being responsible to the LA for work / planning and action in relation to the child. The named worker would be required to have access to a senior consultant expert in the LA who would provide expert advice, guidance and direction. Social Workers particularly should not be allowed to ‘experiment’ with cases.

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Pete Bentley—Written evidence The named worker would have appropriate experience (which could be achieved by Regulations containing wording stronger but similar to that contained in ‘The Restriction on the Preparation of Adoption Reports Regulations 2005’) and have responsibility for the child from at least the application to the court for a care order to say 6 months after the LA has formally placed the child with potential adopters under the Adoption Agency Regulations 2005. By suggesting the above model I don’t mean to infer that the role of the children’s guardian in court proceedings should be dispensed with. The ‘Bristol pilot’ referred to by Corum in their oral evidence may have similar characteristics. b) Should we be concerned about the falling number of adoptions? Why are the numbers falling? First I would like to highlight that several isolated but very strong statements have been made in the media by high profile people. These statements would have been heard widely and I believe have a very strong impact on the public and politicians. Many people working in the adoption field will also have to some extent have been ‘hurt’ by some of the comments. As the outgoing CEO of Barnardos Martin Narey in an interview with Amelia Hill of the Guardian published online on 21st January 2011 is quoted as saying ‘ the adoption rate of babies must increase four-fold ( ie 400%), and the numbers of toddlers and older children placed with new families must also increase dramatically ‘. The new CEO of Barnardos ( Anne Marie Carrie ) on 13th Oct 2011 on Woman’s hour stated that ‘the adoption system is actually grinding to a halt ‘. On the 4th November 2011 on ‘Tonight’ (ITV) referring to the assessment of potential adopters Martin Narey stated that ‘the assessment system needs (to be) utterly dismantled - not just trim it’ However on 4th January 2012 giving oral evidence to the Commons Education committee in response to a question ( Question 390) as to what he meant by a radical increase in adoptions Mr Narey replied ‘ … I think there is scope for adoptions to certainly increase by, let us say, 50% or more. Later at Q 393 he stated that the 50% figure ‘was not a figure I want to stick to. It is an example of what I mean by a radical increase.’ I note that there is a large difference between a 400% and 50% increase. Mr Narey has rightly highlighted some individual instances of concern. However just because for example an individual has a justifiable complaint about a tax matter does not, I suggest, mean that the whole tax system has to be reinvented. I make these points partly to suggest that Mr Narey has apparently changed his view over time as he becomes more familiar with the complexities involved in adoption work. I do however fully accept for example (see the rest of my evidence) that the avoidable delay in both the courts and LA processes needs to be minimised. I also accept that in the recent oral evidence given by Barnardos to the committee there was no evidence that their formal view is that ‘the adoption system is grinding to a halt’.

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Pete Bentley—Written evidence

I hope I’ve made my point – that strong statements in the media can persuade politicians prematurely. The work of the Lords select committee and its evidence based approach can I hope rectify this whilst still tackling head on the issues that matter to make our system for early legal permanency planning for children better. We should not be too concerned about falling adoption numbers. If the number of adoptions and special guardianship orders (Dept for Education data – SSDA903) are added the actual number of permanent placements under these two orders has increased (between 2010 and 2011 by 6% and between 2007 and 2011 by 17%). Great vigilance is however required to ensure that for all children the right legal form of permanency is devised quickly and that excellent oversight is provided to ensure the plan is achieved quickly and as efficiently as possible. This would inevitably increase the number of adoptions. I would like to quote from the Corum oral evidence: “the quickest solution to the ’delay’ problem could be achieved by the establishment of a very strong permanency planning process with very senior eyes upon it” . I strongly support that. We now have more detailed evidence that any avoidable delay in respect to planning for a child can be extremely harmful to his or her development. See for example AP Para 3,37,38,42,43,44. 2) Legislation a) What impact did the 2002 Act have on the adoption process The 2002 Act itself was and is an excellent piece of legislation and thus had, and continues to have, a very appropriate impact. A very significant change in the legislation in the 2002 Act was the addition of the wording of Sect 1(4)(c) ie ‘’that the court or adoption agency must have regard to’ : “ the likely effect on the child( throughout his life) of having ceased to be a member of the original family and become an adopted person”. By quoting this I don’t mean to imply that it takes priority of the other provisions in Sect 1 (see my evidence to the Commons Education Committee) . b) Have all aspects of the 2002 and 2006 Acts been implemented appropriately and successfully No: The main provisions in the 2002 Act that have not been put into practice are those relating to adoption support. In particular knowledge of the existence of the Adoption Support Services Regulations 2005 and its provisions is not widespread nor enthusiastically shared with adopters. For example the LA is legally required by Regulation 6 of The Adoption Support Services Regulations 2005 to appoint an ASSA (an Adoption Support Services Adviser) whose function is defined in detail by Reg 6(2) but in general is to give advice and information to those affected by the adoption of a child including information about the provision of appropriate services. Reg 6(3) defines the knowledge and experience that the ASSA must possess prior to their appointment.

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The reason I’ve given the detail above is that very few people working in the in the adoption field appear to be aware of the requirement on the LA to appoint an ASSA or their responsibilities. c) Is further legislation required to improve any aspects of the adoption system? As indicated elsewhere the main inhibitions are related to practice. The imposition of statutory time limits can appear attractive and may be generally useful however there will always be exceptional cases (for example in the assessment of potential adopters or some court proceedings) where a statutory time limit is inappropriate Consideration should be given as to whether the ‘provision of’ (as opposed to an assessment of the ‘need for’) adoption support should be a statutory entitlement. Consideration could be given, for example, to an amendment of Reg 32(3) of the Adoption Agencies Regulations 2005 to enable an adoption panel ( when it considers the matching of a child with potential adopters) to be satisfied that there is certainty that an appropriate package of support will be provided ( rather than just the promise of an assessment of need). The panel would not have the power to require the agency to provide the support but for example would have the power not to recommend the match if the agency were not able to commit itself to the provision of the support and the panel were of the view that the guarantee of support was reasonably required to ensure the success of the adoptive placement. At the end of the process (as is the case now) the Agency Decision Maker would have the power to reach a different decision to that recommended by the panel. See also other suggestions elsewhere in this evidence d) Can you as a respondent identify a problem and tell us if, and if so where, the legislation (including regulations), needs to change? See c) above. In addition it is seriously concerning that SI 2012 No 1410 ( The Adoption Agencies ( Panel and Consequential Amendments Regulations 2012 ) were introduced with effect from the first of Sept 2012 without apparent full knowledge of the consequences, and without appropriate consultation with principle stakeholders. Such consultation has always occurred in the past when consideration was being given to an amendment of the regulations. I believe there is a real risk of deterioration in the quality of the process and an increase in delay for the child from September onwards because of this. 3) Time taken in placing Children a) Is excessive time taken in placing children? Do some groups of children take a disproportionate length of time? Yes for some children excessive time is taken – see for example the groups identified in AP para 17 and also the information in the Adoption Register annual report.

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b) What aspects of the adoption process, including pre-process care proceedings, take most time? Norgrove was correct in identifying delays in the Court process as being significant. He was not correct in identifying that there was delay in the adoption panel process. I believe that this has been confirmed in the oral evidence the committee have received at the date of preparing this evidence. The recent Ofsted report at para’s 71- 76 confirms this. Para 76 for example states: 76. The Family Justice Review made a recommendation, accepted by the government that the requirement that local authority adoption panels must consider the suitability of an adoption plan for a child should be removed. There were mixed views about this. Some, mainly court or Cafcass representatives, felt that as adoption was a legal process, this was an unnecessary duplication of the court’s task. Panel chairs in particular felt that the panel discussions brought a range of perspectives and areas of expertise that added rigour to the decision-making process. Inspectors did not, however, find that the panel’s scrutiny of the case added delay for children. There was no evidence in the tracked cases that panel decision-making about the suitability of adoption delayed final hearings. There have however, undoubtedly been delays in the administration of the Panel by some LA’s , by for example failing to call an emergency panel meeting. (see also the Corum oral evidence.) I believe that Martin Narey ( despite I’m sure his best intentions) in referring to panel delays has confused these two issues ( ie delays in the administration of the panel process versus the function of the panel over and above recommending for example the yes/no to adoption for a child or the approval of potential adopters). From my email correspondence with Mr Narey I don’t believe he has fully grasped the extent, or validity, of the work that the panel undertakes on behalf of the child, and the potential adoptive family to ensure an appropriate match. Do the various parts of the system- local authorities, adoption agencies, courts and others work effectively together? No not particularly – see Norgrove. c) Could the adoption process be speeded up, whilst ensuring that necessary safeguards are preserved? Yes definitely both in the LA process and particularly the Court process. It is important however that full consideration is given to the established case law of the ECHR as it relates to Article 8. The birth parents must be given an appropriate opportunity to parent their child. Oral evidence from Corum dealt with this. The requirement of the LA to assist parents parent their children by the appropriate provision of for example Sec 17 (Children Act 1989) services must be given a very high priority by all LA’s – there must not be postcode variation.

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Pete Bentley—Written evidence d) How widely used is concurrent planning? What are its advantages and disadvantages? It is not widely used . For a full summary of its use appropriate and otherwise see the Oral evidence by Corum . It is important to state that at present foster carers are recruited as foster carers not adopters. If a foster carer wished for example to be assessed as an adopter they would apply accordingly. This is because the task and expectation of a foster carer is significantly different from that of an adopter (and vica versa). Many statements have been made in the ‘debate’ by persons who do not appear to understand the complex issues involved. See again the oral Corum evidence. e) What are the reasons for the variations in time taken to place children by different local authorities? The needs of individual children in each LA and the number of available and appropriate families plays a significant part. In addition the availability of sufficient staffing levels is relevant. I believe other factors include local LA culture, regional culture, and sometimes the personality, professional preferences, and relevant experience of key personnel. Significantly different agencies will have different policies about how soon to refer children to local and national databases and for example how ‘ visible’ they wish their children requiring placement to be – by hosting events to bring children waiting and prospective adopters together similar to the events run by BAAF ( who many years ago had a similar scheme entitled ‘adoption parties’). 4) The number of potential Adopters a) Are there enough potential adopters coming forward? Are there shortages in particular ethnic groups? There are not enough potential adopters – see the mismatch between referred children and adopters in the Adoption Register annual report. See also AP para 17 (but the word ‘encourage’ is not appropriate because there is a danger in ‘wrong’ matches being made and hence the risk of disruption of the placement). b) How do we ensure the best “fit” for a child, and is trans-racial adoption relevant to this issue? Many adoption social workers are well practised in ensuring potential good matches – they need to be recognised for this. The role of an Adoption Panel at both the ‘best interests’ and ‘matching’ stages also contributes. The issue of trans- racial adoption is in danger of being a ‘red herring’. The existing legislation (Sec 1(5) of the 2002 Act and the current statutory guidance is very adequate). The analysis of Corum and BAAF as given in oral evidence to the committee is in my view accurate and very persuasive. The oral evidence of the Dept for Education witnesses [Ques 56] that in effect we should not look specifically for

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Pete Bentley—Written evidence adopters from ethnic minority groups is in my view very misplaced. We must continue to recruit and try and match children to Adopters from a similar background to that of the child whilst of course minimising delay (by the application of the statutory guidance). c) Why do some potential adopters drop out during the adoption process? Potential Adopters drop out on occasions because they realise that adoption may not be for them. Adoption is not, and has not been for some time, about ‘owning’ a child without recognition of their origins and attachments that for example they may already have made with birth family members (including sibs) and /or foster carers. Adopters also need to be prepared to offer therapeutic parenting and to cope with children’s attachment difficulties and trauma. Not all applicants feel they want to do this. There are anecdotal comments about adopters not feeling welcomed (see AP paras 18,19, 20) but for a different view see the Ofsted report para’s 85-90. For example at paras 86 and 87: Nearly all the adopters felt that they had received a welcoming and sensitive response when they first enquired about adoption. One adopter said that the initial response from the local authority had made them even more excited about the prospect of adoption than before she made the call. Several spoke of appreciating that they had been made to feel valued and that the agency thought that their call was important: ‘They were very welcoming and encouraging. They seemed very pleased to have us.’ 87. Another said that she had felt an instant rapport with the adoption team member she first spoke to: ‘He was instantly on my wavelength.’ This experience was in marked contrast to what the adopter perceived as the more formal attitude of another local authority she had previously contacted for information. The difference in those responses was a significant factor in her decision about where to apply. Note also that AP para 2 states that ‘42% of looked after children between the ages of five and ten had a mental disorder of some kind’. There is a danger in the public believing that adoption is too straightforward as a life- long commitment. . Mr Narey has stated that he believes the number of adoption disruptions is overstated. Without good evidence I suggest that this comment should also be treated with extreme caution. Because of his status as government adoption adviser the public are very likely to take what he says at face value. It is vitally important that his views and basis for those views are examined in detail (in an evidence based way) before sole reliance is based on his recommendations.

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Pete Bentley—Written evidence d) Have the changes to eligibility introduced by the 2002 Act impacted the number of potential adopters? Yes Single adopters and gay / lesbian adopters can now adopt (see the Adoption Register annual report and CVAA statistical returns for further information.) e) What will be the likely effect of the measures proposed in the Department for Education’s ‘Action Plan’ for Adoption. I mainly agree with the contents of the action plan at paras 1-44. One of my principle disagreements is in relation to the decision to remove from Adoption Panel the requirement to make a recommendation in respect of ‘best interests’ without apparently full and proper understanding and consultation about what process would ‘fill the gap ‘. I expect the ADCS in their evidence will comment on whether they believe the solution required by the statutory guidance will in practice be achievable. The solution proposed by Barnardos in oral evidence ( in respect to their suggestion that the LA Independent Reviewing Officers can ‘fill the gap’) is I believe very likely to result in a deterioration of quality of the process and indeed run the very real risk of creating further delay for the child ( see the Ofsted report (paras 147-152): 147. Inspectors found that the influence of independent reviewing officers (IROs) on timely adoption outcomes for children was inconsistent. 148. Most local authorities reported that the level of challenge varied from one IRO to the next. Despite seeing several cases where timescales for the completion of actions had not been met (in one case, repeatedly so), inspectors rarely saw evidence of IROs escalating cases to senior management level where there had been significant delay. Social workers in one local authority agreed that a failure to meet timescales rarely resulted in any remedial action. Another social worker described the IRO as ‘over-accepting’. 149. Not all local authorities had formal escalation procedures. Where they existed, IROs had utilised them to raise concerns at a more senior level. However, there was little evidence of any meaningful liaison with Cafcass when there were serious concerns. 150. Generally, IROs had not yet taken on the full scope of their responsibilities as outlined by revised care planning guidance. Most local authorities were clear that IROs should closely oversee the progress of cases and there were examples of cases where IROs were involved appropriately between reviews. In one case, an IRO rightly stated that a significant change to the care plan, concerning arrangements to place siblings separately for adoption, should be ratified at a statutory review. However, the meeting could not be convened for two months resulting in further delay. 151. In one local authority, the caseloads of IROs were judged by inspectors to be too high. In this authority, minutes of reviews were often distributed late or unavailable, risking a lack of clarity about roles and responsibilities for progressing actions. In other areas, the distribution of recommendations and minutes of review discussions was generally timely.

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Pete Bentley—Written evidence 152. In some cases review recommendations often lacked clear timescales for completion of actions and did not always make accountabilities clear. See also the ( in my view) very concerning recent case of : A and S v Lancs CC which is reported at : http://www.familylawweek.co.uk/site.aspx?i=ed98855 In summary the IRO system although fine in theory is not working at all effectively. I draw the committee’s attention to Section 11 of the Children and Young Persons Act 2008 which gives the power to the Secretary of State to set up a body independent of the Local Authority to appoint/ train/manage the work of IRO’s. This may be a solution but in my view would take typically 3 or 4 years to implement and be effective. In my view there is some inappropriate ‘playing to the media gallery’ in the action plan. We must be very careful saying that social workers have been looking for ‘ the perfect match’ see AP para 36 . I submit that In the vast majority of cases they haven’t. Also in using the word ‘delay’ care needs to be taken in separating avoidable delay from unavoidable delay. In some cases a short delay may indeed be in the interests of a child. A distinction needs to be drawn also between allegations of a panel process causing delay and a LA’s administration of the panel process. f) Does the number of agencies inhibit the number of potential adopters recruited? No: the more agencies recruiting potential adopters the better. I also believe that generally the current process of assessment of adopters as for example extensively covered by the publication ‘Preparing and assessing prospective adopters’ (published by the then Dept for Education and Skills as part of the practice guidance to the 2002 Act) is still very appropriate with the addition of the suggested modular changes currently being discussed. g) Does the recent increase in knowledge about early child development affect the balance between children’s rights and parental rights? The use of the word ‘balance’ in this question is inappropriate. I suggest the process is a sequential one. First can the birth parents be assisted (by for example by the provision of Sec 17 services and see the oral evidence by Coram) by the LA in parenting their child within the child’s timescale. If not then what is the best legal plan for permanence? The research powerfully reinforces the need to place children as early as possible with their permanent carers (either birth family or adopters). It reduces the time available to evaluate the evidence and make a decision. The European Court case law on Article 8 issues is also extremely important to understand and comply with. See also AP para’s 29, 36.

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Pete Bentley—Written evidence Because an adoption order once made is nearly always non- revocable (see the relevant case law) I draw attention to the consequences of a miscarriage of justice. See for example the recent case of ‘LB of Islington v Al Alas and Wray’ reported at http://www.familylawweek.co.uk/site.aspx?i=ed97208 Briefly in this case rickets was eventually found to be cause of bone fractures in a young child which at the time had resulted in a care order being made after a medical diagnosis of NAI (non accidental injury). A first child had died, and a second child born to the parents had been made subject to a care order at birth and removed from the parents. The second child was subsequently returned to the care of the parents after the mis-carriage of justice was identified. Very early adoptions (in the manner presently being canvassed) could well have resulted in the second child being adopted before the miscarriage of justice was identified. I believe therefore some thought needs to be given to what is a controversial suggestion, that some consideration be given, in law, to providing for ‘early adoptions’ to be potentially revocable ( in say the first year or two of the adoption) in those very rare cases where a miscarriage of justice has occurred. 5) Court Proceedings a) Do court proceedings take undue time in the adoption process? Yes : See Norgrove plus my previous comments on the ECHR. b) Would the recommendations of the Family Justice Review substantially alter the position? Yes if it is implemented fully in one go, and properly funded. c) How effective are provisions for the representation by guardians of children in court proceedings? There is evidence that the CAFCASS service as provided to the child has been severally downgraded over the last 10 years. I suspect that the evidence submitted by NAGALRO will cover this topic. d) How effective have placement orders been in facilitating the placement and adoption of children compared with “freeing orders”? Placement orders have been very effective in legally allowing the LA to place a child for adoption. In addition anyone with parental responsibility has the opportunity to mount a full challenge to the making of a placement order in the court process.

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Pete Bentley—Written evidence However if a child has been in a prospective adoptive family since the making of the care order it is very likely that the attachment of the child with that family will be taken into account in assessing the welfare of the child when considering the appropriateness of a placement order. I pose the question ‘is this appropriate and legally just’? Essentially it means that as soon as an Interim Care Order (which is made on a lesser test of proof than a full Care Order – see my evidence to the Commons Education Committee) is made then the birth family may from that moment have in effect ‘lost their child’. e) How common is it for care proceedings and placement order proceedings to be heard together or consecutively? What are the advantages and disadvantages of this approach? It has become more common for the proceedings to be heard very closely together. The danger is confusing the respective orders. A placement order removes from the persons with PR the legal right to refuse consent to adoption and legally allows the LA to place the child for adoption. It is vitally important to not allow the two orders (ie care order and placement order) to be regarded by practitioners as being the same thing. It may be absolutely appropriate for some children (particularly older children) to be subject to a care order but not a placement order. f) How will changes to legal aid impact, if at all, on adoption proceedings? From my limited knowledge I believe it will have no impact on public law cases. 6) Post adoption Support a) How, if at all, has the 2002 Act impacted upon the provision of post-adoption contacts and support? It has opened the door further but by no means have the provisions of the 2002 Act and the Adoption Support Services Regulations 2005 been fully and appropriately implemented by practitioners in a way which could help minimise the risk of an adoption disruption. b) Are measures needed to enhance post-adoption financial and other support for adopted children, adoptive parents, and birth families. A family adopting a child should prior to matching have full information as to what support (including financial) will (as distinct from ‘may’) be provided post adoption. This is essential so that when the family agree the match there will be certainty for them. 7) Inter-country adoption I don’t have enough working knowledge on this topic to comment.

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Pete Bentley—Written evidence 8) Access to information a) Has the 2002 Act made it easier for adopted adults and/or birth families to trace their relatives, should they wish to do so? From my very limited knowledge – yes it has. 9) Other Permanent placements a) What has been the effect of the introduction, in the 2002 Act, of ‘special guardianship’? Special Guardianship is a very appropriate option for children for whom it is important that there is no legal pretence in law that their parents are any other than their birth parents. It is important to note that an adoption order makes the adopters legally the ‘birth’ parents of the child. In passing it is interesting (if my information is correct) that there are two ‘levels’ of adoption in France (one of which does not severe the legal relationship of a child and their birth parents.) b) Is special guardianship an effective alternative to adoption, especially for those of school age (ie 5 and older)? Absolutely yes …Special Guardianship however should not be used as a ‘softer’ form of adoption where what is appropriate is indeed an adoption order. It must be remembered that at the end of the day it is a Court that makes the order (either an adoption order or special guardianship order) and must in law be satisfied via the report of the children’s guardian that it is the right order for that particular child. c) What is the best way to ensure permanent and consistent placements for children? See previous comments. In particular my response to 1(a). I believe that a recent BAAF comment is of great relevance : ‘These proposals will be demanding to implement responsibly. They will require well trained, knowledgeable and well-resourced professionals, properly informed and supported carers and the support of the courts and judiciary’. d) Would earlier interventions in cases of children with difficulties have an effect on the number of children who need to be adopted or otherwise permanently separated from their birth family? Yes very probably but we must ensure that we operate always within the case law of ECHR in respect of not removing children from birth parents inappropriately and perhaps prematurely. This later point has to be balanced with our new knowledge of the effects of delay.

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10) Monitoring a) Do ‘adoption scorecards’ provide an appropriate means for monitoring the performance of local authorities with regard to adoption ? To some extent but all target driven analysis is likely to result in LA’s prioritising what is required to get a high rating in a particular area. Some children may well be treated with less priority if their own situation is not one likely to be recognised by the particular target. I know of agencies that genuinely believe that there scorecard rating does not accurately reflect their overall performance. The LGA dealt with this issue in some detail during their oral evidence. b) How robust are current systems for monitoring the number of adoptions made, the number of children awaiting adoption, and the amount of delay experienced by those awaiting adoption? They are getting better but see the Adoption Register annual report for an accurate summary of the national picture. Pete Bentley – Evidence Annex A two emails to the Chairman of the Committee sent in mid June 2012 Dear Baroness Butler Sloss I write as a Local Authority Adoption Panel Chair and as an ex employee of BAAF for 15 years (as a consultant in the Newcastle Office). In brief I am writing to enquire if there is any possibility of the proposed change in regulations proposed by this SI being fully debated ( under the negative resolution procedure ) in the Lords whilst they are formally laid before Parliament and prior to their implementation on 1st Sept 2012 ? I acknowledge this is very unlikely however I am very concerned that the present requirement (under reg 18 of the Adoption Agency Regulations 2005) that the Adoption Panel of the LA make a recommendation to the Agency prior to its formal decision is being abolished and that the Adoption Agency will be prohibited from referring the matter to its Adoption Panel in future (even for advice). Although 'Norgrove' made the recommendation I have seen no evidence that any consideration at all has been given to an examination of the 'value added benefits ' that reference ( as presently required) to the Adoption Panel may ( or may not) bring in addition to the yes / no recommendation as to whether Adoption is in the best interests of a child. A quick example is that at present the Panel will examine in detail whether appropriate work has been undertaken with the child concerning the loss they have experienced in being separated from their birth parent(s), the consequential behavioural manifestation of that loss, and leading

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Pete Bentley—Written evidence on to consideration of appropriate therapeutic work with the child. I have seen this first hand at Panel and my experience over many years is that neither the courts or IRO's (in their consideration of a case) are or will be equipped to explore this issue after 1st Sept. Neither do I believe the 'hope' that the Agency Decision Maker ( as expressed in the revised guidance) will have the time and resources to explore this issue is either realistic or achievable. The Government in their response to Norgrove justified the change in the Regs as being required because of potential delay or the risk of delay. All the colleagues I have spoken to with experience of the process are of the view that delay does not normally happen as a consequence of the Panel process and this is borne out by the recent Ofsted report ( 'Right on time : exploring delays in Adoption' ). They report ' ... Inspectors found no evidence of panels contributing to avoidable delay ' and ' the influence of independent reviewing officers ( IRO's) on timely adoption outcomes for children was inconsistent' I should add that I do, of course, accept that the Court is the right and proper place for the arguments relating to the making of a Placement Order, to be considered and determined and that the role of the Panel in that regard is superfluous. Its the 'extra value' of referral to the Adoption Panel that I'm concerned about. I believe here is a high risk that under the changes in the Regs, as intended from 1st Sept, there is the possibility of more ( not less ) delay and/or the risk of children being placed for adoption without proper and full preparation of the child / potential adopters. These matters will now only be 'visible' to an Adoption Panel at the 'matching' stage ( and clearly there will be the risk in future of Panels being 'accused' of causing delay at the 'matching' stage - by those without a full understanding of the importance of the relevant issues) I have written about these issues to Mary Lucking at the Dept for Education ( without in my view an adequate response) - coped to Martin Narey , I also have submitted written evidence to the Commons Education Select Committee - which is available on its website. I should add that I fully support addressing avoidable delay in both the Local Authority and Court settings but I believe this needs to be a truly evidence based exercise and that for example Article 8 issues need to fully considered in the process . I don't want to make this email too long but am happy to provide further information / copies of my correspondence etc to the Dept for Education if it will assist. Best Wishes ... Pete Bentley

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Pete Bentley—Written evidence Dear Baroness Butler Sloss Just to sincerely thank you for the seriousness that you treated my email that I sent to you a week ago, and for the question which was put to the Department for Education witnesses by Lady Howarth on June 26th. In her response the Dept for Education witness was of course perfectly correct in saying the David Norgrove consulted widely, however what she failed to add was that consultation ( and his committees subsequent recommendation) was purely on whether the Adoption Panel should continue to make a yes/no recommendation as to whether a child should be placed for adoption. There was no consultation by Norgrove on the involvement of the Panel on the matters that I referred to in my email and by Lady Howarth in her question. What concerns me is that no-one from the Department seems to want to formally acknowledge that ( and its implications) either to myself or now (and of course very much more significantly !) to your committee. Of equal concern to me is that the relevant stakeholders in the adoption field were not consulted on the proposed content of what is now SI 2012 No 1410. As long as my professional memory goes back such consultation has always taken place before previous proposed changes in regulation and has always significantly involved among others, BAAF on behalf of its members. I respectfully suggest that in prohibiting the Local Authority from referring a child to the adoption panel for even advice these, of all proposed regulations, should have been fully consulted on. I'm sure you are aware that an adoption panel is composed of not just social workers employed by the local authority but is required by regulation to include 'at least two persons with personal experience of adoption' in addition to others. Thus a typical panel includes an adopter , an adopted adult , a foster carer, an elected member ( representing the corporate parent ) , and possibly an educational psychologist or child and adolescent mental health services professional, in additional to an agency, medical and legal adviser. It is also chaired by someone who is required by regulation to be independent of the Local Authority. The present panel system ( involving, as it does, what amounts to local community representation ) has taken many years to mature and has in the past apparently been highly valued and supported by previous governments in the work it is required to undertake, leading to a better understanding of the needs of the individual child, and where adoption is the outcome helping ensure that full recognition is given to the preparation of the child ( and the adoptive family) for the placement,r which in turn helps minimise the risk of a future disruption in that adoptive family. Finally can I offer my good wishes to you and your committee in the work you are undertaking. Best Wishes .. Pete Bentley

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Pete Bentley—Written evidence

Pete Bentley Evidence – Annex B http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201213/cmselect/cmeduc/writev/1514/cps89.htm July 2012

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Professor Nina Biehal, Professor Julie Selwyn, and Professor June Thoburn— Oral evidence (QQ 718–769)

Professor Nina Biehal, Professor Julie Selwyn, and Professor June Thoburn— Oral evidence (QQ 718–769) Transcript to be found under Professor Julie Selwyn

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Birmingham City Council’s Adoption Service—Written evidence

Birmingham City Council’s Adoption Service—Written evidence Background a. We believe the present structure in adoption works well and should continue. There is a good level of child-focussed and professional adoption expertise across the UK. It is right that adoption remains a non-profit making activity at all levels. b. We should be concerned about the falling number of adoptions, particularly as this is not paralleled by a similar reduction to the Looked After Children population in the UK. There are likely to be a range of reasons for the decrease in adoptions. We consider these to include: (iii) the use of legal alternatives, including Special Guardianship Orders (SGOs) and Residence Orders. Whilst both Orders are useful alternatives giving children a level of legal security, in the right circumstances, we do have a concern that SGOs are not always used appropriately, resulting in children not being adopted, for whom adoption would be the best outcome. We welcome the Government’s decision to commission research into the use of SGOs (Action Plan For Adoption DfE). (iv) Lack of guaranteed financial support after adoption. In the recent challenging economic climate, the decision to apply to adopt, for some, may well be influenced by whether the person/couple considers they can ‘afford’ to…take time out of work/give up work. (v) Complexity of need of children now requiring adoption, eg foetal alcohol, older children, sibling groups which span very young siblings to older siblings. Legislation a – d. Whilst the guiding principle of the Adoption and Children Act 2002 is that the child’s welfare is paramount, in practice, the implementation of the Act has often resulted in the rights of the birth parents outweighing both the needs of the child and the role of the adopters. Placement Orders do not work well. Every step of the process allows birth parents in to challenge the plan for adoption. This can raise unrealistic expectations for the birth parent. The uncertainty of the final outcome is stressful for adopters, who have the child living with them. In cases of relinquishment, there are too many opportunities for birth parents to challenge and change their minds. In our view, the use of Freeing Orders worked much better in supporting the matching process by bringing the decision-making process to a clear conclusion at an earlier stage. 177

Birmingham City Council’s Adoption Service—Written evidence We would welcome changes to Legislation/Regulations which redefine the end point at which the Placement Order can be legally challenged. This could work well if it were at the point of the match being ratified by the Adoption Panel. Rights to Adoption Leave and Pay need to be extended to adopters who are self-employed, as well as low paid workers who may have not paid sufficient NI contributions. The Government’s ‘Fostering For Adoption’ proposals will also need to make provision for entitlement to leave from work at the point of the child’s placement, at which point the carers will foster carers rather than adopters. Under the current regulations, the right to leave only becomes available at the point of approval as adopters. Small employers may not be able to sustain employees in this longer term. A Child in care has more access to a full range of services, e.g. difficulties in accessing CAMHS for adopted children in some localities. Differing cultures have different attitudes, e.g. tradition of caring for children through other routes, i.e. fostering. Time taken in placing children g. The time taken to place children in terms of the matching/preparing/introduction processes are not excessive. They reflect the seriousness of the lifelong decisions being made for the child, as well as the professional experience and knowledge of the workers regarding what helps to set a strong foundation in the early days of an adoptive placement. There is currently a scarcity of skilled adopters for larger and/or older (4+) sibling groups, children from a range of Black and Minority Ethnic backgrounds, children with disabilities, and children with challenging behaviour and attachment difficulties. This does impact negatively on the length of time it takes to achieve an adoptive placement, if it is achieved. Their needs to be an understanding that adopters’ motivation differs from foster carers. h. The Child’s Permanence Report (CPR) is an important document, and takes a significant amount of social worker time to prepare well. The replication of information inevitably impacts on timescales. If both the CPR and the Prospective Adopters Report (PAR) could be redesigned so that each one could be also used as the Annexe A and B Court Reports, (perhaps with appropriate appendices) an enormous amount of social work time would be saved. The preparation of the child, through therapeutic support and lifestory work is also time intensive. The lack of availability of the right models of intervention for children moving to adoption, as well as the inconsistent access to CAMHS across the UK creates further delays in placement. The current legal framework permits relatives of the child to come forward at too late a stage in the proceedings. Where this results in a permanent home for the child within the extended birth family, it is to be welcomed. However, on the occasions where it does not, the delay for the child is often significant.

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Birmingham City Council’s Adoption Service—Written evidence

i.

Our experience across the Consortium is that there is a culture of willingness to work together amongst the various professionals involved in adoption work. There are many examples of good practice, although this is not always consistent. There is a need for further work to be done regarding the relationship between the Courts/CAFCASS/Local Authorities. Currently, where the Courts/CAFCASS lack confidence in the Local Authority, the child’s case may remain in the court arena for longer than is necessary. Compulsory joint training would be helpful in providing opportunities for greater appreciation of each profession’s perspective and knowledge in adoption matters. There is also a tendency for roles to become blurred once a case enters the court arena. Both the Court’s and Children’s Guardian’s role and expertise should be focussed on whether the circumstances meet the threshold for a Placement Order only. Other matters, such as contact, and where the child will be placed, are the expertise of the Local Authority and should not be part of this decision-making process.

j.

From the child’s perspective, the adoption process could be speeded up by reducing the number of repeated parenting assessments, where there is considerable evidence that the birth parents will not be able to achieve the progress necessary, and within a realistic timeframe, for the child to be able to thrive in their care long term. Earlier pre-birth assessments would also prevent delay in some cases. As has been stated previously in this submission, the early and effective preparation of children would also reduce delay. This has resource implications in both staffing and training. What we now know about developmental trauma should inform decisions about Birth Parents Rights and Children’s Rights. Repeated assessments, high levels of contact can ultimately affect the child both developmentally and emotionally long term. From the adopters perspective, it is our view that the current timescales for the preparation, training and assessment of adoptive applicants, are both realistic and reasonable. It is important to recognise that adoptive applicants come to Adoption Agencies as service users, with needs which they are hoping will be fulfilled through adoption. It is vital that thorough, comprehensive assessments continue. Applicants often need time to process the vast amount of information given to them, both intellectually and emotionally. Because of this, the timescales for the completion of assessment need to have a degree of flexibility, without the concern that the Adoption Agency will be penalised. An extra few weeks of discussion and reflection at the assessment stage may prevent poor matching or placement difficulties or breakdown later on.

k. In the West Midlands, pure Concurrent Planning is not widely used. It is hugely resource intensive and is unlikely to be developed significantly in the current economic climate. This approach will only apply to a small group of children, eg

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Birmingham City Council’s Adoption Service—Written evidence children under 2. We need to attract adopters willing and able to manage the risk if rehab to family successful. The Government’s Fostering For Adoption proposal (also known as ‘dual approval’) is more likely to be used and is a welcome development for 3 particular groups: 4. Adopters who wish to adopt a young child – voluntary relinquished. 5. Foster carers who do not want to have to move on lots of children, and have the potential to embrace permanency. Dual approval would also protect such placements from having lots of other children placed there at the fostering stage, and the carer’s remuneration would be predictable enabling them to plan. 6. Placement of a child with a family who have already adopted a sibling/s. 7. Older children, sib groups, fostering with a view to adoption where we can provide fostering for a longer term. Flexible finance support will support the family. l.

The variations in the time taken to place children by different local authorities cannot be answered completely, but is likely to be affected by local resources, particularly with regard to staffing capacity. The culture within the local Courts and Cafcass will also result in delays in effective decision-making in some areas.

The number of potential adopters h. Whilst a number of Adoption Agencies in this Consortium have seen some increase in the number of adopters recently, there continues to be a need for adopters from a wider range of ethnic backgrounds, and with the potential to parent children with a wider range of backgrounds/behaviours/needs. There is a mismatch in the profile of children with a plan for adoption, and the adopters matching considerations. We should be moving towards permanence long term, i.e. Adoption, Long Term Fostering, SGO for example. It is dependant on the needs of the children. i.

The best ‘fit’ for a child is ensured when thorough, rounded assessments are completed on that child’s needs, with ethnicity included as one important aspect. In our experience, it is more often the adopters who express a wish for a child from a particularly ethnic background. Reasons expressed for this include the desire for the child to ‘look’ as though s/he were born into the family.

j.

The reasons for applicants ‘dropping out’ during the assessment process, often stem from a growing understanding about the realities of adoption, and the distinct differences between parenting an adoptive child rather than a birth child. These include: -learning about the long term needs of the children -living with uncertainty regarding the child’s future needs -the reality of the child having two sets of parents

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Birmingham City Council’s Adoption Service—Written evidence -the expectation that adopters will take part in post adoption letterbox contact as a minimum, and in some cases contact with birth family/siblings, once a year for example. For some, the strain of failed fertility treatments and resultant relationship difficulties surface during the assessment; for others, an unexpected pregnancy or offer of fertility treatment brings an end to the adoption process. The fact that applicants do reach the conclusion during the assessment process, that adoption is not right for them, reinforces the importance of assessments being thorough as at present. k. The changes in eligibility have increased the range of adopters coming forward. l.

The ‘Action Plan for Adoption’ has raised the profile of adoption in the media, and we hope that ongoing publicity proves helpful in increasing the number of adopters. We look forward to the outcomes of the research commissioned on disruption and the use of SGOs. We welcome the production of guidance on child development/impact of delay/key research evidence for use in care proceedings for the judiciary and lawyers. The acknowledgement of the importance of adoption support is also positive, although to be effective, will require an increase in resources. The main concern regarding the proposals is that in speeding up the processes, the risk of disruption will increase. In order to meet the new timescales for assessments, it is likely that they will be outsourced by some Agencies. We are concerned that this may result in a lack of confidence in the quality of assessments, and consequently, social workers may undertake further assessments at the matching stage. We believe it is a misconception that the Adoption Panel process, in itself, has created delay. The decision to replace the Panel’s scrutiny of Care Plans with an individual increases the risks. A PAR is an assessment and preparation. It is a process for families and agencies to be informed and reflect on whether Adoption is right for this family and any children placed. Panel considering Plans for Adoption: Advantages considered by range of professional and independent members who have personal experience of adoption – degree of independent, quality assurances. Dynamic process – social worker is present and part of discussion, other information therefore available which adds to decision making. Concerns re ADM: 1 Person making decision with limited discussion with others – prohibits this part from medical adviser/panel adviser. Capacity of ADM to read all paperwork and

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Birmingham City Council’s Adoption Service—Written evidence then record detailed decision – likelihood of more challenge re process in Court which will be more delay if panel still looking at matches – first time they will have heard of child – more time needed to read papers. More resource intensive to LA as need infrastructure to support ADM process additional to panel process/structure. LA still has to make decision, ADM is as time intensive as panel process. Reliant on consistent availability of 1 or very few senior personnel time needed for this work is huge, senior managers have other responsibilities. Smaller agencies more issues re independence as senior manager likely to have case responsibility. m. The wide range of adoption agencies enhances the number of potential adopters, as it offers more choice. n. The growing body of knowledge on early child development is extremely helpful in the assessments of young children, and emphasises the vital importance of early decision-making on behalf of vulnerable children. It also informed the support needs of the children. Court Proceedings g. Yes, court processes are unduly lengthy. Repetition of birth parent assessments, kinship assessments, and the focus on gaining ‘expert’ opinion has taken the focus from the paramouncy of the child’s welfare. h. If the recommendations of the Family Justice Review are embraced fully, we expect to see a substantial improvement in court timescales. We look forward to this. i.

We recognise the importance of the child having independent representation in the court process. However, the parameters of the Children’s Guardian’s role does need some refining. One particular concern is the propensity to introduce late challenges to the Local Authority’s plans. The resultant delay does not serve the best interests of the child.

j.

Whilst we understand the reasons behind the move away from Freeing Orders, due to children being left in legal ‘limbo,’ Placement Orders have not brought the improvements hoped for. Freeing Orders provided a clearer legal ending for adopters, removing the stress associated with legal uncertainty once the child is placed. In consequence, children with Freeing Orders were placed more quickly. The current investigations into adoption provide an opportunity to re-examine Placement Orders and strengthen this aspect of the legal process. This could be achieved by combining the best features of Freeing Orders, as outlined above, and Placement Orders, where Care Order status is maintained, this preventing the possibility of children who are not subsequently placed for adoption becoming ‘organisational orphans.’

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Birmingham City Council’s Adoption Service—Written evidence k. It is usual practice for Care Order and Placement Order proceedings to be heard together in this region. This reduces delay and its continuation is vital for this reason. l.

The changes in legal aid provisions have the potential to create further delays for children. If birth parents are not able to access this, and their consent is then dispensed with, they could later challenge the Adoption Order on the grounds of their not having access to legal aid.

Post-Adoption Support c. The 2002 Act highlighted the importance of post adoption support and services have grown significantly in subsequent years, with many Local Authorities having dedicated Adoption Support workers/teams. Challenges remain, however, due to the varied interpretation of the provisions in the 2002 Act, by Local Authorities and Primary Care Trusts, including CAMHS and related therapeutic services. There continues to be a need for therapeutic services that are able to respond to the needs of adopted children. Geographical issues present a particular challenge for children with disabilities, who may be receiving services in one Local Authority when they are a Looked After Child, but need to have services in place in the Local Authority/PCT where their adoptive placement is situated. At present, there is often resistance to set up services on the part of the receiving Local Authority/PCT, until the child is in placement. We recommend that the 3 year rule be dispensed with, as it works against the best interests of adoptive families. Support needs to be provided in the area in which the adoptive family is living – there may need to be some financial recompense for this but it’s better for families. Adoption is not just about making placements quickly it’s about sustaining placements throughout childhood. d. In order to enhance the current and future demand for adoption support by all those connected to adoption, increased financial resources are needed by Local Authorities. Regarding regular financial support, in the form of adoption allowances, there needs to be a mandatory central benchmarking system put in place. This would remove the current ‘postcode lottery,’ where each Local Authority benchmarks differently. The need for a revision of the provisions for adoption leave and pay has been outlined earlier in this submission. Intermediary Services continue to place demands on both Local Authorities and Voluntary Adoption Agencies. Due to the level of investigative work, and length of involvement in these cases, charges are now made to the service user by many agencies. This may result in an unfair system, only available to those with the necessary financial resources.

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Birmingham City Council’s Adoption Service—Written evidence Birth Parents often reach the point of needing support during the years when Letterbox contact is taking place. As letterbox contact arrangements are now standard in the majority of adoptions, this is becoming a growing area of work. Inter-Country Adoption a-c. Given the specialist nature of this area of adoption work, we suggest the setting up of a National Agency for Inter-Country Adoption as an effective way of meeting the needs of Adopters for this particular group of children. We would also suggest that consideration be given to the UK becoming a ‘placing country’ in a limited way, for inter-country adopters from closely geographical and cultural neighbours, such as The Republic of Ireland. Access to Information b. Social media has meant direct contact with birth family has been made much earlier than previously, eg early adolescence. This is usually unplanned and can jeopardise the security of the placement. This is a complex area which requires considerable adoption support and is a growing concern. c. The 2002 Act has made it easier for adopted adults to trace. However, the impact of the rise in social media, such as Facebook, TV programmes, such as ‘Who Do You Think You Are’ as well as easier access to Genealogy websites is already having an impact on this area of work. Other Permanent Placements i.

Special Guardianship Orders have resulted in a decrease in Adoption Orders in some Local Authorities. We hope the current research being undertaken will give a clearer picture nationally in this respect.

j.

Special Guardianship Orders should only be used for older children if the legal security of an Adoption Order is not achievable. It should be the 2nd option after adoption.

k. Permanent and consistent placements for children can be achieved by: -thorough preparation of the adopters -accurate assessment of the child, which is communicated to the adopters -ongoing support which can ebb and flow in response to the needs of the whole adoptive family at any particular time, including access to CAMHS, educational provision and flexible financial support. l.

Earlier interventions are likely to increase the number of adoptions.

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Birmingham City Council’s Adoption Service—Written evidence Monitoring a-b. We do not consider scorecards an effective means of monitoring Local Authority performance in their current form. They miss the subtleties of the content of adoption caseloads, and create incentives which may work against the best outcomes for children. For example, older children with complex needs who take longer to place, may not be considered for adoption, due to the impact on the scorecards. Also, as the scorecards are adoption focussed, which detach them from early Child In Care (CIC)and Local After Children (LAC) processes. Therefore, the CIC and LAC teams do not realise how their work impacts on the adoption scorecards. b. number of adoptions made – factual; number awaiting adoption – inconsistent as different things are being counted; delay experienced – misses subtleties, such as older children where more preparation of child is needed. 19 July 2012

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Amanda Boorman—Written evidence

Amanda Boorman—Written evidence I would like to inform The House Of Lords Adoption Committee about my experiences of adoption and welcome this opportunity. I feel my experience is rare in that had I not had the financial support of a relatively wealthy extended family the adoption would most certainly have broken down very quickly. My much loved daughter would, against our wishes, be in the care of the local authority for her childhood and most probably beyond, facing costly residential placements and a high risk of psychiatric care or prison. Like many others my daughter would go from a child victim to an adult nuisance to society within a short space of time. As a result of my family's financial support we have remained together whilst experiencing intense difficulties over many years. I adopted my daughter 13 years ago and struggled to cope from the beginning. My daughter was placed with me aged five having been removed from her birth family aged four. Many unsuccessful attempts were made to work with her birth mother who was herself in care as a child and has challenging behaviour and learning difficulties. My daughter was hugely traumatised by her early years both by her parents lack of care and also the system which meant she had ten emergency removals out of her home by the time she was finally removed for adoption. The results of this experience are that she has extreme anxiety, attachment issues and developmental trauma which manifests in violent, risky and challenging behaviour. Due to the lack of meaningful support, injuries have occurred to myself, my daughter and those around us. I lost my job several weeks into the adoption placement as well as the opportunity to do an MA which was leading to employment as a lecturer within a department at York University. Within a couple of years I had remortgaged my house and my daughter was unable to access education of any kind. I have not been waged for thirteen years as I have had to do to 24 hour care. Had we been supported effectively I could have returned to work and cost less in support as I could have funded our needs privately and independently. After eighteen months of what could only be described as traumatic day to day living I was commissioned by The Sunday Times in 2001 to write about my experiences. This was at a time when the Labour Government were changing legislation to help speed up the adoption process and increase numbers of children provided with permanence through adoption. I have enclosed that article and it appears that the current Government are attempting to address the same issues that were present eleven years ago. Despite the time passed it seems that adoption numbers have fallen, more children are removed from birth families and the adoption breakdown causes remains an unrecorded area. My local authority did not provide the specialist therapy promised to me whilst I was writing the article. Despite my constant communications with the local authority and professional back up for our problems ( including the wonderful Family Futures organisation) post adoption support has at best been patchy and shown a dangerous lack of real understanding. My daughters and my own potential has been severely hampered within this. 186

Amanda Boorman—Written evidence

I have a filing cabinet full of recordings from literally hundreds of meetings and assessments over thirteen years, the majority of which did not bring about change for my daughter and were costly for me to attend and manage. The only people benefiting were those attending who were being paid to produce paperwork. Communication and coordination of information between agencies has been shocking and is the root cause of lack of effective support. I estimate that hundreds of thousand of pounds of taxpayers money has gone into the production of this paperwork. My full story is very complex and contains some very negative experiences as well as hopeful and moving ones. For that reason I do not feel this is the occasion to go into any more detail. What I can say, is that when I read my article now, not too much has changed for my daughter and I and I could write the same article now changing my daughters age to 18 and changing the Government to Conservative rather than Labour. I would like to stress that I have no regrets about adopting and am most certainly pro adoption. Forearmed, I would do it again! My daughter and I have an incredible relationship and she is a much loved family member. We are using our experiences to launch a new charity next month to support adoptive families and social workers based on free or low cost training, holidays, information and advice that is first hand and not text book. (www.theopennest.co.uk). I have real concerns that the speeding up of the adoption process could lead to families being unprepared for the challenges adoption brings, particularly if a child may be over two years old at placement. Social work teams may be under pressure to meet targets and underplay potential problems. My daughter was described as "lively". Parents should be allowed to see court records and recommendations made at the point a child is freed for adoption. It was recommended by a psychiatrist in court that any family adopting my daughter should have ongoing help with attachment therapy. A suitable local therapist was mentioned by name. I was not told of this and have became self taught at my daughters emotional expense. My daughter did not receive therapy for over five years and it has been minimal. I would like to list the areas that I feel are most important to tackle in order to support those working at the ground level of adoption by parenting damaged children: 1. Clear information and advice on a child's likely developmental problems where they have experienced neglect and trauma. Even if removed as quickly as possible it is documented that children are damaged by cruelty and neglect at a surprisingly young age. Forewarned really is forearmed. Adopters are by nature often brave and committed people and they can cope with the truth. 2. A well managed and extensive post adoption support plan. This should be in place before adoption papers are signed. It should include effective crisis management, therapeutic support and regular specialist short break opportunities that recognise some adopted children suffer separation anxiety. Direct payments are a positive way to involve families and friends to provide care.

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Amanda Boorman—Written evidence 3. Training of social work students and practising workers in the effects of trauma and how to parent therapeutically. 4. Training of front line social workers in the delivery of news that funding is scarce. Defensive practice is poor practice. 5. More effective multi agency approaches to support plans for adopted children. Government guidelines on lead professionals responsibilities taken seriously and properly implemented. 6. Free and accessible practical support for adoptive families especially in areas of training, respite and therapy. An understanding that it is a false economy for funds to be poured into multi agency meetings and bureaucracy rather than into adoptive families. 7. A real understanding of the long term economics of adoption breakdown by social care and health authority mangers. The encouragement of managers to invest when adopted children are struggling rather than lengthy and costly "fobbing off" to save funds. The younger a child is helped the more chance they have of adjusting to lead a productive life ultimately saving money for the government. 8. A National forum regulated by a Government adoption expert for those experiencing problems within their adoptive family. This could be used to record and to provide first hand evidence about what is going wrong and what help is needed to avoid adoption breakdown. It would also be a way for families feeling unsupported by Local Authorities to flag up any shortcomings in the services being provided. Although many great organisations speak on behalf of adoptive families and many social services managers submit evidence to committees, I feel that the percentage of witnesses with first hand unedited experience of difficulties is low. I would like to thank you for this opportunity and to offer my experiences, written or verbal, in any way I can that would help bring about more adoptions and most importantly the humane treatment of children within the adoption process who deserve for their second chance at a happy childhood to succeed. November 2012

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Bradford Metropolitan District Council—Written evidence

Bradford Metropolitan District Council—Written evidence Background a. Do we have the right structure for adoption? 

Children waiting for adoption are currently in public care. This is a structure that allows for a high level of public scrutiny, local accountability and regulation at every stage of the adoption process. Any change to this structure needs to ensure that the current levels of accountability and oversight are maintained.

b. Should we be concerned about the falling number of adoptions? Why are the numbers falling?  In the 1960s and 1970s children placed for adoption were generally relinquished babies. In 2012, the children waiting for adoption are children who have experienced significant levels of trauma and neglect. Many of these children have learning difficulties, emotional difficulties (including problems with attachment) and significant health needs. Babies form only a small percentage of the children waiting for adoption. Placing these children creates considerable challenges, yet adoption still offers the best long-term outcome. In view of the background issues presented by these children it is hardly surprising that placing children for adoption takes longer and the numbers of successful placements are lower.  There is a mismatch between the ages and needs of the children awaiting adoption and the ages/needs of children that adopters are wishing to consider. Most adopters come forward as a result of infertility problems and wish to be placed with children as young and straightforward as possible. If we want to see numbers increase there needs to be a national recognition of the challenges adoption brings and a more robust adoption support system with more realistic financial support for adopters. Legislation a. What impact did the 2002 Act have on the adoption process?  Some progress in offering improved support to adoptive families. This has hopefully increased the confidence of adopters who are starting out on the adoption journey. However, the expectations about the levels of adoption support available are not always matched by the actual support available in reality. 

There is much more equality of opportunity relating to adopters who may be single, gay or lesbian and, for the first time, these groups of people can adopt jointly.

b. Have all aspects of the 2002 and 2006 Acts been implemented appropriately and successfully? 

Although the commitment to adoption support has been improved, the provision of support is variable. Partner agencies (e.g. education and health) do not always appear to understand the complex issues generated by adoption and how these issues affect children and their parents.

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Bradford Metropolitan District Council—Written evidence There are significant gaps in support, particularly specialist therapeutic support. CAMHS services do not always provide specific therapies for adoptive families and there are long waiting lists. Adoptive parents often need support to ensure that schools understand how adoption can be creating particular difficulties for their children in the school setting. c. Is further legislation required to improve any aspect of the adoption system? 

Legislation to require health services to have targeted services for adoptive families would be very helpful. Many CAMHS services do not have specific services or therapies for adoptive families and there is no fast-track system. Private therapies are very expensive and cannot be offered universally to adoptive families. Responsibility for adoption and its consequences should be the responsibility of all agencies, not just local authority children’s services.

d. Can you as a respondent identify a problem and tell us if, and if so where, the legislation (including regulations), needs to change? 

The implementation of the removal of SBPA decision making from adoption panels appears to be motivated by a belief that the current system is delaying decisions about children being placed for adoption. The evidence in this agency does not support that view. The current panel arrangement is robust, efficient and allows the best possible scrutiny and quality assurance of decisions relating to children. Removing this system requires creation of an alternative process that, paradoxically, could be more time consuming and less accountable.

Time taken in placing children a. Is excessive time taken in placing children? Do some groups of children take a disproportionate length of time? 

The OFSTED report “Right on Time” (April 2012) explored the reasons why there are delays in placing children for adoption. Care planning can result in delays in some children entering the care system, but the key factor in causing delays is the “length of time for care proceedings to be concluded before an adoption plan could be confirmed.” In addition there are difficulties in recruiting adopters for children from BME backgrounds, older children and children with complex health and development needs as well as sibling groups. More efforts are needed to enable the public to understand the reality of adoption and that we do not have “straight forward” babies available for adoption.

b. What aspects of the adoption process, including pre-process care proceedings, take most time? 

Legal delays. Over reliance on specialist reports. Potential family and friends carers coming forward to care for children towards the end of the process.

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Bradford Metropolitan District Council—Written evidence 

Finding suitable families for children with complex health issues (e.g. Foetal alcohol syndrome, autism etc.), children over the age of 4 years and children in sibling groups. Sadly, there are far more children in these groups than there are families who are willing or able to care for them.

c. Do the various parts of the system – local authorities, adoption agencies, courts and others – work effectively together? 

No. There should be regional “standardisation and good practice” forums that allow much freer debate and discussion between the key agencies.

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Voluntary adoption agencies are keen to “market” their approved families and there is a risk of overstretching these families in order to “sell” then to a local authority. There is a significant disparity between the cost of a local authority placement for a child (£13,314) and a Voluntary Adoption Agency placement for a child (£27,000).

d. Could the adoption process be speeded up, whilst ensuring that necessary safeguards are preserved? 

“Speed” should not be the sole factor in adoption. There is a danger that a rushed approach will create more mistakes which could result in potential safeguarding issues as well as disruption of adoptive placements.

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Adoption UK research with prospective adopters also suggests that adopters need time to absorb and adjust to the task of adoption and what it is likely to mean for them. The consensus reached was that 10 months is a realistic timeframe for this adjustment process. In natural parenthood the timescale is 9 months for a task that involves far less complexity and is better understood!

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Speeding up the legal process and moving away from such a heavy reliance on independent experts in court proceedings would certainly speed things up.

e. How widely used is concurrent planning? What are its advantages and disadvantages? 

It has only been used in this agency in a small number of situations for families who are considering a subsequent sibling of a child they have already adopted.

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Advantages are; a reduction in placement moves for children and therefore positive effects on attachment and relationships for the children and their carers.

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Disadvantages are; lack of certainty for adopters means that many families not willing/able to take this route. Financial disparity between fostering allowance and adoption allowance.

f. What are the reasons for the variations in time taken to place children by different local authorities?  Issues around availability of “in-house” adopters, workforce/staffing issues, availability of specific adopters for a particular match, adopters not wanting to adopt children with complex health and development issues.

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Bradford Metropolitan District Council—Written evidence 

Demographic factors will vary between different local authorities. Bradford, for example, is a particularly deprived community with above average levels of ill health amongst its child population. Children in Bradford with adoption plans are likely to have experienced higher levels of deprivation and more complex health problems and will therefore be more difficult to place for adoption.

The number of potential adopters a. Are there enough potential adopters coming forward? Are there shortages in particular ethnic groups? 

This agency is still able to keep a good number of adopters coming forward but they are not always the right adopters for the children waiting to be placed. The number of adopters coming forward has increased since last year.

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Yes, there are shortages in recruiting Black/African-Caribbean as well as South Asian adopters and especially for children who are older, siblings or have complex health and development needs.

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There are further complications about assessing South Asian adopters as some require staff who can communicate in Urdu, Punjabi or Bengali. These adoption assessments typically take much longer and this has an impact on resources.

b. How do we ensure the best “fit” for a child, and is trans-racial adoption relevant to this issue? 

All aspects of a child’s emotional, behavioural, emotional, linguistic as well as cultural/religious needs are considered as well as the impact of their early life experience in planning matches.

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The evidence suggests that children do best in families that, where possible, can meet all of their needs and also resemble them. The issue of identity is life long.

c. Why do some potential adopters drop out during the adoption process? 

There are many reasons for this including; adopters realising adoption is not for them, changes in personal circumstances (e.g. redundancy or financial problems), relationship breakdown, pregnancy, etc.

d. Have the changes to eligibility introduced by the 2002 Act impacted the number of potential adopters? 

There has been an increase in the number of gay, lesbian and unmarried but cohabiting adopters being recruited compared to pr- implementation of the 2002 Act.

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Bradford Metropolitan District Council—Written evidence e. What will be the likely effect of the measures proposed in the Department for Education’s ‘Action Plan for Adoption’? 

Government plans to create shortened timescales for placing children could result in premature changes to the care plans of more difficult to place children. Some children with multiple difficulties have taken up to 3 years to match with adoptive families. These adoptive placements have been successful and offer a good outcome for the children. The length of this process is usually due to the complexities of the placement, the scarcity of suitable families and is not necessarily due to inefficiencies in the system. Local authorities may decide to end adoption family finding prematurely in order to avoid government sanctions.



The quality of adoption assessment might be compromised with the shortened time scales. This could result in more adoption disruptions. Recruitment of BME adopters tends to be more time consuming.

f. Does the number of agencies inhibit the number of potential adopters recruited? 

No, adopters tend to shop around to find an agency they feel most comfortable working with. There is great benefit for adopters and agencies to have a local approach.

g. Does the recent increase in knowledge about early child development affect the balance between children’s rights and parental rights?  Not clear what is being asked for in this question. Court proceedings a. Do court proceedings take undue time in the adoption process? 

Yes.

b. Would the recommendations of the Family Justice Review substantially alter the position? 

Yes.

c. How effective are provisions for the representation by guardians of children in court proceedings? d. How effective have placement orders been in facilitating the placement and adoption of children compared with “freeing orders”? 

In some instances less effective because birth parents have, on a number of occasions, exercised their right to contest either the Placement Order or the Adoption Order and in some cases this has delayed the placement of children by many months. None of these cases in this agency have resulted in the child being returned to the birth family. It is likely only to have been more effective in authorities who did not routinely use Freeing. Freeing was a much more secure order for a prospective adopter.

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Bradford Metropolitan District Council—Written evidence

e. How common is it for care proceedings and placement order proceedings to be heard together or consecutively? What are the advantages and disadvantages of this approach? 

This is very common.

f. How will changes to legal aid impact, if at all, on adoption proceedings?  Unlikely to make any difference. Post-adoption support a. How, if at all, has the 2002 Act impacted upon the provision of post-adoption contacts and support? 

Bradford created a system for indirect contact (a “letterbox” service) several years prior to the 2002 Act. The 2002 Act resulted in the creation of an adoption support team who offer dedicated support to adoptive families post adoption. This includes a Service Advice Line (duty service) offered on a daily basis. As a result, problems with the letterbox service can be addressed speedily and more comprehensively than prior to the Act. The adoption support team can offer support to direct contact arrangements when these are set up, although direct contact remains a rarity. The number of indirect contacts has grown significantly over the past 10 years and Bradford now has in the region of 1400 participants in exchanges.

b. Are measures needed to enhance post-adoption financial and other support for (i) adopted children; (ii) adoptive parents, (iii) birth families?  Bradford provides adoption allowances to many adoptive families in line with the 2002 Act. For most families, these allowances appear to be helpful and sufficient. There are situations where enhanced financial packages have to be offered to support adopters with the most challenging children. As the number of children with significant difficulties increases there will be increasing demands to offer enhanced financial packages.  Increased resources are required to offer universal support to all adopters. For example, parenting courses, therapeutic parenting skills (for example “Theraplay”), training and education. In addition, quick and easy access to good, adoption focused therapies is essential. Early interventions can often avoid more protracted problems developing and adoption breakdown. Inter-country adoption a. Have the inter-country adoption safeguards introduced by the 2002 and 2006 Acts proved successful? b. Would you recommend any change to the legislation to make inter-country adoption simpler?

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Bradford Metropolitan District Council—Written evidence c. Are there any special challenges in adopting children from particular countries or regions?

Access to Information a. Has the 2002 Act made it easier for adopted adults and/or birth families to trace their relatives, should they wish to do so?  Since the implementation of the Act, clear procedures have been developed to assist adopted people to gain access to their adoption records and receive appropriate support if they decide to trace relatives. Without doubt, the Act has made improvements in this area. Other permanent placements a. What has been the effect of the introduction, in the 2002 Act, of ‘special guardianship’?  Permanency can be achieved through routes other than adoption.  Special Guardianship is a much more effective route to permanence for Friends and Family carers as it does not distort family relationships and a means tested allowance is available in every case. b. Is special guardianship an effective alternative to adoption, especially for those of school age (ie 5 and older)?  Yes – though each situation has to be determined on its own merit. c. What is the best way to ensure permanent and consistent placements for children?  Not to concentrate on adoption as being the “only best way” to permanency but to consider all possible routes including SGOs.  Have some parity about the support and financial arrangements available in each of the permanency options. d. Would earlier interventions with difficulties have an effect on the number of children who need to be adopted or otherwise permanently separated from their birth family?  Yes; either to help families effectively deal with their difficulties and move on with their lives or, where this is clearly not possible, for children to be removed at an earlier point and placed for adoption sooner. Monitoring a. Do ‘adoption scorecards’ provide an appropriate means for monitoring the performance of local authorities with regard to adoption?

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Bradford Metropolitan District Council—Written evidence  It is difficult to comment at this stage because there are likely to be a range of variations relating to gathering information and interpretation of “score card” information and presentation of the statistics.  There is a potential problem because for older and harder to place children it often takes longer to find a family. Identifying a family out of required timescale is judged as a failure. This may cause some agencies to be risk averse and not attempt to find adoptive families for these children for fear of this reflecting badly on their scorecard.  If adopter assessments are complex or unearth unexpected issues (as they often do), adoption agencies may be tempted to gloss over the issues in order to meet timescales. Alternatively, adoption agencies may decide to only consider assessments of families presenting more “straightforward” backgrounds. Paradoxically, this may mean that agencies miss out on the more complex families who are actually capable of taking on the more difficult children. b. How robust are current systems for monitoring the i) number of adoptions made, ii) the number of children awaiting adoption, and iii) the amount of delay experienced by those awaiting adoption?  Current systems are adequate but could be improved. A national database system could be one such improvement. July 2012

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British Association for Adoption and Fostering (BAAF)—Oral evidence (QQ 80–107)

British Association for Adoption and Fostering (BAAF)—Oral evidence (QQ 80–107) Evidence Session No. 2.

Heard in Public.

Questions 80–107

TUESDAY 3 JULY 2012 Members present: Baroness Butler-Sloss (Chairman) Baroness Eaton Viscount Eccles Baroness Hamwee Baroness Howarth of Breckland Baroness King of Bow Baroness Knight of Collingtree Lord Morris of Handsworth Baroness Walmsley Lord Warner ________________ Examination of Witnesses Witnesses: John Simmonds, Director of Policy, Research and Development, British Association for Adoption and Fostering; Maureen Ingham, Cardiff Office, British Association for Adoption and Fostering; and Alexandra Conroy Harris, Legal Consultant, British Association for Adoption and Fostering.

Q80 The Chairman: May I say that we are delighted to see you again? Thank you very much for taking the trouble, as BAAF, to come and give us some very necessary instruction. It is very good to see you now to give actual evidence to us. I rather assume you are also going to be sending us some written evidence. John Simmonds: Yes, we have finished that and it will be on its way in the next 24 hours. Q81 The Chairman: It is possible that we may want to come back to you, BAAF, in particular, and one or two other of the major organisations, at a later stage. When we have had a lot more evidence we may want to see whether there are any written comments you want to make on it. I do not think we would have time to bring you back to give oral evidence but I hope you will be on the end of a written line to give us anything else we might need.

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British Association for Adoption and Fostering (BAAF)—Oral evidence (QQ 80–107) John Simmonds: We would be delighted to do that. Q82 The Chairman: I declare an interest as a patron of BAAF. The first question I would like to ask is: to what extent does research evidence support adoption as the preferred approach for permanency for children in care? Looking at that, should we be concerned about the fact that adoption seems to be reducing, or are other forms of permanency equally good? John Simmonds: The profile of children in care clearly indicates that the majority of those children are over the age of 11. I think that permanency planning is a concept that should apply to all children but it raises issues of what permanency planning means to children, especially those in adolescence through to 18. The issue of permanency planning is often linked with adoption but it is clear that there are other legal routes to permanency. Special guardianship is particularly significant and there are also residence orders. Those all have their own qualities, advantages and disadvantages. Adoption stands out as being the clearest statement of a child joining a new family with a very clear legal framework around that placement. Given the range of ages and profiles of children in care, adoption is only going to be a placement of choice for some of them. The issue for the care system as a whole is to identify who they are, and to make sure that, when adoption is the plan, it is delivered as quickly as possible. The profile of children placed for adoption is such that they are normally under five, and if we are looking at outcomes for looked-after children generally then it is difficult to know if we are comparing like with like. If a child comes into care in middle childhood, spends a considerable number of years there and moves into adolescence as a looked-after child the range of issues they will face, because of the time they came into care and because of what subsequently happens to them, is likely to be very different to children who are removed at or shortly after birth and have adoption as the plan. So there are really quite significant questions for researchers about making sure we compare like with like when looking at outcomes. Having said that, I do not think there is any doubt in the international literature that outcomes for children adopted are very good indeed. There is still an issue about that research evidence. The adoption of children from the looked-after children’s system is something that we do in the UK and that is done in the United States but, for the most part, research will focus on children adopted internationally, often from orphanages or institutions and in quite different sorts of circumstances. So if you combine all the substantial research evidence about that as a group— international adoption, domestic adoption and children relinquished by their birth parents— outcomes are remarkably good. As much as anything, that reflects the age of the children and the circumstances in which they are adopted. So it is very difficult to give a clear answer about adoption and outcomes that gives proper recognition to the kinds of pathways, circumstances and needs that children have who go on to be adopted. I do not think anybody looking at the evidence would say that that evidence is not very good indeed. Q83 Lord Warner: I would just like to pursue that a little bit, John. Is there any international evidence that some other country has made a better fist of securing the adoption of older children, not necessarily post-11 but further up the age range, than in this country? John Simmonds: The United States has a law that says if a child is in care for 12 of the last 15 months the State has an obligation to consider and make a plan for adoption. What I was saying

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British Association for Adoption and Fostering (BAAF)—Oral evidence (QQ 80–107) earlier about the profile of looked-after children being from 0 to 18, which of course applies in the States as well, means you get very large numbers of children in middle childhood and adolescence who have a plan for adoption because it is mandated through their law. So the number of children adopted in the States from the care system is about 54,000 per year, but they also have 112,000 children waiting to be placed for adoption because so many of those children are in middle childhood or adolescence, who are very difficult to find adoptive homes for at all. That is not to say it does not happen. They have a very good track record in the States about placing children with family-and-friends carers, where those family-and-friends carers go on to adopt children. They also have other very creative schemes for finding permanent adoptive placements for those children. Looking at it from a UK perspective, to mandate adoption in the way they do, and to have 112,000 children every year who are unplaced for adoption, really raises some quite serious issues about their welfare and about dangling hope in front of them when that is never going to be realised. The Chairman: We had better move on to adoption in Wales. Q84 Baroness Walmsley: I live in Wales so I would like to explore the issues in relation to Wales. Do the issues surrounding adoption in Wales differ from those in England in any way, and are there any particular challenges or concerns, or conversely examples of good practice, in Wales that would inform the Committee in its deliberations? Maureen Ingham: In Wales there are many similar issues. The number of children looked after has steadily increased in recent years. The number of children for whom adoption is being sought has risen considerably. To give you an example: there are four adoption consortia in Wales. I am co-ordinator of the largest of those, which encompasses nine local authorities and the two voluntary adoption agencies in Wales. In the last year, up to the end of March 2012, there has been a 31% increase in the number of children referred to the consortium who need an adoptive placement. That follows on from a 32% increase the previous year. At the same time, in the last year up to the end of March, there has been a 27% decrease in adoptive families referred. That gives you an idea of the problems being faced. It is not a uniform picture across Wales. In some areas the shortage of adopters is greater than in others, but certainly in the larger consortia it is a big issue. Another issue where they are the same is delays. There is no evidence in Wales that delays are due to the panel process; they seem to be more in relation to the care proceedings. The Ministry of Justice published statistics in January this year to show that, on average, it took 55 weeks to complete care proceedings; so that is the main area of delay. There are regional variations as well in relation to adoption support and lack of strategy. Some of the differences we have in Wales are perhaps due to the profile of our children. Most of the children who are referred to be placed for adoption are either white British or white Welsh. Most of them have had considerable experience of neglect—that is their greatest need—either developmental delay or uncertainty, or parental misuse of drugs or alcohol. Some of them are waiting a considerable time to be placed. Regarding differences, although the ethnic differences are not the same, there is a language issue in Wales. In certain areas where Welsh is the predominant language it can be harder to place children whose first language is not Welsh. In terms of good work that is ongoing: the two voluntary adoption agencies in Wales, St David’s Children’s Society and Barnardo’s, are very successful at recruiting adopters,

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British Association for Adoption and Fostering (BAAF)—Oral evidence (QQ 80–107) particularly for the harder to place children: older children, larger sibling groups, or children with a high level of need. The local authority adoption services all work closely with the voluntaries. In terms of developments in Wales that are slightly different from England’s, quite a lot is happening at the minute. In February 2011, the Welsh Government issued a White Paper called Sustainable Social Services for Wales. One of the main things proposed out of that is a Social Services (Wales) Bill. There has been consultation on that from March until the beginning of June this year. One of the main proposals in that is to have a national adoption service. This is going to be very welcome in Wales. Q85 Baroness Walmsley: Perhaps I should say diolch yn fawr. I would like to ask you two things. Firstly, have you noticed a difference since you formed the consortium? You might be in a good position to answer that since you lead the consortium; has it made things better? Secondly, do you predict any change in the way the service operates now that you have the children’s rights measure in Wales? Do you think that will affect things at all? Maureen Ingham: The largest consortium, the South Wales Adoption Consortium, has been operating for 10 years. That facilitates a pooling of the adopters and children and increases placement choice. It is particularly important in Wales. We have 22 local authorities, they vary in size but some of them are very small. Within most of them, children cannot be placed geographically within the same region, so it facilitates that. It also facilitates collaborative work in developing policy. There is still quite a lot of inconsistency in practice, delivery of service and so on, but all the consortia are working towards more collaborative work and this will feed into the proposed national adoption service. It is envisaged that there could be a national helpline as a first response to adopters, which would improve consistency of response, and also a national recruitment strategy, which is very much needed. It is well recognised that it was not sustainable to continue delivering the service for 22 individual areas. Q86 The Chairman: Ms Ingham, are you going to be able to give us some written evidence? I know that BAAF are doing it for England but it would be very helpful to us Maureen Ingham: Yes, we can provide written evidence and that will be part of the evidence presented. Q87 Baroness Eaton: My question is about the adoption of children from BME families. To what extent, if at all, do you think delays are caused by the efforts of agencies to find a near perfect ethnic match for children, and what other factors would explain the delays if not that? John Simmonds: This is one of those really controversial issues that stirs up some profound debates. It is undoubtedly a factor. It is very hard to get the sense that the notion of a perfect match is as powerful as it used to be. Most local authorities have come to a view that the range of needs for most children who have adoption as a plan is such that the notion of perfect is just not a helpful idea. The place a child’s ethnicity has is still significant; it is part of primary legislation and the law says that agencies have to give due consideration to ethnicity as one factor. The history of the issue probably reflects society’s attempts to come to a perspective where minority ethnic communities are valued, respected and treated equally in society. For many years, the idea was

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British Association for Adoption and Fostering (BAAF)—Oral evidence (QQ 80–107) that moving a black child from their family and placing them in a white family was the epitome of colonial rule. In social work generally, with its very strong commitment to anti-discriminatory and anti-oppressive practice, the notion that social workers should be at the centre of that has long been uncomfortable. So with a profession committed to those principles and struggling with trying to modernise society in terms of discriminatory and oppressive practice, the idea of doing anything other than trying to place a child in a family that reflects its ethnic, cultural, religious and language background was a real problem. The second major concern was evidence. There is debateable evidence about the effect of placing a child transracially: many people who were placed transracially said their identity needs were not met to a sufficient degree and it both disadvantaged and disabled them as they entered adolescence and adulthood in terms of feeling comfortable and secure with a sense of who they were as a person. There were other people transracially placed who gave a different picture, so it was a complex picture. But there was a general view in social work and adoption practice that the potential for damage to the emergence of a secure, connected identity for children placed transracially was such a risk that it should not happen. The research evidence about those issues has always been debateable. We had a review published by Alan Rushton and Helen Minnis in the late 1990s, which really said there was not sufficient evidence in the research to suggest that the identity of people placed transracially for adoption was so damaged it affected their mental health. The Government in 1998 issued a circular, LAC (98)20, which said, partly in recognition of that, that no child should be deprived of a loving, adoptive home because no perfect match could be found. That was a very well constructed local authority circular. That was also published at the same time as another document, Messages from Research, which reviewed research that had been going on in the 1990s about looked-after children and adoption and continued to re-emphasise the potential for damage of placing children from BME backgrounds with white families. It said that it should be the exception. BAAF published practice guidance that continued to give that message out. Practitioners and agencies had a mixed picture of what LAC (98)20 required them to do and what some of the research and practice messages were suggesting. That issue has continued to work itself out over the last 10 years. In the revision to the adoption statutory guidance issued last year there was a very strong statement that reaffirms LAC (98)20 and says that, although it is a significant factor, it should not be a dominating factor when agencies make a decision about who might be a good match for a child from a BME community. The sense in agencies is that the serious and complex nature of a child’s needs and the issues about establishing that child successfully in an adoptive home are so serious that one issue cannot be allowed to dominate all other issues. It is a serious challenge to find adoptive homes. It is a serious challenge both to understand and meet, in an effective way, the needs of a child who has been drug addicted, has experienced maltreatment through their early life, or who may have a series of genetic factors that show themselves throughout childhood. There is such a range of complex, significant factors that to say that one issue—a child’s ethnic identity—should dominate would be irresponsible. That has come to play more and more of a part in what happens in practice. I do not think there is any doubt, despite the complex range of issues a local authority and adoption agency has to take into account in approving a match, that the development of a

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British Association for Adoption and Fostering (BAAF)—Oral evidence (QQ 80–107) child’s identity—including their ethnicity, culture, religion and language—is important. It has to be something that adopters are prepared and ready to think about, and they must be creative and thoughtful in their approach to those issues over the course of time. However, it is not something the evidence currently suggests lends itself to this notion of “perfect”. There is no such thing. It is one factor that needs to be taken into account. It is a significant factor but our sense is very clearly that a range of other issues are equally, and sometimes more, important. Q88 Baroness Eaton: So you are saying that yes, it has caused delays, but are there other factors that are causing delays in addition? That was the second part of the question. John Simmonds: There are other factors. For children born to Asian mothers, where the issue of family honour is significant, the plan for adoption will be established fairly quickly. So they will be small babies and there are a significant number of Asian adopters who come forward and will be ready to take those small babies. So placing those babies is not normally subject to delay. If you take black British boys, which is a group where there is significant concern about delay and the evidence suggests they wait considerably longer than other groups, the decision making takes longer. The families and the circumstances they come from raise issues. There are questions about the number of adopters ready and prepared to adopt three, four and five year old black or black British boys. It should not be like that but at the moment it is. So there are really significant questions about trying to bring forward members of those communities or other people that might go on to adopt those children. The greater numbers of children from BME backgrounds are from a mixed background. They do not wait significantly longer than white children. Although it is very difficult to characterise those children, typically they would have a white mother and a father from the most complex range of BME backgrounds that you can imagine. There is nothing straightforward about their ethnicity and that is one of the questions many agencies face: how do you come up with a stable, identifiable identity for a child where the grandparent generation could be from any part of the world, from any country with a whole complex range of ethnic communities, tribes and other factors? So the questions then come up about who this child is, what their inheritance is and where they actually do come from. If you take those children as a group, the evidence is that they do not wait significantly longer than children from white backgrounds. Q89 Baroness Howarth of Breckland: You have talked a lot about the research already and I would like to take it to where the social worker comes in. They are faced with issues of matching where the issue is significant but not dominant and where they have before them the Adoption and Children Act 2002 saying that the decision makers must specifically give “due consideration to the child’s religious persuasion, racial origin and cultural and linguistic background”. As someone faced with all of that, and the difficulty, in listening to you, about the outcome of research, how does a social worker make a decision? Do you think the Children Act should be revised in relation to its advice? John Simmonds: You have identified a very important issue about the responsibility of social workers to try and bring all those complex questions together. That is partly why we have panels: because you have a range of expertise from a number of different perspectives that will help social workers think about those issues. It is really important that local authorities establish decision making and planning processes calling on the expertise of both the adoption team and the looked-after children team. It must have proactive policies about the recruitment

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British Association for Adoption and Fostering (BAAF)—Oral evidence (QQ 80–107) of prospective adopters, particularly from BME communities. A whole systems approach really allows that to be done well. It is not something that can be laid on the shoulders of a single social worker because the issues are too complex and too burdensome. I raised the issue at the beginning about the sense of guilt and the sense of responsibility when what you are trying to do is make a lifelong decision for a child with complex needs. It is something that needs to be shared. It need to be well embedded in the way the local authority sets up its systems and provides support, guidance and proper discussion from a sufficient range of people who are well experienced in these kinds of issues. In many agencies that is certainly available, but it is probably not as widely available as it should be. Q90 The Chairman: I am concerned that the Government is proposing to get rid of adoption panels. I wonder whether you could give us a very short answer on this now, because there is a question of time, but we would be grateful for rather more on it in your written evidence. We have heard from a local government employee who is very concerned about the latest Adoption Agencies (Panel and Consequential Amendments) Regulations 2012, which come in in September. I think we may be short of time to hear much on that today but I do think we need some help from BAAF. We might let you see the correspondence we have had on that. Can you give us a very short answer on that one? Alexandra Conroy Harris: The abolition of panels where local authorities are considering whether a child should be placed for adoption is a first step but there are indications that the Government are considering reducing the involvement of panels in other decisions. It is certainly something BAAF has had concerns about. Within the process where the local authority decision maker, taking advice from panels, decides whether a child should be placed for adoption, but the ultimate decision is that of the court making a placement order, there is perceived to be a duplication. The theory behind the abolition of panels in the decision on whether a child should be placed for adoption, which came out in these regulations, is that the court will be able to give proper scrutiny to the care plan for the child. We have a lot of concerns that the courts do not have the time, the wide range of expertise or the opportunity to reflect on the plan for the child that panels do. Panels draw on experts from social work, psychologists, lay people and people who have had personal experience of adoption and bring them together. They put a lot of time and effort into considering quite a lot of paperwork and evidence about a child before making a recommendation. The idea that a judge would be able to duplicate that within the court process, given the time pressures they are under and the lack of broad-based expertise available to them in making that decision, is quite concerning. It reduces the background to the decision for a child and it makes it on a much more narrow basis. We would be very concerned if that was extended into other areas where panels put a lot of value into the process and have the time and space to consider and discuss that courts and single decision makers do not have. The Chairman: Lady Howarth, I am sorry to have interrupted you. Q91 Baroness Howarth of Breckland: That is the question I was intending to ask as the follow-on question. Could I just go back and ask John Simmonds whether he thinks the 2002 Act should or should not be amended? Does it give people something to think about? John Simmonds: The clause recognises a very important issue. Identity is fundamental but what I am saying is that, as it is currently phrased, it indicates to not enough of a degree the balance

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British Association for Adoption and Fostering (BAAF)—Oral evidence (QQ 80–107) that needs to be struck between giving those issues due consideration and the real possibility of disruption and the child’s needs not being met in other kinds of ways because of other issues that must be considered when matching a child with adopters. So I think there does need to be something else introduced to balance that issue against other important issues. Q92 Baroness Howarth of Breckland: Not to lose it. John Simmonds: Not to lose it but to add to it. I would be very concerned if we went down the route of the American legislation, where the Multiethnic Placement Act bans any consideration of ethnicity in the placing of a child for adoption. Q93 Lord Morris of Handsworth: Mr Simmonds, I would like to explore the other side of Baroness Eaton’s question and look at the BME adopters pool as a group. Rightly or wrongly there seems to be a perception that there is a problem recruiting prospective adopters from particular ethnic groups. Can you tell us whether you think that is the case? Should it be a matter of concern if it is, and what more can be done to increase the gene pool of BME possible adopters? John Simmonds: The evidence is that it is an issue and there are a number of factors that lead to that. Local authorities, adoption agencies and voluntary agencies need to recognise that you have to explicitly address that issue in your recruitment policies, practice and procedures. Your literature needs to be absolutely clear in the way it is written, in the photographs it uses and in the way it encourages and invites people from every community, if they are interested in adoption, to come forward. There are varying degrees to which that is actually the case. Lots of questions have been raised in the last few months about the adequacy of the whole recruitment process and the kinds of responses prospective adopters get from some local authorities and agencies. We know there are specific recruitment efforts that actually explore specific issues. For example, there are issues in Islam about the nature of adoption and there are questions about what the Quran says about adoption. We know that Islamic scholars have debated those issues; they have a view about the potential for adoption and the position Muslim families might find themselves in. Those issues need to be addressed; they need to be an explicit part of a local authority’s information and advice. You need to ask where one might explore those issues, what the advice might actually be and how one might get involved in adoption. So there is a lot adoption agencies can do in terms of recruitment practice and recognition of the potential fears and anxieties families from BME communities might have in entering a process that is still constructed as being largely white. We have some evidence recently from a specific research project in Action for Children set up to recruit families from BME communities, looking at that in comparison to what the adoption agency was doing as part of its normal practice. The evidence was that the specialist project was very successful and far more successful than the team that did routine adoption recruitment. We need to learn those lessons and make sure they are more widely spread. There is an issue about total numbers. We know the largest group of people from minority ethnic backgrounds are those from mixed backgrounds. There is a big growth in that section of the community. We also know that section of the community is largely under 25 and, because of its age and profile, it is not a group where adoption will be at the top of their agenda. So there are restrictions. We know that it is a large group and, over the course of time, it will 204

British Association for Adoption and Fostering (BAAF)—Oral evidence (QQ 80–107) become a very significant group. There are issues about particular groups being in the minority or of a profile where adoption is not likely to be at the top of their agenda. I do not think there is any doubt that more can be done. As the Government explores setting up a national adoption gateway, establishing an adopter charter or national customer service standards, those issues of families from BME communities will need to be an explicit part of that. We know that that will actually make a difference. Q94 Baroness King of Bow: So the largest number of BME children waiting for adoption are mixed race? John Simmonds: Yes. Q95 Baroness King of Bow: How does that compare with mixed race prospective couples wanting to adopt? John Simmonds: I do not have a clear picture of that in terms of numbers. We know that mixed race couples do come forward. They are actively recruited and are very strong in what they have to offer. If you look at the development of mixed background individuals, they are mostly under 25. So there are issues about where adoption might fit into their agenda. That is not to say it does not happen; it most certainly does. Baroness King of Bow: I know it most certainly does. John Simmonds: Yes indeed; of course. Q96 Baroness Walmsley: Can I ask one more quick point of clarification? Do you think the reason the pool of mixed race couples does not have adoption at the top of its agenda currently is because an awful lot of adopters come from failed fertility treatments and they just have not got to that point yet? John Simmonds: Yes, indeed. Q97 Baroness Knight of Collingtree: It is probably very easy for some of us to guess why some people ask you to put them on the list for adoption. What concerns a lot of us is that it seems from the evidence that many—and I do not know how many—would-be adopters change their minds and ask to no longer be on the list. Is this about the length of time it takes for them to be accepted? I heard about a couple last week who waited two and a half years and said, “Oh, forget it”, went off to America and literally bought a child and adopted that child. Or is it the lack of acceptable children? Or is it an objection to the questions adoptive parents are asked before they are allowed to become that? If there are delays of that kind, can you suggest ways around those delays? John Simmonds: The decision to adopt for many people is a long and, in many ways, an arduous one. The issue of infertility treatments is still a significant part of becoming an adopter, and the length of time and the exposure the individuals and couples have to all of that is arduous. Adoption is an obvious solution to that but it is not for everybody. The exposure of those with infertility problems, or indeed those interested in adopting for altruistic reasons, getting to know what adoption means and what the typical child who has adoption as a plan might look like, can be quite a long pathway. One might explore it in all kinds of different ways but it is important that people interested in adoption actually do that.

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British Association for Adoption and Fostering (BAAF)—Oral evidence (QQ 80–107) For some it immediately becomes something they decide they want to do and they quickly become committed. For others it can take two to five years to get themselves in a position to do it. That picture about what it takes and what pathway people take is a complex one and everybody will find ways of doing that in a way that is right for them. At the point at which they make their initial inquiry to an adoption agency it is absolutely essential that that is responded to sensitively, thoughtfully and with all the information somebody needs. In the last year we have seen lots of evidence that some people have a really bad time, and that is of real concern. We also know that people start to become engaged in the process and then find it is not right for them. It may be that the profile of children is not right for them or their circumstances can change. There is some concern at the moment that people are deciding to wait or not to adopt because there is uncertainty about their employment, housing and so on. That is undoubtedly an issue for some people. There are concerns, and the coalition Government have identified that agencies as a whole need to do better than they currently do. That is not to say that some things are not done very well indeed, but the responses people are getting is too hit and miss. There is too much of a postcode lottery about it and we need to make sure, given how significant adoption is, that when people get to the stage of deciding it is something they want to explore, we engage and involve them in the process in as appropriate a way as we can as quickly as possible. That is why the national adoption gateway currently being explored seems an entirely appropriate and positive thing to be thinking about. Undoubtedly, some people, through preparation groups or as they discuss with social workers their motivation and what they hope to get out of adoption, will decide that this is not right for them. That still needs to be something they have the opportunity, time and space to talk through with a social worker that knows about these experiences. That still needs to be available to them. So you have identified something of concern at the moment. Sometimes there are good reasons why people drop out. If there are the concerning reasons you have also identified, then we do need to do something about that. Baroness Knight of Collingtree: I will just quickly ask: if you do have any suggestions that we could think about and incorporate that would be very helpful. The Chairman: Yes, it certainly would. That is a very helpful thing to have said. Q98 Lord Warner: You have already given us some ideas about what you see as possible institutional barriers to achieving successful matches between prospective adopters and children. You mention that Section 1(5) of the 2002 Act might be a bit too rigid in its wording. Are there any other institutional barriers and, in particular, are there any financial barriers you would like to bring to our attention that need to be tackled? John Simmonds: There is an issue about the interagency fee that really needs to be explored. In some of the research that has been published as part of the Adoption Research Initiative, the issue has arisen of the interagency fee being a barrier in a voluntary adoption to exploring quickly and appropriately whether adopters might be available and meet the needs of a child. A lot of agencies would argue that actually is not an issue because they commonly have to go out of their area to find prospective adopters. There would be an advantage if there was a central pool for the interagency fee to make sure money never gets in the way of exploring an appropriate match as quickly as possible. It is just not on the side of the child for that issue to be something to which an agency says, “We will explore locally maybe with this or that person

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British Association for Adoption and Fostering (BAAF)—Oral evidence (QQ 80–107) who has come forward and see how they get on, and there may be something in the consortium”. Agencies need to explore as quickly and as widely, as soon as adoption is the plan, what a prospective match might be. Time is just not on the side of the child. So I think there is an issue about the agency fee and the current operation of the interagency fee. The general point I was making is that the family finding needs to start as quickly as possible. One of the things we have been exploring and thinking about is whether it would be helpful to introduce into primary legislation a duty on local authorities to consider placing with carers who could become the child’s permanent carers, and whether that would be a measure on the side of the child. It is something that is currently in operation in relation to concurrent planning. We think that in placing that duty on local authorities there may be some very significant advantages to making sure children are placed as quickly as possible, whatever the court ultimately decides. But that is something for debate. One of the things we have been exploring in BAAF through a series of pilots is adopter-led matching. We have an arrangement in the East Midlands adoption consortia where we bring together children, prospective adopters, the children’s carers, social workers and other people in an activity day event where there is art, playground equipment, sometimes adventure playground equipment and sport. Prospective adopters and children participate in those events with the idea of exploring whether prospective adopters might be sparked by having direct contact with children and then go on to express an interest in adopting them. We know that in some of the early pilots that has been the case. That was a project that was introduced with some opposition. There was some concern about whether we would be exposing children, particularly, and prospective adopters to risk. I do not think that has turned out to be the case; it is a very carefully run project. There are lots of potential institutional barriers about the degree to which we think social workers and local authorities should control what a match looks like and the degree to which, at an early stage, we should involve prospective adopters in working with social workers. You cannot hand over responsibility to adopters for that decision but they can work with social workers about what a prospective match might actually look like. Any institutional barriers or fears that currently exist really need to be addressed because, again, time is not on the side of the child. The issues about finding an appropriate match are so weighty that we cannot allow those anxieties, to get in the way. Professional practice needs to find ways of managing those anxieties. Q99 Lord Warner: It would be very helpful to actually have some of these examples but relate them to the extent to which more elasticity in the legislation would facilitate them. It seems to me that is what we are in the market for. Alexandra Conroy Harris: There are also some legal barriers to early identification of possible matches. Although a local authority can start looking within their own pool of approved adopters as soon as they have identified that adoption is a possible plan for the child, it becomes very difficult to go outside and advertise in publications like Be My Parent and other places adopters have access to before a placement order has been granted by the court and without leave of the court. Obviously, courts become very reluctant to allow local authorities to advertise a child as possibly available for adoption before the final care order and placement order has been made. So some more flexibility there might allow identification of prospective

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British Association for Adoption and Fostering (BAAF)—Oral evidence (QQ 80–107) adopters at an earlier stage. Therefore, a child might be ready to move on to their adopters much sooner after the final court decision than is currently the case where you have a difficult to place child who is not able to be advertised until the care order has actually been made, and you are building in another section of delay after the care and placement orders. The Chairman: Are you putting all this into your written evidence? This is extremely important for us and it may be that you could expand a bit on this. We are going to run out of time but we do not want to lose what you are offering us because you are now telling us about things that are directly related to what we are looking at. We are very grateful but I think we have to move on. Q100 Viscount Eccles: I think we have covered my question. What I am looking for are possible changes to primary or secondary legislation that you believe could help to increase the pool of adopters or improve the matching process. If you could submit any views on that in writing, because it gets pretty technical when you talk about a specific change to an existing piece of legislation, that would be most helpful. Q101 The Chairman: It certainly would. Could I just ask Ms Harris: is there any reason why people could not advertise for prospective foster parents who are prepared to become adopters? If you did that you would not have the problem of having to get the leave of the judge. Alexandra Conroy Harris: You could, but you would have to be open with the court. That again goes back to the difficulty of concurrent planning and concurrent placement. If you were to advertise for prospective foster carers who would be able to adopt, you are still having to go to the court with a plan with adoption at the end of it. That is not going to get the consent of the parents so it is going to have to go to the court. The difficulty with concurrent planning is the opposition of parents’ lawyers and quite a lot of the judiciary to the idea of placing a child in what will become a permanent placement. We are making suggestions about how that can be addressed. Q102 The Chairman: It would be very helpful if you could expand on that because that might be a way around, but we would need it in writing. Alexandra Conroy Harris: It needs to look not only at the adoption legislation but also the Children Act. They fit together so well and it is impossible to look at amendments to the Adoption Act because you are only looking at the end of the process, whereas the children will have been subject to proceedings conducted under the Children Act 1989 and related measures. The Chairman: There is going to be a Children and Families Bill so it would be broader than adoption anyway. Q103 Baroness Hamwee: Can we move on to post-adoption contact and support? First of all, could you tell us how common it is for there to be contact, either direct or indirect, between the child and the birth family after adoption? Secondly, because we are focusing on legislation, can you tell us whether the Adoption Act has had any impact on practice and whether there are any changes we should be looking at?

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British Association for Adoption and Fostering (BAAF)—Oral evidence (QQ 80–107) John Simmonds: Indirect letter box contact, mediated through the adoption agency, is very common. I have some issues with this, but it is often negotiated as part of the deal when adoption becomes the plan. I sometimes think that the issues about what it is meant to do and for whom are not properly thought through. Q104 Baroness Hamwee: Can I just stop you there to ask you to clarify? Do you mean that it is something some people see as getting the birth parents to give consent—a negotiation? John Simmonds: Yes. That may be the right thing to do but in the long term the issues are: who is this for; what is it meant to do; and what are the outcomes going to be? Those are the issues that the adopters, the child, the birth parents and the adoption agency need to address. Direct contact is very much less common, certainly with birth parents. If direct contact becomes an issue, and it sometimes does, it is often something arranged more directly between the adopters and birth family members. It is more typically the case that direct contact happens between the child and the child’s full or half siblings. That is often very important. Indeed we know a lot of adopted and looked-after children have very strong feelings about continuing to be separated from their siblings. For some adopters, particularly adopters of sibling groups where there is a large number of children in the family, that can be a very big issue to manage in terms of one’s time and resources. There have been a lot of issues raised recently about the fact that, although letter box is mediated through the adoption agency, the introduction of social media, Facebook and the internet has often raised questions about people being able to find and make contact with one another without going through the agency. That is something of significant concern. We have published on that issue. We have heard some really tragic stories that have come out of contact being re-established in that particular way. There is also an issue about the way we think about and define contact. It is often thought to be about with whom, how often and when. Really contact is about the nature of relationships and the nature of identity. That often does not get properly focused on. Children need to know where they come from, why they were placed for adoption and who was in their family. Curiosity and wanting to know about origins and people in one’s history is often a very significant part of what children think about and have feelings about throughout their childhood. That is something that needs to be properly and openly recognised in adoptive families. It needs to be a part of the culture, dialogue and conversations that happen between adopted children and their adoptive parents in a way that is sensitive and appropriate as it develops over time. Many of those issues are often not sufficiently focused on. I am talking about something that has a profound psycho-social significance. Often contact is talked about as being with whom, how many times and where; it just does not capture the essence of those kinds of questions for me. The Chairman: We are going to have to move on. Forgive me for interrupting you, Mr Simmonds, but I think Lady King is going to ask something about money. Q105 Baroness King of Bow: I shall. Can I just ask if guidance can be improved on the area of contact? As an adoptive parent I have banged my head against the wall trying to meet the birth parents of my children and for them to meet their birth parents. Social workers just look at me as though I have fallen from Mars and they cannot understand why I want my children to

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British Association for Adoption and Fostering (BAAF)—Oral evidence (QQ 80–107) meet their birth parents. Could there be any improvement in the guidance? If you think there could be, could you let us have that in writing? I did not really say that because we do not have time for that comment. Baroness Hamwee: Could you extend that to grandparents as well? Baroness King of Bow: The grandparents I have managed to meet. The social workers are fine about meeting the grandparents; it is the birth parents they have the breakdown over. Baroness Hamwee: It is not just you. Baroness King of Bow: No I know, but they are more open to it. They are not open to them meeting the birth parents at all. The question I wanted to ask is whether there has been an impact as a result of the reduced finances that local authorities have and the impact of cuts on post-adoption services. Has there been an impact and, if so, what has it been? John Simmonds: Yes. We know that in local authorities, in voluntary adoption agencies and in adoption support agencies, the impact of the cuts is significant in all kinds of different ways. We know that teams have been reorganised and have taken on different responsibilities and there were often limitations put on the provision of appropriate, necessary adoption support. It is something of concern and, given how hugely significant adoption support is to adoptive families, that could have a very serious impact. The Chairman: We do actually have PAC here, which is very helpful. So although we do want something from you—maybe you would like to give us that in writing—we are very grateful that PAC are here and that can cover that. We are now on to our last question, I think. Q106 Baroness Walmsley: So would you support the imposition of a statutory duty on local authorities to provide the assessed support needs of adoptive families? What would be the advantages and disadvantages of imposing such a duty? Obviously there is a financial impact there but, presumably, if there was an imposition of a duty the resources would have to follow. John Simmonds: We have set out quite a lot of issues about this in our evidence; it is something we are concerned about and have thought about a lot. In principle, that does seem the only way to make sure that much needed services are actually available. The current primary and secondary legislation, I think, is quite strongly worded about what the assessment and decision making process needs to be, how needs are understood, how they are discussed between the parties and how they are planned for. It is of concern that all this statutory framework seems to have done is open up a hole that has left lots of people feeling confused, muddled and very dissatisfied about the availability of adoption support. So in principle it does seem the right thing to do. It raises lots of questions about what a universal adoption support service might look like and whether restricting it to adoption would be the right thing to do. Should one exclude special guardianship from that? What about the whole range of children living with extended family members where there is no legal order in place, and what about those children with hugely complex special needs living with their own families who equally need access to support from health, education and so on? I think there is a big question about a universal service that is just addressing the needs of a very small group of children, as strong as the argument is for doing that.

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British Association for Adoption and Fostering (BAAF)—Oral evidence (QQ 80–107) Q107 Baroness Walmsley: Do you think that has any effect as a deterrent on people coming forward to become prospective adopters? Is there an awareness of unmet needs? John Simmonds: It has a very significant effect on some adopters where the child is already placed and they have not applied for the adoption order to be made because of their uncertainty about whether adoption support will be provided once the order is made. There are many cases raised with us about that anxiety. The Chairman: With huge regret we are going to bring your session to an end. I think we could usefully go on asking you questions for another hour. However, we do have PAC here, and we are very glad they are. It will be extremely important that we have your written evidence. I know you said you had it ready but perhaps, as a result of what we have been asking you, you would not mind expanding it a bit, particularly on the points made by Viscount Eccles, Lady Hamwee, Lady Walmsley and Lady Howarth about any statutory process. For example, do you think the adoption regulation coming in in September really ought to be looked at again? We have been so grateful to you and I hope we may come back to you for any further evidence we want. We have had a marvellous session with you and we are extremely grateful to all three of you. It was very nice to have the Welsh perspective. Thank you all very much indeed.

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British Association for Adoption and Fostering (BAAF)—Written evidence

British Association for Adoption and Fostering (BAAF)—Written evidence Focus: Adoption of children from BME families; Recruitment of prospective adopters; Postadoption contact and support. General Context: To what extent, if at all, does the research evidence support adoption as the preferred approach to achieving permanency for looked after children in care? Permanency planning and permanency options for children who cannot be cared for by their birth parents continues to be a primary driver in policy and practice across England and Wales. This contrasts to most countries in Europe where permanency is a barely recognised concept with adoption primarily focussed on international adoption in quite significant numbers. The age profile of children in care in England for the year to March 2011 shows that the greater number of children in care between the age of 10 and 18 is 38,020 and represents 58% of the total. Those under 11 are largely in care resulting from abuse and neglect with a significant number under Care Orders. The likelihood of leaving care for the under 11’s is very much related to their age at the beginning of the last care episode. Under 2’s return home quickly or have adoption agreed as their plan – it is unusual for them to remain in care. However, some children who return home may return to care again or experience significant risk in poor family environments over the first 5 years or more of their lives (Ward, Brown et al. 2012). Other research evidence recently published (Wade, Biehal et al. 2011; Farmer and Lutman 2012) sets out a picture of heightened risk and poor parenting for many children who return to their parents. Children who first come into care after age 2 face a more challenging time in terms of properly thought through permanency plans that do in fact secure a family life for a child that is secure and meant to last. Delay and indecision starts to build up for a variety of reasons with the possibility for some of these children that they will spend a considerable period of their childhood in care. About 26% of children in care over the age of 11 will have started to be looked after when they were under 11 (Sinclair 2007). Children over 11 who first come into care over the age of 11 will have come into care because their family life has broken down or because they have been abused. They are likely to have a range of emotional and behavioural problems resulting from or bringing about that breakdown or abuse. The exceptions to this are unaccompanied asylum seeking young people who have a particular profile and set of needs. Their permanency needs are no less significant but it is usually the outcome of their asylum claim that determines this. Permanency planning for over 11’s is very difficult because many young people have a range of difficulties that makes stability and security in their lives difficult to achieve. Even 212

British Association for Adoption and Fostering (BAAF)—Written evidence those children that do establish this, usually through foster care, will face plans being made for them by their local authorities in mid adolescence about leaving care including leaving their placement even it is well established. Permanency planning is well embedded in England and Wales and has been for many years. It is important to note the overwhelming evidence from child development research about children needing a secure family life where they have developed a secure attachment relationship to the primary caregivers with all the consequential benefits and opportunities that this provides through childhood, adolescence and beyond. The pathways for these developments are established genetically and subsequently through the quality of the environment in the womb and post birth. There is a constant interaction between many variables that influence subsequent outcomes and many opportunities for creating developmental pathways that are more positive when there has been a poor start in life – particularly in adolescence. But that must not divert us from recognising that a poor start in life can be a significant factor in limiting the child’s capacity to make use of subsequent opportunity when and if it presents itself. The evidence for this has strengthened in recent years and is not subject to any substantial dispute. What is generally accepted is that the greater majority of children placed for adoption have heightened developmental risk from a combination of adverse genetic factors, pre birth exposure to drugs, alcohol and stress in the womb but that the potential for developmental catch is significant especially where they are placed at a young age. These factors are equally applicable to children in all other placement categories. The prime permanence option is return to the child’s birth parents or if that is not possible then to a family member (Section 22C, Children Act 1989). The largest numbers of children leaving care in any one year return to their parents or relatives (10,350 in the year to March 2012). Where children are placed with family members then there are a number of legal options including for a small number, adoption. Special Guardianship was introduced at the end of 2005 as a good, maybe more acceptable legal alternative and that seems to have proved to be popular with family and friends carers. The evidence base for outcomes from Special Guardianship is not yet available but is subject to DFE funded research at the University of York and BAAF. Residence Orders continue to be another option. It should be noted that by far the greater number of children being cared for by family members or friends never come to the attention of the local authority. This is estimated from the 2001 census to be about 95% of children looked after by a family member. (Farmer and Selwyn 2012) Where parents or family members cannot provide the child with a permanent family life, then the legal options for ‘stranger carers’ are Adoption, Special Guardianship and Residence Orders. Foster care is also an option but here parental responsibility is primarily held and exercised by the local authority but retained by the parents. The child’s foster carers act on behalf of the local authority but have no legally exercisable parental responsibility. Permanency usually consists of three elements – the child’s sense of belonging to, feeling secure with and connected to a family of their own, the physical space called home and

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British Association for Adoption and Fostering (BAAF)—Written evidence community and the legal framework that secures both of these with parental responsibility core to this. For children who cannot achieve permanency with their birth parents, these different components interact with one another in the consequential effect they have on the child’s own sense of permanency. Adoption clearly provides the strongest framework in severing the legal relationship the child has with their birth parents and establishing an equivalent legal relationship in the adoptive family. But having done so, that in itself does not severe the child’s need to know about their origins and history and the reasons they are not being cared for by their birth parents. It does not necessarily diminish the concern for, interest in, curiosity about or wish or need for contact with the birth parents. The contribution of Special Guardianship and Residence Orders has yet to be fully investigated for its outcomes as a permanence option. Neither severs the child’s legal relationship with their birth parents and Special Guardianship allows the Special Guardian to exercise their parental responsibility to the exclusion of all others with parental responsibility. However, various aspects of this are subject to variation on application to a court for leave or directly to the court. For many children who are looked after, their need for permanence will be core to their temporary care arrangements and the local authority’s plan for establishing permanence. For some children, permanent or long term foster care will be their permanency plan. Evidence suggests that for many children this is an excellent plan with comparable outcomes to adoption (Schofield 2003; Schofield and Ward 2008; Biehal 2010). However, there are issues about how permanent/long term foster care placements are established and explicitly become the plan for the child. They are other issues about the adequacy of the local authority having parental responsibility for the child rather than the child’s dayto-day foster carers and the continuous scrutiny of the local authority that results from this. There are other issues about the long term adequacy of the arrangements where plans are made for the child to leave care in mid adolescence and the lack of availability of the kinds of family support that most late adolescent and early adulthood individuals need to manage the challenges that adult life brings. These are not insoluble problems in foster care but currently they still lack the reliable, taken for granted solutions that come from ‘family membership’ that applies to most young people in late adolescence and early adulthood. That may come from lack of appreciation of the issues, lack of opportunities for creating these solutions and increasingly lack of resources. Adoption cannot be considered to be the preferred permanency option. Indeed in law it is not the preferred option – return to birth parents and placement with family members are the required permanency options where this is determined to be a safe and in the child’s best interests evaluated against their need’s, welfare and long term interests. But adoption has clear advantages where the child’s needs, welfare and circumstances require it. It recognises in an unambiguous way that children have as a primary need to see themselves and to be seen as a family member where that is secure, loving and life long. It recognises the serious long term consequences of subjecting children to uncertainty about their family membership and their need to know to whom they can turn when they are troubled, frightened or face change. It recognises the importance of children knowing

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British Association for Adoption and Fostering (BAAF)—Written evidence who they can turn to when they need to celebrate, share their excitement from life experiences or have fun. In terms of outcomes, we know that most adopted children make rapid developmental progress in terms of their physical health, emotional and social development, cognitive development and progress at school and their identity and self-esteem. This is not to underestimate the challenge that this developmental progress poses for the child and for the adopters. It also does not under-estimate the importance of support services. For some children in adoptive placements, the challenge becomes too great and families can find themselves in real difficulty. One follow up study of children placed in middle childhood (Rushton and Dance 2004; Dance and Rushton 2005) identifies the combination of age at placement, type and exposure to maltreatment, changes of carer before placement, inattention and restlessness and preferential rejection of the adopted child by the birth parents as risk factors which explain either instability in the adoptive home or disruption of the adoptive placement. Should we be concerned about the falling number of adoptions? The number of children adopted from care has fallen since the implementation of the Adoption and Children Act 2002. At it height the numbers were 3800 in 2003 and for the last statistical year ending in March 2012, 3050. The drop in numbers is significant but a precise explanation is difficult. It might be anticipated that the introduction of a new legislative framework might result in uncertainty and inefficiencies that would work themselves out over time. This does not appear to be a strong explanation. It may be that the increase in care cases following the death of Baby Peter focussed attention on managing the initial safeguarding arrangements rather than permanency planning. The figures more clearly indicate that the delays in the courts have produced longer and longer timescales for agreeing permanent plans. It also seems clear that the complexity of children’s needs and the difficulty of matching them with suitable adopters may also have contributed to this. However, even if this is a partial set of factors to consider, the actual number of children in care under a Placement Order or Freeing Order is significant. For Placement Orders, numbers have risen very steadily and if placed these suggest a steady future rise in the number of children leaving care through an adoption order (see Appendix 1). Children in care under Freeing Orders have fallen as they should. It is a matter of some concern, however, to know what has happened to these children. A & S (Children) v Lancashire County Council [2012] EWHC 1689 (Fam) (21 June 2012) has focused our attention in a particularly troubling way on two such children who were originally freed for adoption. It is also important to note that the availability of Special Guardianship as a permanency option implemented at the end of 2005. It makes a significant contribution to the numbers of children leaving care. When children leaving care through Special Guardianship is added to the numbers of children leaving care through an Adoption Order, the numbers of children leaving care through a permanence order is at its highest ever. This indicates the success of Special Guardianship in securing permanency for children unlike Custodianship. It also marks the continuing focus of local authorities and the courts on delivering permanence. What we don’t know is how many children who left care through Special Guardianship might have left care

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British Association for Adoption and Fostering (BAAF)—Written evidence through Adoption and what the relative merits might have been of one over another. We don’t know if or how many children should have had adoption as the plan but where for a variety of reasons that didn’t happen. What we do believe is that the Adoption and Children Act 2002 is well-drafted piece of legislation that is clear in its objectives and processes. The problems that do need to be addressed are problems about care planning, variation between local authority practice and delays in the courts. Care Planning All children in care must have a permanence plan by the time of the second review at 4 months. Much of the evidence from studies of the implementation of the pre-proceedings phase of the public law outline (Masson, Pearce et al. 2008; Ward, Brown et al. 2012) and of care planning generally show a pervasive belief in the ‘rule of optimism’ about the potential of the birth parents to address their range of difficulties – a belief that is not just rooted in any one stakeholder organisation or profession. Even where parents have substantial issues and where children have been removed before, a ‘start again’ syndrome drives much practice with parent’s rights trumping the child’s needs and rights as clearly vulnerable as the child is likely to be. Observing children, getting to know them, thoroughly assessing their development and listening to what they have to say as Article 12 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child requires is an essential part of focussing on the child’s needs, welfare and the environment that will maximize their chances of developmental recovery and a loving family life. Adoption in Wales To what extent, if at all, do the issues surrounding adoption in Wales differ from those in England? Are there any particular challenges, concerns or examples of good practice relating to adoption in Wales of which the Committee should be aware? Adoption in Wales bears some characteristics that are directly comparable to England. There has been a16.7% increase in the number of Looked After Children since 2007 and unsurprisingly an increase in the number of children with adoption as the plan. While some Local Authorities have been able to respond to this need, this is a varying picture across Wales. BAAF Cymru coordinates the largest consortia arrangement in Wales, serving nine Local Authorities and two Voluntary Adoption Agencies. Over the past year at the end of March 2012 there had been a 31% increase in the numbers of children referred to the consortium who required an adoptive family. The data from the previous year record a 32% increase. The numbers of adoptive families referred to the consortium as at 31.3.12 had however decreased by 27%. We know that delays in matching children to their new family impacts on children’s development but local authorities can become trapped in a cyclical dilemma between available resources and identified need. Most of the children referred have suffered significant neglect, are developmentally delayed and have an uncertain prognosis or suffer from pre birth effects of parental drug and alcohol misuse. Referrals also include children from large sibling groups and within the consortium there are presently no adopters available for siblings of three or more. In addressing the current shortage of adopters to meet this need, the challenge is to recruit a

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British Association for Adoption and Fostering (BAAF)—Written evidence greater number of adopters generally and more adopters specifically skilled, able and interested in caring for children who wait the longest. However, a targeted recruitment strategy must be supported by a robust and responsive early response to enquiries from prospective adopters. This is presently inconsistent across Wales with issues of inadequate resourcing of such services by experienced practitioners able to manage enquires sensitively and responsively. Initial responses must however be backed by local capacity to deliver training and commence the assessment process. One of the key challenges facing some Adoption Agencies in Wales is the ability to resource a system that can process assessments in a timely way and provide preparation courses that are delivered in sequence to individual assessments. This is leading to inconsistencies in the way prospective adoptive parents are supported throughout the process. Further comparable issues with England can be found in delays in care proceedings. We do know from MOJ statistics from January 2012 that it takes 55 weeks for care proceedings to be completed. We have therefore welcomed the Welsh Government’s decision to implement the recommendations from the Family Justice Review in establishing a judicial and court process that is timely in respect of children’s timescales. A Family Justice Network group has been established to drive forward these recommendations. Wales is still to lay regulations on removing the ‘should be placed for adoption’ recommendation responsibility from Panels, we are anticipating the same implementation date of 1st. September. We have provided a separate consultation response to the Welsh Government on this particular issue setting out some of the practice implications of this change for Local Authorities. Issues relating to inconsistencies in the provision of Post Adoption support services are present in Wales as well as in England. For services to be effective there is a need for full implementation of the Adoption Support Services (Local Authorities) (Wales) Regulations (2005). Not all LAs have dedicated Adoption Support Services Advisor posts and there is no consistency in where this role lies within Local Authorities. The strategic aspect of the role has in general not been implemented, including the framework for working with Health and Education. The initial proposal that this function should be fulfilled by a combination of an experienced adoption practitioner with a resource mandate has been difficult to achieve. There is also concern that services for birth parents can be inconsistent across Wales. The lack of adequate adoption support services for birth parents is recognised in Inspections as one of the greatest areas of unmet need. This can result in unsuccessful management of loss, particularly for the birth mother, an unacceptable ‘contact gap’ after the child is placed for adoption (whether agency mediated or direct contact) and an inability to track and meet the needs of birth fathers. Some of the differences in Wales relate to the ethnic profile of children. The majority of children requiring adoptive families are White Welsh/ white British and concerns about significant numbers of BME children waiting for an appropriate match does not raise the same issues as in England. However we do need to be mindful of the importance of the Welsh Language and the potential impact this can have on both children and potential adopters whose first language is Welsh. We have no concrete evidence to suggest that disproportionate consideration is being given to this in respect of matching but central data collation generally in Wales on trends in adoption is presently less detailed than in England. To date there has been Performance Indicator monitoring within Local Authority’s and publication of key data on an annual basis. This is however qualitative data which can plot trends over comparable timeframes but does not measure quality There are also inconsistencies in reporting

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British Association for Adoption and Fostering (BAAF)—Written evidence mechanisms on interpretation of that data and there can be limited understanding of its use and value at Local Authority level. For example whilst disruption statistics are not collated nationally, there are huge variations in how a disruption is interpreted. Wales could learn significant lessons from a study of disruption and needs to consider commissioning similar research to that in England. Probably some of the greatest differences in Wales lie in the recent reconfiguration of some Adoption Services and in recent developments in response to tackling some of the issues outlined specifically concerning delays for children requiring adoptive families. Over recent years there has been significant development in Local Authority Adoption Agencies collaborating together to deliver adoption services for prospective adopters within available resources. Examples of this can be found in the delivery of service such as joint partnership arrangements to offer pre approval training provision for prospective adoptive families. There have also been more radical configuration of services where a number Local Authority Adoption agencies have coordinated their whole service delivery together in respect of pre approval and approval of adoptive families. Examples of this can be found in North Wales, which is now hosted by one Adoption Service serving six Local Authorities; the West Wales single adoption service serves three Local Authorities and South East Wales single adoption service hosted by Blaenau Gwent presently serves three Local Authorities (two more are in the process of joining) This service has now established a single Adoption Panel. There is also a consortia arrangement in South Wales established in 2002. This consortia works collaboratively with nine Local Authorities and two Voluntary Adoption Agencies to facilitate links between children waiting for a placement and adopters approved by member agencies. The consultation on proposed legislative amendments (Social Services (Wales)) Bill to restructure adoption services has just finished. It is anticipated that Gwenda Thomas, Deputy First Minister will make an official statement on the Bill prior to the summer recess with the introduction of the Bill into the Assembly in 2013 with Royal Assent expected in 2014. A proposal within this Bill is the establishment of a National Adoption Service. Details of this specific section of the draft Bill is enclosed in the bundle (Appendix 2) as well as BAAF Cymru’s response to the consultation process (Appendix 3 and 4). There is on-going political interest in the present functioning of adoption services in Wales and BAAF Cymru recently provided both written and verbal evidence to a cross party Children and Young People’s Committee of Inquiry into Adoption . In May 2012 The Welsh Government facilitated its first meeting of the Expert Working Group on Adoption. This group has a representative membership from a range of stakeholders from both the statutory and voluntary sector as well as an adoptive parent. The programme of work to be developed by the group is to help drive performance objectives across Wales with an initial mandate to specifically explore the following:   

Interrogation of data available through National Data collation, consortium arrangements, existing adoption services and the National Register. Existing models of Best Practice (including models in England) Barriers to Adoption in Wales (specific reference to Post Adoption support)

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British Association for Adoption and Fostering (BAAF)—Written evidence  

Opportunities for collaboration Implications for practice of a National Adoption Service

Examples of good practice in Wales St. David’s Children’s Society have a good track record of recruiting families able and willing to consider children with specific needs. Barnardo’s Cymru have also successfully recruited adoptive families particularly for children with disabilities. Rights of Children and Young Persons (Wales) 2011. This measure this imposes a duty upon all Welsh Ministers to have due regard to the rights and obligations in the UNCRC specifically Article 12 which states every child has a right to say what they think in all matters affecting them and have their views taken seriously. This is a leading development for Wales alongside it being the first Country to establish a Children’s Commissioner in the UK. Generally the national policy context has been positive, for instance the Children and Families ( Wales) measure 2010 which has provisions relating to child poverty, participation and family services. However, questions remain about the consistent implementation of national law and policy. With specific reference to adoption, the 2011 measure must adhere to the fundamental principal that adoption is a service for children and must be duly processed with the child’s timeframe. The child’s right to family life can be compromised through delays in care proceedings, delays in family finding and inconsistencies in the provision of post adoption support. We also need to see improvements in the provision of direct services for children both in respect of resources but also a workforce that is trained to listen to children’s wishes and feelings and work directly with them (and their primary care givers) in order that they can work through the myriad of feelings and emotions they will continue to experience in respect of their own personal history. At times it is a difficult equation for practitioners to balance the ‘wishes and feelings’ of the child and the paramountcy of the child’s welfare. This often involves a judgement of the ‘situation of least detriment’ rather than a clearly defined decision. It is also of concern to practitioners, panels and others that at times there is an apparent lack of direct work with the child in order to inform and elicit those wishes and feelings.

Adoption of children from BME families: To what extent, if at all, is delay being caused by the efforts of adoption agencies to find a ‘perfect or near ethnic match’ between adoptive parents and the adoptive child? What other factors, if any, could explain the longer time taken in placing children from BME backgrounds? Transracial adoption has been a source of controversy for many years. The issue reflects the growing recognition, unease and then determination to address racism and discrimination in society and the parallel process of empowerment, positive affirmation and support to minority ethnic communities by public bodies. Anti-racist and anti-discriminatory policies and practice have been important in public service for many years with varying degrees of impact and success. Social work in particular has been very influenced by these arguments and dilemmas particularly as an emerging profession with its identification with the oppressed and the

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British Association for Adoption and Fostering (BAAF)—Written evidence disadvantaged. Anti-discriminatory practice is embedded in social work in a way that has particular prominence and is somewhat unlike that in more established professions. In adoption, the issues have had a particular focus as removing minority ethnic children and placing them with majority white families was seen to be the epitomy of colonialism in depriving the child of their ethnic roots and heritage and consigning them to an ‘in-between world’ where they were neither one thing or the other in terms of their identity. Practice has come to reflect the unease with transracial placement with a strong emphasis through the 80’s and 90’s on placing children in families closely matched to the child’s ethnicity, culture, religion and language. A strong emphasis was on the potential damage to children of an adoptive family life that did not directly reflect their heritage. The concern with delay in the placement of minority ethnic children was directly addressed in a Department of Health local authority circular (LAC 98(20)) which made it clear that no child should be deprived of a loving home on account on the lack of a suitable ethnic match. The circular was sensitively and clearly drawn up but it was published at a time when another publication from the Department of Health ‘Messages from Research’ (Department of Health 1999) as well as Practice Guidance from BAAF continued to warn practitioners of the dangers to children’s identity of a match that did not reflect their heritage. These were difficult issues for adoption agencies to reconcile with a fear of the potential for long term, damaging consequences as well as being seen to be overtly discriminatory on the one hand and the risks associated with delay or not placing the child at all on the other. The issues were highlighted in a particularly important research study by Selwyn (2010) commissioned as a part of the Adoption Research Initiative. This study demonstrated the continuing influence of ‘same race’ policy and practice in the three local authorities studied and the way that this contributed to significant delay for many children. The study also made it clear that the complexity of these children’s heritages did not lend themselves to easy definition. The greater majority of the children were from mixed ethnic backgrounds where the mix typically consisted of a white mother and a minority ethnic father but where that genealogy indicated little that gave the child membership of any defined community. Compromise, confusion and lack of urgency marked planning and placement and it is not surprising that this has fuelled questions about the adequacy of current policy and practice. The publication of the Department of Education’s Adoption and Special Guardianship Data Pack has added to this with a the number of days for a black or black British child taking from entry to care to adoption being 1350 days while for a white child it is 925 days. However, it should be noted that for a child from a mixed background it is 1000 days. Even within this there are important differences with babies from mothers from a Asian background where the preservation of ‘family honour’ is important in the child having adoption as the plan. It such circumstances, it may be easier to place with Asian adopters because of the child’s much younger age than it is for black and black British boys aged two or three where abuse and neglect figure as the dominant factor in the plan for adoption. The available data and Selwyn’s research led to the Adoption Statutory Guidance revision of 2011 re-emphasising the LAC 98(20) messages that no child should be deprived of a loving home because of the lack of a suitable ethnic match. The Guidance does continue to emphasize the importance of consideration being given to the development of a child’s identity. It also

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British Association for Adoption and Fostering (BAAF)—Written evidence emphasises the diligent efforts that adoption agencies should make to recruit adopters from minority ethnic communities. A child’s ethnic background is only one factor among a number of factors that should be considered in making a match. It is safe to say that most children adopted from care have developmental vulnerabilities that will manifest to a greater or lesser degree over the course of their childhoods. All children need to develop a positive sense of their identities where what they feel about themselves and their connection to the outside world is positive and sustaining. This combines a wide range of factors including origins, belonging and connectedness and would include issues of ethnicity, culture, religion, language, gender and sexuality. For adopted children and families this also includes adoption, as adoption is an identity factor. For most people at different points in their lives there are issues of loss, unease and disconnection in relation to their identity. There is little evidence that suggests that children placed transracially are more likely because of the transracial nature of the placement to have poorer outcomes. But there is much evidence that shows that there can be a sense of isolation and alienation if there is no direct and open support to the child in the development of their identities in their adoptive family or their community. Similar issues apply to the possibility and likelihood of children experiencing direct and indirect forms of racism and other forms of discrimination. Indeed this is also something that may be experienced by the adopters themselves or other adoptive family members. The experience of ‘difference’ and disconnectedness from origins are a core part of the adoption experience and these manifest themselves in many different ways. All adopters need to be prepared for the possibility of these experiences and need to have access to support if and when they manifest themselves. The degree of the ethnic match between child and adopter is one factor but it is not a sufficient factor in ensuring that the challenge of adoption across all its dimensions can be met. In considering a potential match, the full range of the child’s needs must be addressed and the full range of the actual and potential resources and capacities of the adopters must be recognised. No one issue should so come to dominant the challenge of finding a match that adopters who can meet the child’s needs are ruled out of consideration on that single ground. In light of the research evidence on outcomes for children who have experienced trans-racial adoption, is the ACA 2002 right to specifically direct decision-makers to give ‘due consideration to the child’s religious persuasion, racial origin and cultural and linguistic background’? Does this provision (s 1(5)) need to be amended and, if so, how? The range of factors that influence outcomes in adoption is wide. Age at placement is one of the clearest indicators. Some aspects of age at placement are indicative of other factors – the absence of maltreatment or changes of carers or exposure to high intensity contact during care proceedings. On a more positive note, it indicates the potential for the child to establish the conditions that build a secure attachment relationship, to establish typical daily patterns in their cortisol production, to be well nourished and generally have their bodily needs attended to, to feel safe to explore their outside world. These and other related factors are the reasons why the avoidance of delay is such an important factor and is identified as a general duty in S1(3) of the ACA 2002. Children need to be identified as early as possible when they cannot return to

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British Association for Adoption and Fostering (BAAF)—Written evidence their birth parents or other family members and a permanency plan needs to be established and delivered within the child’s timescales. Placing as young as possible does not eradicate risk factors from the child’s genetic inheritance or any long lasting effects from exposure to toxins, malnourishment or stress in the womb. These may manifest themselves in different ways as the child develops but evidence clearly indicates that developmental recovery is more likely the earlier the child is placed. Whatever subsequent difficulties are encountered adopters, with support, are focussed on and committed to the child and determined to find whatever solutions are available. Where delay occurs the child is exposed to degrees of stress that impact on development. For children placed at an average age of 7, at follow up at an average age of 13, 48% were in stable and satisfying adoptive families, about 28% were in stable but struggling families and 23% had disrupted. The factors that predicted which group the child was in were age at placement, moves in care, degree and type of maltreatment, the extent of hyperactivity and inattention and the child being preferentially rejected by their birth parent. In another study (Hodges and Steele 2000; Hodges, Steele et al. 2005) which compared children placed early with those placed later, the attachment status of the adopters was a significant factor over the first two years of placement in the change of the attachment status of the child. It was notable that whatever degree of attachment security was achieved by the later placed group, there were enduring aspects of insecurity. In neither of these studies was the child’s ethnicity identified as a significant factor or the degree of match between the child and the adopters. There are problems in most studies where minority ethnic children are present in small numbers and their ethnic status is one variable among a large number of tested variables. Tests for significance are unlikely to indicate ethnicity as playing a part in outcome where this is so. This does not indicate that ethnicity is insignificant but that it is very difficult to design and test for unless that is explicit. Section 1(5) of the Adoption and Children Act 2002 does continue to play an important part in adoption. ‘Due consideration’ is the key part of this sub-section. The development of the child’s identity is very important. But this combines both what they have inherited to the degree to which this can be meaningful described and what comes to be a part of their lived experience in their adoptive home and community. This includes those aspects that come to be stable in their adoptive family experience and as families and children change whatever change comes to bring about over the course of childhood in terms of values, meaning, belonging and identification. Best practice in matching does not lock certainty into the development of children’s identity but opportunity and a pathway. The key factor is how that opportunity is identified and how it comes to develop and change on the child and the family’s pathway and over time. There are key psychological and social factors at work here including openness, respect, the capacity to acknowledge difference and loss, curiosity and the availability of support. Giving due consideration encompasses all of these factors at its best. Giving due consideration does not imply a dominance of these factors over all others or imply any sense of perfection in seeking a solution to the problem of the child’s identity. Giving due consideration under S1(5) indicates the presence of a set of factors that are important in the development of the child’s identity, a core part of their being.

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British Association for Adoption and Fostering (BAAF)—Written evidence However, in terms of what is known about adoption outcomes, due consideration to the child’s religious persuasion, racial origin, and cultural and linguistic background must take its place against a recognition that there are many other factors that stand as relevant or risk factors in the placement of a child for adoption. Finding suitable adopters that have the range of parenting capacities that the child needs including the resilience to rise to the challenge of the unknown is never easy. Finding suitable adopters for sibling groups or children with disabilities or complex health conditions or older is never easy. These are well known and well established issues in adoption and they create a powerful case that public bodies must give due consideration to the child’s rights and needs for a family life through adoption and the balance of factors that must be taken into account in discharging that responsibility. The placement of child for adoption with adopters who have the parenting capacity to meet the child’s needs (as far as this can be predicted) must happen as quickly as possible. Minimising delay is a primary factor alongside the primacy of the welfare of the child. Giving due consideration to other relevant factors as the both the UNCRC and domestic legislation requires continues to be important within this primary duty to minimize delay. Is there a problem recruiting prospective adopters from particular ethnic groups? If so, why? Should it be a matter of concern? What more can be done to increase the pool? It is very important and indeed is universally accepted that adoption agencies should through every part of their adopter recruitment process welcome and be inclusive of people from every section of society. Minority groups have received particular attention for a number of years as it has become recognised that social status in itself is not predictive of becoming a good adoptive parent. Being married, white and middle class and below a certain age is no longer recognised as the ‘ideal’ in adoption. Being single, older, gay, lesbian and bi-sexual, of a particular religious persuasion, English as second language and minority ethnic status are equally relevant in successful adoption – it is an understanding of the nature of adoption, psycho-social factors particularly the resolution of past losses whatever these may result from, actual and potential parenting capacity, resilience and ability to work with an agency that are predictive of being a successful adoptive parent. There have been a number of issues raised in recent months about the adequacy of responses by adoption agencies to enquiries made by people interested in adoption. Other issues have focussed on the experience of some adopters in different parts of the process. The specific experiences of people from minority ethnic backgrounds in relation to these challenging questions is not known. But there is generally a concern to find ways of recruiting more adopters from minority ethnic backgrounds. These involve ensuring that 

in all recruitment literature, information and advice sessions, preparation courses and home study assessments that the need for and the needs of people from minority ethnic communities are addressed.

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British Association for Adoption and Fostering (BAAF)—Written evidence     

That staff involved in any part of the process are familiar with and have access to support in relation to the specific needs of applicants from minority ethnic communities That equality and diversity polices and procedures are in place and effectively core to practice That recruitment practices identify local community groups, church groups, community leaders to ensure that messages about the need for minority ethnic adopters are available and communicated to those who might be interested That specific issues are well understood i.e. the position of Islam in relation to adoption The advantages of or need for specific campaigns or specialist teams that focus on recruiting minority ethnic adopters

While each of these items is relevant to best practice in recruitment, there are constraints that result from the specific profile of minority ethnic communities in particular local authorities. Some communities have become well established in sufficient numbers with a relevant profile of stability, resources and motivation for adoption in some local authority areas. Others may have a profile where for example the minority ethnic group that is growing the quickest are those for a mixed ethnic background. But here the age profile for the majority of this group is under 25 making it unlikely that adoption would be something that they might consider in sufficient numbers. These issues indicate that recruiting sufficient numbers of minority ethnic adopters will continue to a challenge for some time to come. Targeted local efforts will continue to be important but recruitment campaigns will need to identify both local intelligence about numbers, profiles, needs and success and extend these into both adoption consortia and nationally available data.

Increasing the pool of prospective adopters: What, if anything, is known about the motivation of prospective adopters? Is anything known about why, having approached an adoption agency, some (perhaps many?) individuals/couples decide not to proceed? Generally it is unclear what the potential pool of individuals or couples interested in adoption might be. The motivation still is primary one of infertility but altruistic motives still play an important part. Infertility has undergone significant changes with more effective treatments more readily available. The age at which people choose to have children has changed drastically. Economic and social circumstances impact on recruitment where people are worried about employment, housing and their future. The challenges of adoption are not very everybody. These issues need to be better understood and they need to inform every part of the adoption process to ensure that as far as possible there is sufficient supply of well motivated, well resourced, well trained and well supported adoptive parents.

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British Association for Adoption and Fostering (BAAF)—Written evidence BAAF is fully supportive and engaged in the current focus on ensuring that from initial inquiry to approval the system is geared up to ensure that the current very serious shortfall in the supply of adopters is a problem that has a solution. What, if any, institutional and/or financial barriers exist to achieving successful matches between prospective adopters and looked after children more quickly? There are some practical difficulties in identifying a match for children as soon as possible after the decision has been made that the child should be placed for adoption. Agencies tend first to look for prospective adopters within their own pool of approved adopters, then within any consortium to which they belong. If no adopters are identified within these groups, the Local Authority will approach other local authorities, then finally voluntary adoption agencies. Referral to the Adoption Register gives access to a wider pool of approved adopters as does advertising in publications like Be My Parent (published by BAAF) or ‘Children Who Wait’ (published by Adoption U.K.) or more general papers if a placement is needed in a specific area or with adopters from a particular group. Specialist adoption publications and the Adoption Register, acting on guidance from the Department for Education and its predecessors, will not accept advertisements unless the local authority has the consent of the child’s parents or a court order giving permission. Publicising that a child is likely to need an adoptive or long-term fostering placement is seen as a significant interference with a parent’s parental responsibility and is not undertaken unless the parents consent or a court gives permission. Courts are unlikely to give permission before they have endorsed a care plan for adoption, as leave to advertise could be seen as pre-judging the case. The publication of any information which is likely to identify any child as the subject of family proceedings is a criminal offence under s97(2) of the Children Act 1989. However, experience has shown that the response to an advertisement for a child is primarily an emotional reaction which is rarely produced by an anonymous advertisement stripped of identifying detail. A photograph is particularly important in engaging prospective adopters. The general practice of most local authorities is not to apply for permission to advertise and not to look outside their own pool of adopters until the care proceedings have been concluded. In addition, adopters themselves are reluctant to put themselves forward for a child whose legal future is uncertain. It involves an emotional commitment to a particular child who may return home or be placed with a family member after months of raised hopes. Adoption social workers are reluctant to put their adopters forward, firstly because they do not want to expose them to potential disappointment and secondly because it makes them unavailable to be put forward for other children who may need earlier placements. Adopters do have to be prepared for the risk that a child for whom they have been put forward or matched might be the subject of an application for revocation of the freeing order at a late stage, or that the parent might argue a change of circumstances allowing them to contest the adoption application. Adopters no longer have the security of freeing orders, which meant a complete end to all legal proceedings about the child, and although there are hardly any successful applications to revoke placement orders, parents are frequently given leave to make the application, creating significant anxiety for adopters. It is possible that this

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British Association for Adoption and Fostering (BAAF)—Written evidence lack of security even after a placement order has been granted makes adopters more reluctant to accept additional risk by putting themselves forward earlier. Financial barriers The inter-agency fee Research by Bristol University (Selwyn 2009) found that voluntary adoption agencies provide good value to local authorities seeking adoption placement and are particularly good at providing adopters for some hard-to–place children. She also found that the cost to a local authority of preparing and approving an adopter is more than the inter-agency fee charged by voluntary agencies, and that faster movement out of care and into an adoptive placement makes financial savings for the local authority. However, the way in which local authorities distribute their budgets hides the full cost to them of approving adopters and reinforces their perception that looking for an adopter from a voluntary agency is an expensive option and so is often a last resort. Voluntary agencies have closed or merged as a result of budget restraints in local authorities, reducing the number of adopters that are potentially available to children. Adopters Financial disincentives for adopters coming forward include the time needed to be taken off work to attend assessment and panel meetings, the remaining disparities in financial support and provision between maternity pay and leave and adoption pay and leave. Often the emotional needs of the children being placed require an adopter to be available at home full-time for longer period than many adopters can afford. The Government's ‘Foster to Adopt’ initiative depends on the potential adopters being at home with the child from placement, although the entitlement for adoption leave and pay is not triggered until the matching decision has been made. This restricts the scheme to those who can afford to give up work for a year with no guarantee of a return to work, and those who are already unemployed. Is there anything more that can be done in either primary or secondary legislation to help increase the pool of prospective adopters and/or speed up the matching process? The current system for recruiting, advising, preparing and approving the suitability of adopters has evolved over many years. The current framework can be traced to the reforms that were introduced by the Adoption and Children Act 2002. The need to modernize the system was identified in the Prime Minister’s Review of Adoption and the subsequent White Paper. A core framework was identified in the swift publication of the National Adoption Standards under a project funded by the Department of Health at BAAF and chaired by Dame Margaret Booth. Many of those standards still exist but have been incorporated into other current statutory documents. A subsequent review in 2002 under the Department of Health on adopter preparation, assessment and the operation of panels set out a series of recommendations,

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British Association for Adoption and Fostering (BAAF)—Written evidence which were the basis for the revised Adoption Agency Regulations, published in 2005. These Regulations plus Statutory Adoption Guidance and Practice Guidance on preparing and assessing adopters are the core framework together with the National Minimum Adoption Standards against which Adoption and Adoption Support Agencies are inspected and approved (see Appendix 2). It is these statutory documents that identify the current framework although they have been variously amended particularly by the coalition government’s publication of new Adoption Statutory Guidance and National Minimum Standards early in 2011. One of the fundamental difficulties with the pool of prospective adopters and the matching process is that of a general mismatch between the adopters coming forward and the children needing placements. The majority of people approaching agencies to consider adoption do so because they are unable to have children themselves. Their initial hope is usually that they will be able to replicate the family that they intended to have naturally by adopting a child who matches, as nearly as possible, the baby that they cannot have. For some this hope can be refocused through the preparation and training process and they may be willing to consider adopting older children, children with disabilities and difficulties and sibling groups, but many will withdraw at an early stage when they discover how unlikely they are to be matched with their ideal, very young baby. These are often the adopters who then turn to intercountry adoption in the hope of getting a younger child from overseas, or who may turn to surrogacy or further fertility treatment. If the child protection system was more effective in identifying and removing children at risk from their birth families before they have suffered significant harm the children would be available for adoption at an earlier age and easier to place. The same child, difficult to place at 6, having been emotionally or physically abused; having experienced moves into foster care, lengthy court proceedings and possibly having a couple of younger siblings in tow, would have had many more adopters coming forward for him as a new-born or very young baby. The optimism of social workers in the parents’ ability to change, extensive assessments and lengthy care proceedings produce an older, troubled group of children who will be a challenge to parent; there are fewer people willing and able to take up that challenge than there are people who would consider adoption of a young baby. Adopter Preparation and Assessment and the Operation of Adoption Panels: A Fundamental Review - Department of Health 2002 As a part of the Prime Minister’s Review of Adoption and the Adoption White Paper, a review of preparation, assessment and panels was established by the Department of Health and undertaken by a stakeholder group with the findings issued for consultation in October 2002. The work built on the already published National Adoption Standards including the standards for prospective adopters and was intended to be a ‘nuts and bolts’ review. It was noted that there was then much good practice and the objective was to build on the best of that practice and maintain its strengths. In a summary, it was noted that the key objectives of the Review were –  To ensure greater consistency and transparency of adopter assessments between agencies (a level playing field) by developing a common ‘menu of issues’ which adopters can expect agencies to explore with them.

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British Association for Adoption and Fostering (BAAF)—Written evidence  To make materials available to agencies to ensure that prospective adopters receive high quality information and preparation throughout the process.  To clarify the range of checks that social workers should undertake on prospective adopters and the circumstances in which additional checks may be appropriate. It was noted that the process involved three interlinked stages –  vetting/safeguarding – ensuring that the adopter(s) can provide a safe environment for a child;  preparation/education – developing the prospective adopter’s capacity to meet the 
developmental needs of the child;  assessment – assessing the prospective adopter’s capacity to meet the developmental needs of the child, including the capacity to cope with the ‘adoption dimension’. Throughout this process for most prospective adopters, the ‘child’ was most likely to be a ‘generic child’ rather than a specific child whose needs, development and circumstances were known and the preparation and assessment were focused on and geared to the details of that child. In further developing the objectives of the preparation of adopters, a distinction was made between content and process with content enabling prospective adopters to  

form realistic expectations of the process; understand the detailed nature of assessment and the challenges that they may face as adoptive parents and cope with these challenges. 


Process was identified as facilitating learning and enabling prospective adopters time and 
opportunity to make sense of the information presented to them. The earlier Cabinet Office Report had identified a number of issues with the assessment of prospective adopters –    

variations in the length of time the process takes for assessment between different agencies. This was planned to be addressed through establishing statutory timescales the assessment of ‘second time round’ adopters. Some streamlining was recommended with accompanying safeguards where there had been significant changes in circumstances and the length of time since the first assessment. how the assessment is carried out – while a range of innovative approaches were identified, there was concern that the process could feel intermittent and incoherent. who currently gets approved – it was noted that there was little information on the drop- out rate, although in the BAAF study, Children and Families in the Voluntary Sector, 94% of cases going to panel were recommended for approval.

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British Association for Adoption and Fostering (BAAF)—Written evidence 

what makes a successful adopter – a lack of clarity and transparency in both the criteria for assessment and their application, which created a climate of suspicion and mistrust, which deters prospective adopters.

Specific questions were raised in the Review about the balance between preparation and assessment. It was noted that 

Prospective adopters need to be free to learn during the assessment process. The preparation process should facilitate their learning. It was clear that for many prospective adopters the process of learning may be impeded if they feel that they are being assessed at the same time.



There were inconsistencies in the quality and quantity of the education and training provided to prospective adopters by different agencies.

Other questions were raised about –     

The lack of detail about the issues social workers should explore in the assessment. The lack of consistency in the assessment process The variation in preconditions and disqualifying factors set by different agencies The confidence that prospective adopters from BME backgrounds had in the response that they might receive from agencies The positive value that the then BAAF form F had in ensuring consistency in recording information.

Recommendations from the Review The Review made a series of recommendations, many of which were accepted and incorporated into the current system. They were grouped under the following headings: Achieving a level playing field  Achieving consistent assessments that give confidence across the sector in their quality and ensuring prospective adopters perceive the process to be fair and transparent  Basing preparation and assessment on the adopter’s capacities (what they have the potential to do) and what agencies can do to develop that capacity  Recognizing that agencies may need to prioritize their processing of applications depending on the children they are responsible for with a plan for adoption. Priorities need to be explained to applicants with information made available about other adoption agencies.  Agencies needing discretion in the approach they take to assessment and in the tools and materials they employ  Agencies needing to promote the training of social workers, the acquisition of relevant experience and the provision of professional support. It was noted that

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British Association for Adoption and Fostering (BAAF)—Written evidence



systems, processes and structures do not protect children but competent practitioners. The Assessment of Children in Need Framework was identified as having a direct read across to the assessment of prospective adopters

Engaging prospective adopters in the process  All relevant issues need to be sensitively and thoroughly explored with prospective adopters so that they can decide whether adoption is right for them. Prospective adopters need to be open about their life histories and personal circumstances to enable this to happen.  Self assessment was recognized for the positive contribution it might make but that the assessment process as a whole must be through and information validated and analysed for its relevance to the adopter’s suitability.  Sensitivity to cultural issues must be core part of agency practice. High quality information and preparation throughout the process  Agencies should prepare high quality written information for prospective adopters on every aspect of the process including local policies, priorities and procedures. Preparation  While consistency in preparation is important, local discretion in the design of approaches and materials is important. Links between the preparation and assessment process  Preparation and assessment should be integrated.  The primary purpose of preparation is to facilitate learning and exploration in a non assessed environment  Discretion should be exercised about sharing information between preparation and assessment. However, all those completing preparation courses should have access to exit interviews with the aim of a self-assessment of the suitability to adopt. Issues to be explored in adopter assessment This chapter in the Review is substantial. The primary aim of the chapter was to explore and identify a ‘menu of issues’ that will become an outline structure in regulatory form with details discussed in accompanying guidance. It was noted that the ‘menu of issues’ was intended to help prospective adopters aware of what can be expected in the assessment including those issues that are not appropriate for agencies to use to screen prospective adopters from being assessed. The basic structure of the assessment was divided into three areas –   

Checks and references Parenting experience and parenting capacity (from the ACIN Framework) Family and environmental factors (from the ACIN Framework) 230

British Association for Adoption and Fostering (BAAF)—Written evidence Checks and references The primary aim of these checks and references is safeguarding. It is noted that the extent of the checks may feel intrusive but the purpose is fundamental in relation to the placement of a vulnerable child. The reason for the checks and references was to be clearly explained to the applicant/s. Common sense was to be a part of the approach in ensuring that there was minimal delay but an assessment could not be completed until the checks and references including any additional checks or references had been completed. The items identified in the review were subsequently and with little change incorporated into Schedule 4 of the Adoption Agencies Regulations 2005, the Practice Guidance and the revised BAAF Form F (PAR). Parenting experience and parenting capacity (from the ACIN Framework) Where prospective adopters have little or no experience of caring for children, it was suggested that this might be addressed in preparation with suitable opportunities for direct experience of children being identified in discussion with the social worker. The assessment process was identified as needing to explore the applicant/s capacity to prioritise and meet the needs of a child from care. A number of issues were identified including –  the significance of the child’s history, origins and the separation and loss from the birth family. The importance of being open with the child about these issues was stressed with contact forming a significant part of this.  the capacity to empathise with the likely differences between the child’s background and the adopters.  the experience and views about contact with children in the existing family and social network and the views that they have of the development of these children.  the views of the prospective adopters about the child/ren they could care for including those with emotional, health, developmental, behavioural and educational problems.  The qualities and capacities of prospective adopter/s for flexibility, consistency, learning from experience, coping with stress, promoting identity and difference and work with the agency.  The health and vigour of the prospective adopters as assessed and advised by the agency Medical Advisor. Alongside these specific issues in relation to adoption another set of issues were identified under the heading –  The applicant/s capacity to make and sustain close relationships with adults and children  Assessment of the stability of relationships

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British Association for Adoption and Fostering (BAAF)—Written evidence It was noted that under the then current BAAF form F this was likely to include issues such as –   

the qualities that each prospective adopter brings to the partnership; what makes the relationship positive for each individual? within the relationship how do the prospective adopters cope with problems/stress/anger?

. It was noted here that these issues would need to be addressed with sensitivity and could be experienced as intrusive. In particular ‘It is unlikely that asking ill-thought through questions about a prospective adopter’s sex life will provide information pertinent to the assessment. Such questions should only be asked if they have a clear purpose which has been explained to the prospective adopter. Family and Environmental Factors (from the ACIN Framework) Apart from the prospective adopter/s themselves, their wider family and social network and circumstances were also identified as a core part of the preparation and assessment. These include –     

The attitudes about adoption of both children and adults in the household and other significant children and adults in the wider family and relevant social network. The financial circumstances of the applicant/s Employment and hours of work Anticipated primary caring responsibilities of the child Suitability of the applicant/s accommodation including identifying any potential risks from activities, accommodation, environment, hobbies and garden.

Throughout the Review, recognition was given to the sensitivity and potential intrusiveness of many areas that would be subject to assessment. This included striking a balance between the objective of undertaking a thorough assessment to ensure the maximum chances of securing a stable, secure and a loving home for a child and the avoidance of unnecessary and meaningless questions that did not contribute anything to this primary objective. The Review was subject to public consultation and the feedback was used to design the current system. A summary of the current statutory framework is included in Appendix ???– Research Evidence As a part of the Adoption Research Initiative, the Department for Children Schools and Families commissioned a review by Professor David Quinton from the University of Bristol on matching in adoption. This substantial review was published by BAAF early in 2012(Quinton 2012). The review as the title suggests is focused on the evidence base for matching – the 232

British Association for Adoption and Fostering (BAAF)—Written evidence identification of those parenting capacities which when combined with child characteristics lead to positive placements and outcomes. The review identifies that the research evidence for matching is relatively weak given its importance. There is more research evidence on parenting capacities although this principally focuses on factors that influence disruption and this evidence largely emanates from the USA. Much of the evidence focuses on those adopter characteristics that have not been identified as risk factors. These include – 1. Age. Age per se has not been found to be significant. There may be some advantages where it brings maturity but in itself it is likely to be more important as indicative of other factors of greater significance. 2. Education, Occupation and Income. As with age, these characteristics are not found to be significant in themselves although as with age they may be indicative of other significant factors such as a unmanaged conflict between the adopters and the child 3. Single vs. two parent adoption. The success of single woman adopters is noted especially for harder to place children although it is particularly important to note the evidence from the USA where nearly a third of adoptions from care are made to single women adopters. 4. Culture and ethnicity. While a significant factor for a range of reasons, the degree of the matching of characteristics between adopters and child is not shown to be significant in disruptions. 5. Experience as Parents. Differences between those who seek to create a family through adoption and those seeking to complete a family through adoption has not been found to be significant. Adaptability to the child’s needs and circumstances is probably the more important issue and experience may or may not be indicative of that. 6. Experience as adopters of foster carers. There is some evidence from the USA that foster care adoptions are more stable but given the greater number of such adoptions in the USA and the pathway to placement, this is not surprising. 7. Parenting history and behavior. Adoptive parent’s history of abuse has been found to be indicative of disruptions including abuse in the adoptive family. A U.K. study has also demonstrated the importance of unresolved losses in adoptive parents in the development of the child’s attachment status. 8. Social Support. The availability of social support and social networks has been demonstrated to have a positive impact on placement stability. However, the capacity to develop and maintain support is dependent on other factors in adopters. 9. Expectations. Realistic expectations have been shown to be very important in placement stability. Expectations can result from a number of sources – poor preparation, inadequate information, experience, strongly held beliefs and social conventions and unresolved losses and trauma. These may be particularly important for children who are older at placement. 10. Stretching. Placing children outside of the expressed and known preferences and capacities of adopters has been shown to increase the risk of disruption. 11. Willingness to work with the agency. An unwillingness to work with the adoption agency either in seeking information and discussing emerging problems has been

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British Association for Adoption and Fostering (BAAF)—Written evidence shown to negatively impact on placement stability. 12. Agency Influence on Expectations. Where agencies did not share information relevant to the placement of the child, where there was high staff turnover, poor preparation of adopters and planning for the child to join their new family there was a negative impact on placement stability. 13. Parenting Style. Parenting behavior has been shown to be significant in the positive development of and particularly the developmental recovery of adopted children. Parental sensitivity and responsiveness have been shown to be important in placement stability but child characteristics do have an important part to play in this especially where there are significant levels of overactive and restless behavior. Summary Research has demonstrated that demographic factors have little part to play in adoption stability and outcomes. This is largely reflected in the current approach to recruiting, engaging and approving prospective adopters where, age, marital status, sexual orientation, class, income, ethnicity, religion are not used to bar people – indeed diversity is welcomed. It may be that these issues index other important characteristics but in themselves they do not predict of determine outcomes. What seems to be far more significant are qualities such as commitment, sensitivity, a flexible and relaxed approach to parenting where the child’s capacity to tolerate closeness is respected and can be understood and worked with, realistic expectations, the ability in adopters to distance themselves from the child’s behavior, and a willingness to work with the agency and to comprehend information about the child. In reviewing these issues Quinton stresses that these general characteristics are probably as good as our current level of knowledge will allow. There are no studies that explicitly address outcomes from matching which is not to say that such knowledge does not exist in high quality professional practice. Adopter Recruitment, Preparation and Approval - The current situation There has been significant exposure since the Times campaign and the Narey report on people with a poor experience of each stage of the adoption process. These issues continued to be explored by and reported in the Treasury Review (unpublished) and were subject to discussion by the DFE ‘Expert Group’ and in the Adoption Action Plan. These experiences must be treated seriously as they run counter to every recommendation in the Fundamental Review of 2002 and subsequent measures in primary and secondary legislation and practice guidance. However, it is also important to note that many adoption agencies report good to high levels of satisfaction from adopters once they have completed the process. There is recognition of why the process is rigorous, why it takes the time it does, and what is at stake for the child as well as the adopters. It is also very important to note with increasing numbers of children with adoption as the plan, the current supply of adopters is just not sufficient. That is particularly so for children in sibling groups, children with complex needs and older children. There are many reasons why this may

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British Association for Adoption and Fostering (BAAF)—Written evidence be so including the effectiveness of current recruitment, preparation and assessment practice. It may result from under-investment in these services. It may result from the current economic climate where many people are concerned about the stability and security of their employment, financial and housing circumstances. The Action Plan introduces the proposal of a two-stage process to be completed for the majority of applicants within 6 months. It also highlights the importance of the process focussing on the analysis of the information relevant to assessing the suitability of adopters, the use of professional discretion in ensuring that process is timely, focussed and relevant and using information available from other assessments including previous adopter and foster carer assessments. It is important as these proposals are further developed that consideration is given to – 1. A distinction between speediness and timeliness in assessing and approving adopters. The process of becoming an adopter involves complex psycho-social processes of taking in large amounts of new information and processing it, coming to terms with lengthy (failed) procedures in relation to infertility where this applies, adjusting to loss and change and making significant adjustments in relationships with partners, family members and support networks 2. Recognising that the adopter recruitment, and the determination of suitability is resource intensive 3. Recognising the importance of a skilled, knowledgeable and supported workforce 4. Using the evidence base that is available 5. Piloting, evaluating and learning what is effective especially where new approaches are being introduced Matching – Social Worker led or Adopter led? The process of identifying a suitable match for a child is largely generated through the adoption agency and social workers. In recent years there have been opportunities for adopters to actively identify children they might be interested in adopting. These opportunities present themselves in profiling publications such as Be My Parent (BAAF) and Children Who Wait (Adoption UK). Further development of these opportunities have taken place through secure web based profiling and the addition of video profiles of children. The introduction of the Adoption Register for England and Wales (funded by the Department for Education and run by BAAF) has provided a further mechanism for linking children and prospective adopters. The Adoption Register has successfully run Exchange Days where children are profiled at a local event and approved adopters are invited to see these profiles, talk to social workers and if they identify a child, express an interest, pursuing there interest further. Further development of these kinds of events have been taking place through a separate pilot to explore the use of Placement Activity Days. These events bring children, their carers, social workers and prospective adopters together for a day event where child appropriate and child centred

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British Association for Adoption and Fostering (BAAF)—Written evidence activities are arranged. Adopters and children have an opportunity to meet one another through a range of outdoor, play, and art activities. The events are very carefully prepared for and sensitively run. Pilots have been arranged through the East Midlands Adoption Consortia and run by BAAF. A number of children have found appropriate matches as a result.22 While the notion of adopter led or social worker led matching is unhelpful as either one or the other, both are important, the question does raise the importance of the appropriate engagement of prospective adopters in the matching process and particular the part that ‘falling in love’ plays in the match. The expertise and experience of social workers must continue to play a part in matching but there is considerably more scope for actively engaging prospective adopters in the process. There is nothing in law to prevent this and it is statutory and practice guidance that should promote its further development and use. Post-adoption contact and support: How common is it for children to have some form of direct or indirect contact with their birth family following adoption? Has the ACA 2002 had any impact on practice in this area? Are further legislative changes necessary? It is common for adopted children to have contact post Adoption Order. The most common form of contact arrangement is ‘letterbox’, the exchange of information and news between the child or their adoptive parent/s and the birth parents or family including siblings on a periodic basis. This is often mediated through the adoption agency to maintain the identification and location of the adoptive family. Direct contact is much less common and where it does happen is with the adopted child’s siblings or possibly other family members. There are examples of direct contact with birth family members. It is difficult to be precise in quantifying the extent of any form of contact but adoption agencies report that the demands on their resources are considerable. There are important studies on contact after adoption from Dr. B. Neil from the University of East Anglia (Neil 2000; Neil 2010; Neil 2011) Contact has usually been defined by its frequency, type, place and person i.e. twice yearly, letterbox, mediated through adoption agency with birth mother. This is sometimes called structural arrangements for contact. However, this has been identified for some time and particularly in the USA as a rather limited definition (Brodzinsky and Palacios 2005). The term that more accurately conveys the nature of contact is ‘communicative openness’. This concept recognises the complex psychological and social processes that are at play when adopted children, adoptive parents and birth parents and birth family members think and feel about adoption. These may be active at those times when contact arrangements are taking place but thinking, feeling and communicating about adoption is not confined to contact but present in some form or another much the time – and that may include not wanting or needing to think about it. The critical issue is the degree to which individuals, families and networks are open to communicating about their thoughts and feelings about adoption in ways that are helpful and supportive to those involved when and where it is something that is important - whatever might have stirred this up. This includes good thoughts and feelings and not so good thoughts and feelings. 22

A Video has been supplied of one event for consideration by the Select Committee

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British Association for Adoption and Fostering (BAAF)—Written evidence

One of the issues the concept of communicative openness raises is the degree to which adopters, children and birth parents are prepared and supported to be communicatively open. Thoughts and feelings about adoption and being a part of the adoptive family are a part of the fabric of adoption. This is so for the birth parents and birth family as well. How these issues work themselves into that fabric and what helps and what hinders depends so much on the psychological maturity, insight and openness of those concerned. Managing this in the best interests of children who are already vulnerable where there are challenging issues from the past of abuse and neglect, safety, fear and trauma is not easy. Having the support of knowledgeable adoption professionals in addressing these issues couldn’t be more important. There is powerful material available which conveys the complexity and intensity of these issues from a child’s perspective. (Macaskill 2002; Harris 2008) It is important to note that the arrival of social media in tracing, identifying and making contact with people is proving to be a major challenge in adoption. There are many cases where this has severely disrupted existing placements, caused profound upset and disturbance and put children at risk. There are no quick fit solutions to this issue although there is guidance for both social workers and adoptive parents.(Fursland 2010; Fursland 2011) There can be no underestimation of the complexity and significance of all the issues connected to and surrounding the rather limited term contact. There are three phases where the law has an impact on those children placed for adoption. Phase 1 - Contact during Care Proceedings Following the child’s admission to care, contact will be arranged to facilitate the continuation of the relationship between the child, their parents and others. In many cases contact will have an element of assessment of the parent’s capacity to care for the child. The legal framework is set out in Article 8 of the ECHR and in S34 of the Children Act 1989 with S1(1) of the Children Act giving a clear perspective on what the overarching responsibility is of the court in deciding these matters ‘the child’s welfare shall be the court’s paramount consideration’. Over the last few years, considerable concern has been expressed about the impact on children especially very young children of the considerable stress caused by high intensity contact where children are transported many times a week over considerable distances in the company of strangers. The framework for this was set out in a judgement in 2003, Re M (Care Proceedings: Judicial Review)[2003] EWHC 850 (Admin), [2003] 2FLR 171) and subsequently clarified in Kirklees Metropolitan District Council v S (Contact to Newborn Babies) [2006] 1 FLR 333, Bodey J). The effect of these judgements in clarifying the law has been to create a practice framework that supports high intensity contact during care proceedings. A paper by Kendrick (Kenrick 2009) exploring the impact of high intensity contact in concurrent planning raised the concerns identified above about the severe consequences of high intensity contact. The President of the Family Division organised the 2011 President’s debate on this issue with presentations from Professor Masson, Dr Glaser, Mrs. Kendrick and Lord Justice Munby who had handed down the 2003 judgement. Lord Justice Munby hearing

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British Association for Adoption and Fostering (BAAF)—Written evidence the evidence presented in the debate about the effect of the stress on babies from these arrangements conceded that the availability of new evidence changed the framework and that if the evidence had been presented to him at that time, his views would reflected this. A subsequent paper has summarised the issues (Schofield and Simmonds 2011) and considerable interest in the evidence has produced a re-examination of current local arrangements in many court and local authorities. However, there is undoubtedly still further work to do in clarifying the law and particularly its interpretation in facilitating contact that is clearly on the side of the child. Too many children are being damaged by the current interpretation that requires them to be subject to arrangements that are the opposite of what we know to facilitate their proper development. A note on a series of steps that should be taken into account is included as Appendix 6 Phase 2 – Contact following the making of a Placement Order The law is clear about the arrangements following the making of the Placement Order during linking, matching, introductions and following placements. There are acutely sensitive issues to be addressed during this major transition. This includes the changing nature of any current contact arrangements with a particular focus in most cases about planning and facilitating ‘Goodbyes’. It is very important that in planning future contact arrangements that the focus remains on the needs of the child including what is not known - especially at this point of major loss, trauma and transition. Making false promises or setting unrealistic arrangements in order to mitigate the pain of the adults or the child is not helpful. Recognising the reality of the longer term processes of ‘communicative openness maybe. Phase 3 – Contact following the granting of the Adoption Order The legal framework is clear in terminating the parental responsibility of the birth parents and transferring parental responsibility to the adopter/s. S46(6) of the Adoption and Children Act 2002 requires that existing or proposed contact arrangements should be considered before making the Order. Subsequent to the making of the Adoption Order, the parents have no legal status in the child's life and will need to apply for leave from the court to make an application for contact under S8 of the Children Act, 1989. The accepted protocol is that if parents apply for leave the court will hear from them and ask the local authority and guardian for their view before deciding whether or not to grant leave (thus avoiding disturbing the adoptive parents or child unnecessarily). If leave is granted the parents can then apply for contact. We are not aware of any cases where parents have been granted leave to bring an application. There have been a few applications where siblings have been allowed to bring an application when adopters have reneged on agreed contact, but as far as we know there still haven't been contact orders made against adopters' wishes. There have been questions raised recently on making it an offence for birth parents or family members to make unsolicited contact with an adopted child through social media. We don’t believe this is a workable or helpful proposition. The issues need to be addressed through the kinds of advice in the Fursland guides.

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British Association for Adoption and Fostering (BAAF)—Written evidence

In summary contact is a complex issue that raises the strongest of feelings and issues in adoption. The evidence base is still relatively poor in the context on children adopted from care. The concept of communicative openness adds a richer framework than that typically used in structural arrangements for contact. We believe the current law to be well drafted and the issues currently being experienced in the field to be those of good practice by well qualified, experienced adoption practitioners in well resourced adoption support services. What impact, if any, have the public spending cuts had on the provision of postadoption support services? This question is very difficult to answer with direct evidence. There is little doubt that there have been extensive re-organisations and adjustments to services over the last few years. While it is clear that the provision of support services either through universal services such as health and education or specialist services in the public and voluntary sector continues, the demand is greater than the supply and public spending cuts certainly contribute to this. It is a matter of considerable concern and one that needs to be urgently addressed. Would you support the imposition of a statutory duty on local authorities to meet the assessed needs of adoptive families for support? What would be the advantages and disadvantages of imposing such a duty?

Since the implementation of the A&CA 2002, eligibility for an assessment for adoption support services is provided under section 4. A local authority must when requested by a person specified in section 3(1), namely 1. children who may be adopted, their parents and guardians, 2. persons wishing to adopt a child, and 3. adopted persons, their parents, natural parents and former guardians; 4. carry out an assessment of that person’s needs for adoption support services. undertake an assessment of need. At the time the statutory framework was drafted and then implemented, there was wide spread concern that there was no ‘duty’ for local authorities to actually provide a service following the assessment. The identification of need through an assessment resulted in the local authority having to ‘decide’ whether to provide any service to the person assessed. (Section 4(4)). Potentially this introduced a serious flaw of completed assessments of need but decisions not to provide. Comparing this to the provision of other public services, there is an understandable logic to this framework. NHS patients are eligible to an assessment of health

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British Association for Adoption and Fostering (BAAF)—Written evidence needs from their G.P. or A&E but they do not have a right to particular treatments unless the clinician decides that is appropriate and in some circumstances NIHCE decides that it is an effective form of intervention given its cost. To deprive a patient of a clinical intervention that is required would be negligent and identifiable as such with significant consequences for the medical practitioner or the health provider or both. The evidence base for adoption support is very limited indeed. NIHCE have issued guidance in relation to looked after children but its recommendations do not specify particular forms of intervention. Other NIHCE guidance does review interventions for identified clinical disorders such as autism or parenting interventions for conduct disorders but these are not adoption specific. There is only one RCT for adoption parenting programmes (Rushton and Monck 2009) in adoption although a second has been completed for fostering but not yet published (Scott et.al) and a third adoption specific programme has been commissioned by the Department of Health drawing on the Oregon Social Learning Centre’s23 evidenced based models of KEEP and MTFC. The secondary legislation in the Adoption Support Services Regulations 2005 is quite specific about the assessment for adoption support and sets this out in Regulation 14(1-4). These regulations draw heavily on the dimensions of the assessment of children in need framework, requires interviews with those being assessed and the preparation of a written report on the assessment. Where necessary, consultation with health and education is specified to ensure that an assessment is comprehensive and complete. Under regulation 4(4), the local authority must decide if the person assessed has needs for adoption support and whether it proposes to provide services. Before making the decision as to whether to provide services, the local authority must issue a statutory notice under regulation 17 allowing the person to make representations. The notice is specifically required to set out – 1.1. a statement as to the person’s needs for adoption support services; 1.2. where the assessment relates to his need for financial support, the basis upon which financial support is determined; 1.3. whether the local authority propose to provide him with adoption support services; 1.4. the services (if any) that are proposed to be provided to him; 1.5. if financial support is to be paid to him, the proposed amount that would be payable; 1.6. any proposed conditions under regulation 12(2). Where the local authority proposes to provide support, then it must provide a draft plan as required in regulation 4(5). It must also specify the time allowed for representations to be submitted. Following representations or the expiration of the time allowed to make them, the local authority must make its decision as to whether to provide support services under section 4(4). 23

http://www.oslc.org/

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British Association for Adoption and Fostering (BAAF)—Written evidence Regulation 18 requires a statutory notice to be issued of that decision together with an explanation of the reasons for that decision. Where services are to be provided then the detailed plan must be provided together with the person nominated to monitor the delivery of that plan (Regulation 16(4)) Regulation 19 requires that the local authority review the provision of services at appropriate intervals and in any event not less than annually. If as a result of a review there is a proposal to vary or terminate the service, then that proposal must be set out in writing giving an opportunity to make representations and the timescale for that. If a revision to the plan is being proposed than a copy of the new draft plan must be made available as well. Following representations or the expiration of the time allowed, the local authority can make a decision to vary or terminate the service. It must issue a statutory notice of its decision and where appropriate issued a revised plan. The regulatory framework is very specific in its detail and envisages a process of assessment, decision-making and collaboration with those eligible to request adoption support. What is does not allow is for a poorly considered, arbitrary, or one-sided gulf between the duty to assess and the duty to provide. The process is framed around transparency and specific detail where the duty of care whether for the professional or the agency is unavoidably present. There will inevitably be some situations where the perspective of those seeking a service is different to those proving a service. But that is inevitable where there is uncertainty about effectiveness especially where costs are high and resources limited. The problem that currently needs to be addressed is what is it about this statutory framework that has not apparently had its intended effect. That framework ensures that through primary and secondary legislation a duty to assess for a wide range of adoption support needs and sets out a series of statutory steps for providing effective support services. That framework recognises the central importance of the provision of support in adoption. Current extensively reported difficulties in obtaining regulatory assessments or related services do need to be addressed. As a part of this there does need to be better understanding of the problems. There are some key questions – 

To what extent is cost a significant factor with the unavailability of sufficient funding by local authorities directly related to this? In other words is there an absence of sufficient ring fenced funding?



Is the absence of a robust evidence base about what works in providing adoption support a major barrier in making an investment in services that are appropriately available in a consistent and reliable form?



To what extent are workforce issues relevant in ensuring there is a sufficient level and range of understanding of the needs and provision services to those affected by adoption?



To what extent does the apparent breakdown in the current statutory framework for adoption support figure in the inspection of adoption agencies 241

British Association for Adoption and Fostering (BAAF)—Written evidence and adoption support agencies by OFSTED? 

What issues arise in the commissioning and provision of adoption support services where the primary provider is health particularly Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services or Education?

It is difficult to envisage a statutory right to an actual service specifically in relation to adoption support. There are other groups of children who would need to fall within any such provision – children placed through special guardianship and possibly more generally - children in care. There would also be other groups of children living with their families – children with special needs, children with special education needs, disabilities or complex health conditions. While the argument for the universal provision of services in adoption is very strong, privileging adoption above these other groups would be difficult in terms of social justice. There is no doubt that the provision of adoption support services need to become more reliable, equitable and effective. Considerable investment is being made but clearly this is not sufficient. It is an issue that requires full and creative exploration. Support to Birth Parents The focus in the provision of adoption support tends to be on those of the child and adoptive family. It is important to note the full range of people affected by adoption identified in the primary and secondary legalisation. In particular there needs to be a continuing focus on the support needs to birth parents. The issues for them are profound and complex. The adoption of their child brings life changing consequences that in many cases are but one of a number of life changing issues they will face. The law is clear about this but services can struggle to engage with birth parents unless they are well resourced, expert in what they do and creative in how they do it. We would want to emphasize 1. How valuable and necessary services for birth relatives are and how high quality services enable birth relatives to move on with their lives and enable their children to move on and settle with their adoptive families. 2. The savings these services can make in the long term to Social Care budgets, as birth parents make changes that enable them either keep subsequent children, or decide not to have more children, thus reducing the number of children in the care system. They also access education and employment so become less dependent on the welfare system. 3. National Minimum Standard 12.3 is vague in requiring independent support for Birth Parents. There is a question about how this might be strengthened in new legislation. 4. Whether the adoption passport for support discussed in the DFE’s Adoption Plan for adopters and adoptees should be extended to include birth relatives so they have a much more explicit entitlement to services.

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British Association for Adoption and Fostering (BAAF)—Written evidence

Appendix 1 Children Looked after by Legal Order – Placement Order and Freed for Adoption 2007-2011 from - SSD903 returns

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British Association for Adoption and Fostering (BAAF)—Written evidence

Appendix 2 6. Services 6.1 The Establishment of a National Adoption Service What is the current position? 6.1.1 Adoption is a complex process and requires considerable knowledge and understanding of Children's needs and problems. Social Workers involved in planning, organising, and preparing a child and their birth family for adoption undertake a considerable task often against a background of difficult and combative care proceedings which impose timescales and require complex reports and care plans to be produced. 6.1.2 Historically the geographical split of local authorities provided a handful of very small agencies covering vast rural areas and only placing annually a handful of children and recruiting a small number of prospective adopters, such agencies have seen for themselves the merit of collaborating with each other to provide a more proficient and cost effective adoption service. Collaboration of these services on a wider scale would provide a National Adoption body, which will ensure the provision of a larger scale service handling some of the key tasks in the adoption process. Why are we proposIng change? 6.1.3 We want local authorities to act sooner, more efficiently and effectively to find permanency for those children for whom a return home is not in their interests and to enhance promotion of adoptions and increase the pool of adopters. 6.1.4 The Family Justice Review of family law proceedings criticised the lengthy time of adoption (between entry into care and adoption was 954 days - that is about 2 years 7 months) and the complexity of the panel system. One of the specific recommendations of the Family Justice Review in combating delay, is the introduction of specific timetables for cases and the removal of some panels, to eliminate unnecessary duplication. The legislative changes arising from the Family Justice Review will be taken forward as part of the implementation of that work. 6.1.5 Agencies, officials and the Adoption Register in the last 12 months have noted a reduction in the numbers of approved adopters. All have identified the urgent need to recruit, assess and approve potential adopters, a process which can take between 6-8 months to complete. The lack of potential adopters obviously has a huge impact on the delays being experienced by the looked after population. Evidence also suggests that post adoption services are patchy throughout Wales. 6.1.6 We believe that a National Adoption service will reap greater benefits enabling the concentration of such specialised skilled persons which will enhance the efficiency and quality of

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British Association for Adoption and Fostering (BAAF)—Written evidence the assessment process, provide equity in the arrangements for adoption and encourage the pooling at prospective adopters. What changes are we proposing to make through the Bill? bb. New powers In the Bill will enable Welsh Ministers to require all local authorities (adoption agencies) to come together to form a single National Adoption service for the purpose of discharging certain adoption functions. Our current thinking is that the National Adoption Service would be responsible for: o

Providing National leadership & overview of adoption services (linking to standards & performance):

o

Recruitment, Training & Assessment;

o

A Framework for adoption approval (including panels);

o

The promotion of adoption and building capacity in terms of prospective adopters and specialist workforce skills; and

o

Commissioning of an adoption support service.

6.1.7 Each local authority would continue to be an adoption agency. to have responsibilities for applying to a court for a placement I adoption order, preparation and maintenance of the adoption plan; and for the placement arrangements for the child. The pooling of certain activities in the National Adoption Service should not affect these processes. 6.1.8 The detail of the arrangement for the National Adoption Service would be included in regulations. Explanation 6.1.9 We want to transform adoption services, to prevent unnecessary delay and duplication which has such a negative impact on the outcomes for our looked after children. We want to identity aspects of the adoption process that are best performed at a National level, whilst recognising that there are functions that should remain the responsibility of individual local authorities. 6.1.10 The development of a National Adoption Service will ensure that skilled and experienced adoption workers are providing an economically viable and cost effective service, with a common understanding and strong professional base for adoption knowledge and best practice. These experienced practitioners will be the backbone of the new service and will have the ability to develop the framework in conjunction with the Welsh Government, by which the National Adoption Service will operate. 6.1.11 The National Adoption Service will not operate as an "adoption agency" as referred to in the Adoption and Children Act 2002 and in the Adoption Agencies (Wales) Regulations 2005

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British Association for Adoption and Fostering (BAAF)—Written evidence made under section 9 of the Adoption and Children Act 2002. The new body will, however, be inspected under the Care Standards Act 2000. Arrangements for the inspection of the National Adoption Service will be set out in regulations. What outcomes do we anticipate? 6.1.12 We believe that the establishment of a National Adoption Service will: o

Enable the concentration of such specialised skilled persons which will enhance the efficiency and quality of the assessment process;

o

Provide equity in the arrangements for adoption;

o

Encourage the pooling of prospective adopters;

o

Deliver an early referral mechanism for children with an adoption plan. Eradicating waiting lists for prospective adopters who routinely face substantive delays for training or for an adoption assessment. Reducing the waiting periods for approved prospective adopters who have not yet achieved a placement;

o

Bring greater focus to authorities placement strategies, heighten the important role that adoption has in permanency for children where rehabilitation with the parents is unrealistic and not in the child's best interest: and

o

Ensure that the third sector agencies have a key role in supporting the national aim through improved partnership with local government in the delivery of adoption and adoption support services.

Impact 6.1.13 A National Adoption Service will have the potential to deliver these services in a more efficient and effective way. It will also allow individual adoption agencies to concentrate their area of expertise on placement arrangements for the child, preparation and maintenance of the adoption plan: and to focus on the thorough detailed work required by the courts for child reports and assessments, when applying for a placement/adoption order. Consultation Questions 88) Do you agree the functions that a National Adoption Service will be responsible for, as set out in paragraph bb? 89) Do you suggest any additional functions that should be Included? 90) Are there any other barriers to the current arrangements that should be considered in the development of the Social Services (Wales) Bill? 91) Do you have any other comments that you wish to make about our proposals for a National Adoption Service? 246

British Association for Adoption and Fostering (BAAF)—Written evidence

Appendix 3 Written response to The Children and Young People Committee Inquiry into Adoption Submitted by BAAF Cymru Context The Organisation BAAF is a UK wide association and registered charity with a distinct national footprint across Wales. BAAF Cymru is also registered as a voluntary adoption and voluntary adoption support agency. We have been educating, advising and campaigning to improve the lives of children and young people in care and on the edge of care since 1980, identifying permanent families for children unable to live with their birth families whilst working to secure placement stability and optimise outcomes. Members include local authorities, voluntary adoption agencies, independent fostering providers, local Health Boards, law firms and other organisations/individuals working with our priority groups of children and young people. A Helpline is also available and accessible to all including non members and members of the public. Our priority objectives in Wales are underpinned by a policy and legislative mandate set out by Welsh Government and include the following: 1. High quality training, consultancy and information to improve delivery of fostering and adoption services. 2. Accessible and responsive advice and information to members of the public affected by adoption and fostering 3. Enhanced public understanding about adoption ad fostering by effective collaboration with partner agencies and the media 4. Provision of specialist advice to Welsh Government 5. Delivery of services informed by the voice of the child In providing this written evidence BAAF Cymru has sought to represent views from a number of different perspectives based on our experience and work within the field of adoption Scene Setting Adoption must be seen in the broader context of planning for permanence and as part of an integrated system of services for children in care. Children in care need permanence plans that

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British Association for Adoption and Fostering (BAAF)—Written evidence are implemented with appropriate urgency and are based on a full understanding and assessment of the child’s need for a family life. A good permanence plan will hold the child’s future development in mind at all times and will give consideration to the full range of possible permanence options (including Special Guardianship, permanent fostering, kinship care arrangements) and their suitability to meet the child’s needs within the context of their individual requirements and family circumstances and the life long impact and implications of the permanence plan pursued. It is also important to stress that adoption is a service for children. Whilst this may sound obvious, it can be tempting to regard the ‘customer’ in the adoption process as the prospective adopter. That is to misunderstand adoption in the most fundamental way. The placement of a child in a loving family is what drives the adoption system. It is our responsibility to ensure that the system that delivers this is effective and efficient with the resources it needs to secure that objective. Prospective adopters deserve nothing less than a first class service that is efficient, welcoming, fair and responsive but we must never lose our focus on the child. Whist the Inquiry is keen to examine the experiences and voice of those directly affected by the adoption process, birth families parents appear to have been omitted. The Adoption and Children Act 2002. (Welfare Checklist 1.4) states that courts and adoption agencies must have regard to the wishes and feelings of any of the child’s relatives. We know that the decision to made by birth parent(s) to consent to the placement of a birth child for adoption is a life changing one for all those involved .In the same vein contested adoption proceedings resulting in the ‘loss’ of a child through adoption are likely to be a traumatic event for the birth parent(s).The finality of the consequences of severing the legal relationship between the child and his or her birth parent(s)is reflected in the thresholds that the placing adoption agency must satisfy and evidence in court .It is important that services are available to birth families pre and post adoption both in assisting them to mange their feelings of grief, anger and loss but also in respect of the child where the plan is adoption. Birth families can provide a rich seam of background information that is fundamental to identifying an appropriate match with prospective adopters. It is also important to have relevant information to share with the adopted person in later years. Alienating the birth family has negative consequences for the child and adoptive family, both in the short and longer term. There is concern that services for birth parents can be inconsistent across Wales, The lack of adequate adoption support services for birth parents is recognised in Inspections as one of the greatest areas of unmet need. This can result in unsuccessful management of loss, particularly the birth mother, an unacceptable ‘contact gap’ after the child is placed for adoption (whether agency mediated or direct contact) and an inability to track and meet the needs of birth fathers. This has been the basis for the development of collaborative arrangements such as the North Wales Adoption service. Adoption support services need to be both timely and appropriate. An adequate service would be proactively available for birth parent(s) throughout their ‘adoption experience’. If such services are limited to the period of care and adoption proceedings they will be of limited value and will not be accepted.

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British Association for Adoption and Fostering (BAAF)—Written evidence Timely and appropriate services for birth parents are likely to benefit all those involved: – birth parents themselves – subsequent children born to the birth parents, – the children placed – an acknowledgement by the birth parent(s) of the situation can provide an important message for the child and thereby stabilise placements. Adoption agencies should be planning in respect of this cohort of older children adopted from care for their future possible search and reunion needs. If there is no resolution at the time of adoption or during the period following the adoption and before the child attains adulthood it may have a negative impact on the birth parent(s) and on the birth child who as an adult wishes to seek out or establish a relationship with a birth parent. – adoptive parents by promoting arrangements that will engender future placement stability for the child Prospective parents How effectively are prospective parents supported throughout the adoption process, particularly through the assessment and approval process? The primary objective and outcome of preparation and assessment is to identify and predict the capacity of adults to become effective adoptive parents to the specific child or children placed. Identifying and predicting parenting is extremely challenging - most people only know what parenting is like when they actually experience it. In adoption there are specific issues about approving adopters that depends on the accurate prediction of what is a future event. The preparation, assessment and approval process are often generic when the child’s needs and circumstances are very specific. Adoption assessments are a complex professional task that requires a confident and competent workforce to provide an evidenced piece of work founded in relationship based practice. One of the key challenges facing some Adoption Agencies in Wales is the ability to resource a system that can process assessments in a timely way and provide preparation courses that are delivered in sequence to individual assessments. This is leading to inconsistencies into how effectively prospective adoptive parents are supported throughout the process. In reality whilst prospective adoptive parents do generally find preparation training very helpful some report that these are completed too long before the assessment begins and are done in a vacuum. Undertaking the preparation classes psychologically builds up expectations that an assessment will follow imminently and they are one step nearer to approval and ultimate placement of their adoptive child. Lack of resourcing or insufficient numbers to make training cost effective for the agency can result in preparation classes only being offered sporadically throughout the year. This has been recognised as a potential contributor to delays in the assessment and approval process and some Adoption agencies have now entered into joint partnership arrangements to offer more preparation classes throughout the year. (examples of

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British Association for Adoption and Fostering (BAAF)—Written evidence this working in practice can be found in Caerphilly ,RCT Newport and Bridgend). It has also been recognised recently that a review of the actual present assessment framework (PAR) should be explored to consider whether the actual model is compounding delays in the timely completion of assessments. BAAF alongside other partner agencies is currently exploring this and will produce a number of recommendations that will require consideration by Welsh Government and Welsh Adoption agencies. These proposals could involve a staged process that is negotiated with the prospective adopter at the start of their adoption journey identifying key components which require completion within a defined timeframe. Good practice experience indicates that this process should take approximately six months which allows sufficient time for most prospective adopters to come to terms with the nature and consequences of making a life long commitment to child. What action is needed to encourage prospective parents to pursue adoption as a route? 

In addressing the current shortage of adopters, the challenge is to recruit a greater number of adopters generally and more adopters specifically skilled, able and interested in caring for children who wait the longest. For example large sibling groups, disabled children or those with medical uncertainty, older children and children from black and ethnic minority groups. However a targeted recruitment strategy must be supported by a robust and responsive early response to enquiries from prospective adopters. This is presently inconsistent across Wales with similar issues around inadequate resourcing of such services by experienced practitioners able to manage enquires sensitively and responsively.



A potential solution to this would be a national cohesive centrally funded recruitment strategy to provide consistency across Wales. This would require support from a National Adoption helpline which managed initial enquires and was serviced by an experienced workforce who could respond effectively, sensitively and efficiently to the scope and range of calls being made. A national enquiry service can also be used to collate data, analyse trends and plot variations in interest from different regions.



Initial responses must however be backed by local capacity to deliver training and commence the assessment process. We have already heard that there are inconsistencies in both the delivery of these services and in models of practice. It would therefore seem sensible to consider whether regional services could collaborate to deliver a more cohesive service (in line with Sustainable Social Services) that is needs led rather than resource driven. This collaborative service model has already been developed between some Adoption agencies in Wales (for example South East Wales : A single Adoption service hosted by Blaenau Gwent delivers an adoption service to three local authorities and has established a single adoption panel).



Access to adoption support post placement can encourage or deter prospective parents from pursuing adoption. The process that leads to the placement of a child with an adoptive parent is the beginning of the adoption story. Access to an available appropriately resourced range of adoption support services including financial support, health, education and CAMHS is of critical importance particularly for children who 250

British Association for Adoption and Fostering (BAAF)—Written evidence have particular needs. Lack of such resources ( which should ,if needed ,continue up until the child reaches eighteen ) can also deter foster carers from applying to adopt a child where remaining with that carer in a permanent arrangement is deemed the most appropriate outcome for that child. Adoptive parents & families With regard to support, adopters have reported the following as helpful in securing successful placements: 

Being provided at the outset with full information about the child and his/her background –Disruption meetings have highlighted concerns about insufficient information being made available at time of placement. Such information could have assisted with understanding how to manage behaviour and proactively seek help before situations escalate to a crisis point.



The support of the foster carers in helping the child make the transition from foster to adoptive care, by working collaboratively with the LA where the plan is adoption, by reassuring and supporting the child and the prospective adopters. The way the transition is managed by the foster carers and professionals can determine the outcome of the adoptive placement and can influence the attitudes of the adopters in the short and long term to future contact with the foster family.



Foster carers need to be well trained and supported in preparing children to move on and how to manage their own feelings of loss. Foster Carers can oppose the adoption plan if they have reservations about the choice of adoptive parents or where they had hoped that the child would remain with them on a permanent basis to adopt the child. This is critical that foster carers understand their roles and responsibilities in this process and are able to give permission to the child to move on to their new adoptive family. Both timely and undue delay in pursuing permanence plans for a child can place the foster carers and their families under undue pressure. It is also worth noting that foster carers do have a right to lodge an adoption application in respect of a child who has been placed with them on a fostering basis for more than 12 months..



Matching Prospective adoptive parents need to be actively involved in the matching process and be honest about the issues and needs they cannot accommodate. Pre and post approval training in issues of neglect, attachment , managing difficult behaviour is critical to enhance knowledge and understanding of the needs of the children they will be parenting BAAF has recently piloted a model of Placement Activity Days which allows prospective parents to meet children identified as needing adoptive families in a safe ‘controlled ‘ environment . Research from America has indicated that these days can assist positive matching between child and their new family . Present processes within consortia need to be considered vis a vis potential linking and matching. It is in everyone’s interests to have a proactive system of early identification of potential matches. However, within a context of protracted care planning and care proceedings a potential unintended consequence arises when prospective adopters (possibly 2 or 3

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British Association for Adoption and Fostering (BAAF)—Written evidence sets) are taken out of the pool in anticipation of the outcome. This then lessens the ‘pool’ of resources available for other children and takes those adopters who do not proceed to matching for that specific child ‘out of the pool ‘for other children 

Experienced Competent and Qualified Workforce Able to draw on research based evidence to inform decisions at each stage of the process for all involved in adoption journey. Some adoptive families have highlighted continuity of worker for both themselves and their child is important to securing successful outcomes. Ensuring the continuity of practitioners is also an important factor in safeguarding the child and the placement.

What improvements could be made to the support given to adoptive parents? 

Consideration given to the possibility of continuity of worker from assessment through to post approval. Research study by Julie Selwyn and Hilary Saunders ‘Adopting Large Sibling groups Aug 2010 have cited this as a stabilising factor post placement. However this needs to be seen in the context of developing regional services to undertake assessments. If an assessor is unable to continue as case worker there must be appropriate handover of all information to inform both the strengths and identified needs of the family



Better preparation and wider availability of post approval and post placement training on child development and parenting skills .Post placement provision can be specifically developed to meet the identified need of the placement and can therefore be applied in practice.



Provision of learning and development opportunities for IRO’s who review adoptive placements-Specific experience in adoption work is variable amongst IRO’s and they need to be able to pick up on the signs of a placement experiencing difficulties at an earlier stage Their role is critical and pivotal as they have an overview of the agency’s overall functioning as well as the individual child’s circumstances. They also have an important monitoring and quality assurance role (further duties allied to 2008 legislation) in respect of the local authority’s duty of care to the child and the care planning process. This applies both to children in adoptive placements and those children for whom there is an adoption plan but no placement as yet identified. This is a very important group of children whose needs need to be kept in mind – the number and nature of changes to an adoption plan for a child within an adoption agency provides an interesting picture of the level of unmet need. It is acknowledged that some prospective adoptive parents delay in lodging the application to adopt a child in placement because of their concerns about the lack of the provision and a shared understanding between them and the adoption agency in relation to adoption support services.



Full implementation of the Adoption Support Services Regs. (2005)

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British Association for Adoption and Fostering (BAAF)—Written evidence 

Not all LAs have dedicated ASSA posts and there is no consistency in where this role lies within LAs. The strategic aspect of the role has in general not been implemented, including the framework for working with Health and Education. The initial proposal that this function should be fulfilled by a combination of an experienced adoption practitioner and a resource mandate has been generally difficult in practice to achieve.



Consideration to be given to collaborative or regionally based adoption support services where appropriate ie support groups for adoptive parents



A confident and competent workforce who have access to appropriate workforce development opportunities through training and ongoing learning

Adopted Children Do the current arrangements for adoption adequately reflect the rights of the child? Adoption and Children Act 2002 (Welfare Checklist) places a duty on Local Authorities to ascertain children’s wishes and feelings. Article 12 UNCRC states every child has a right to say what they think in all matters affecting them and have their views taken seriously. This is now enshrined in Rights of Children and Young Persons (Wales) measure 2011. Adoption must be a service for children and must be duly processed with the child’s timeframe in mind. However the child’s right to family life can be comprised through delays in care proceedings, delays in family finding and inconsistencies in post adoption support services. We also need to see improvements in the provision of direct services for children both in respect of resources but also a workforce that is trained to listen to children’s wishes and feelings and work directly with them (and their primary care givers) in order that they can work through the myriad of feelings and emotions they will continue to experience in respect of their own personal history. At times it is a difficult equation for practitioners to balance the ‘wishes and feelings’ of the child and the paramouncy of the child’s welfare. This often involves a judgement of the ‘situation of least detriment’ rather than a clearly defined decision. It is also of concern to practitioners, panels and others that at times there is an apparent lack of direct work with the child in order to inform and elicit those wishes and feelings. How effective is the support given to adopted children post adoption? 

More follow up research requires investment into the experiences of adopted persons



Children want to experience ‘normal ‘family life and do not want to be regarded as different from their peers. Support services need to be incorporated into other services for children. The adoption support Services Regs apply not just to Children’s Services but to Health and Education. All relevant organisations should be responsive to the life

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British Association for Adoption and Fostering (BAAF)—Written evidence long needs of children who have been adopted and it should not dependent on where the adoptive family lives as to the quality of service. Multi Agency training should be provided for all those agencies with a responsibility to provide services for adopted children (research evidence Transition to Adulthood for Adopted Young People’ by Dinithi Wijedasa-Hadley Centre - showed adopted young people are more likely to be bullied, engage in risky behaviour & have more mental health issues than comparison group) What action is needed to ensure that delays in the adoption process can be kept to a minimum? 

Legal Proceedings and the Judicial process: Court delays damage children MOJ stats published on 13th January 2012 are demonstrating on average it takes 55 weeks for court proceedings to be finalised. A process that is timely in terms of children’s timescales must include judicial continuity and be normally completed within a 6 month timescale. In this context it is imperative that the Welsh Government moves quickly to respond to and implement the recommendations of the Family Justice Review. ( ref Scott and McKeigue ( 2003) ‘Children in Limbo : research on impact of delay on children where court cases have taken over two years to resolve.



Human Rights: The impact of the Human Rights legislation has also had an impact (and rightly so). It is of concern though that the Article 8 ‘rights to a family life’ is often limited to the birth parent(s) and not always applied to the child’s rights to a family life. Again this is viewed as an unintended consequence



Professional practitioner confidence: One of the objectives of the Public Law Outline was to re-establish the social work practitioner as the ‘expert’ in respect of the child. This has not happened in practice within the court arena.. This area of work (and again rightly so), demands a high level of evidential and professional confidence in meeting the required thresholds. Concerns have been expressed about the need to enshrine confidence in the decision making process and enable practitioners to exercise their professional judgement –(“an unrealistic hope that assessment would somehow deliver certainty if only it went on long enough” Beckett & Mc Keigue (2003); ). The relationship and joint working arrangements between adoption and child care social workers within the local authority is critical as are the dovetailing arrangements between the adoption service (particularly if sited within a shared Service) and the permanence functions and specific duty towards the individual child retained by the local authority.



Use of Expert witnesses: Family Justice review recommends primary legislation to reinforce commissioning an expert’s report must take due consideration of impact of delay on welfare of the child.



Multiple changes of foster placements pre adoption: More consideration and detailed planning of appropriate matching with foster family at outset. Plans for siblings

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British Association for Adoption and Fostering (BAAF)—Written evidence to be placed together or separately can impact on delays in assessment as well as significant issues of reunification and contact arrangements once that separation has occurred. 

Shortage of adoptive families particularly for children with specific needs: Adoption must be available for every child for whom it is the right plan. Delays in implementing plans for adoption damages children’s development but local authorities can become trapped in a cyclical dilemma between available resources and indentified need. This is a varying picture across Wales however with one adoption service reporting a 3.7 month timeframe between making of placement order and moving to an adoptive family. South Wales Adoption Agencies Consortium did report in last six month review (April –September 2011) an increase in number of children referred by 48% and a decrease in the number of adopters referred by 31% (compared same figures reported in Sept 2010). Some of those children do have ‘lesser’ identified needs. It is worth noting here for context that the number of LAC since 2007 has increased by 16.7%. We also need to be mindful of the huge emotional and financial cost of keeping a child in care with no sense of belonging to a ‘forever family’. It is important that all agencies in Wales understand the true financial cost of keeping a child in care and future planning of their services should be done with an awareness of the potential for a long term social return on their investment. This statement is underpinned by research undertaken in 2009 at The Hadley Centre which compared the financial costs of adoption in comparison to a child remaining indefinitely in foster care

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Introductions: Introductions to a new family need to be done sensitively and be well planned supported and monitored by an experienced practitioner. If this critical period is not managed appropriately the potential of disruption is high. It is also important to consider the input of psychological support services at this stage onwards for adoptive parents to be able to make sense of a child’s presenting behaviour at an early stage.

What action is needed to increase the number of successful outcomes once children are considered for adoption?  Listening to the child’s wishes and feelings and those of their birth family members. 

High quality assessment of child’s needs by well trained practitioners within a reasonable timescale

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Investment in working with birth parents in respect of the significant loss they have experienced and greater inclusion in plans for their child

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Support to adoptive parents in providing timely information to birth parents from the outset of the adoptive placement to assist in the development of a positive relationship that can have potential life long consequences for all involved.

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Continuity of worker/s to get to know the child/sibling group/birth family. Repeated change of worker for the child due to staff turnover within child-care teams or case

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British Association for Adoption and Fostering (BAAF)—Written evidence responsibility moving between teams means that often there is no one worker with an in depth knowledge of the child. Within any proposed structural changes on how adoption services can be delivered in the future, expertise and knowledge of the case worker needs to be considered 

High quality, rigorous assessments and preparation of prospective adopters within a transparent process framework and defined timescales. Practice shows that disruptions can often be traced back to inadequate assessments and unrealistic expectations of the adoptive parents. The reality of trying to bond with and parent a child/ren born to someone else, even without taking the specific needs and challenges of the child into consideration often differs from what adopters had hoped to feel and experience. This needs to be taken into account alongside the reality that most prospective adopters have experienced loss through infertility and come to adoption after trying, sometimes for many years, unsuccessfully to have a child of their own with the hope that they will be matched with a child as young as possible

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Strategic recruitment planning at a National and Regional level. It is important that identified priorities in adopter recruitment are clearly identified and where an applicants profile does not match these priorities , the responsibility to signpost them to another agency must be implemented .A National Enquiry Service could be well placed to do this in respect of carrying that national overview of regional need

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Monitoring of the adoptive placement-IRO’s supported in respect of training requirements in order to fulfil their critical role in reviewing and monitoring care plans and adoptive placements

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Life journey work can sometimes be viewed as an additional service instead of an integral part of the work with a child which needs to be undertaken by workers experienced and trained specifically for this work. The quality of the life journey work and /or material varies as does who undertakes this work. Adoptive families and foster carers must also be included and engaged with any such work undertaken both pre and post placement

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The value of evidence, research and analysis. Adoption is rooted in a rich evidence base informed by some empirical studies and much good practice. There are also important examples of poor and damaging outcomes for children where there has been poorly informed practice. Evidence and analysis should inform each stage of the assessment process and workforce development programmes to strengthen expertise and professional judgement should be integral to all professionals working in the field of adoption. If probably resourced this could reduce necessity of expert witness at care proceedings stage, increased confidence in the assessment process for prospective adoptive parents, and matching approval and placement stage

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Adoption Support Services .As the complexity of need for children requiring adoptive families becomes greater, so the need for expert, dedicated services to families becomes

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British Association for Adoption and Fostering (BAAF)—Written evidence a necessity for positive outcomes. For large sibling groups consideration should be given to financial assistance in order for the adoptive parents to stay at home for as it takes the family unit to settle Additional support in the home early in the morning and after school would also be an excellent short term investment for long term placement stability 

Independent Scrutiny and Quality Assurance Any system of decision making in adoption should be underpinned by independent scrutiny of crucial decisions that includes a depth and breadth of relevant adoption experience

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National Adoption Register National Register of adopters for children in Wales to increase pool choice and availability across Wales

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Disruption - collection of statistics and analysis to learn lessons and inform future practice (ref recently announced DfE commission of Hadley Research)

How effective has Welsh Gov been at monitoring adoptions & tracking the progress for the child and parents? 

To date there has been PI monitoring within LA’s and publication of key data stats on an annual basis. This is however qualitative data which can plot trends over comparable timeframes but does not measure quality. There are also inconsistencies in reporting mechanisms on interpretation of that data and there can be limited understanding of its use and value at Local Authority Level. For example whilst disruption stats are not collated nationally there are huge variations in how a disruption is interpreted. As stated above we could learn significant lessons from this and need to consider the value of commissioning similar research in Wales

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It is important that distinction is made between PI’s (Inputs and Outputs) and Outcome measurements. (i.e. how do we measure success?) with a potential shift away from P.I’s towards outcome measurements The proposal to create a National Outcomes framework (as announced in Sustainable Social Services) should assist with this

Specific Examples of Good Practice Statutory Sector Collaboration of Adoption Agencies has already taken place across Wales in recognition of a need to deliver adoption services within resources available. These include: 

North Wales Adoption service hosted by Wrexham serving six Local authorities.

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West Wales single adoption service serving three Local Authorities 257

British Association for Adoption and Fostering (BAAF)—Written evidence

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South East Wales Single adoption Service hosted by Blaenau Gwent serving three local Authorities and has established a single adoption panel

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Some Local Authorities now collaborating on joint training programmes pre approval to reduce delay for applicants

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Provision of support groups for birth parents, Adoptive Families

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Since 2002 South Wales Adoption Agencies Consortium (SWAAC) has worked collaboratively with nine Local authorities and two Voluntary adoption Agencies to facilitate a linking function between children awaiting placements and adopters approved by member agencies. Also undertakes development work on behalf of the consortium.

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ADSS and WLGA are also working in partnership with BAAF and other third sector partners to consider a broad scope of reform of adoption services in Wales, underpinned by the priority action set out in Sustainable Social Services for the delivery of a National Adoption Service

Voluntary Sector St David’s: Good track record of recruiting families able and willing to consider children with specific needs; Low Disruption rates; Good packages of post adoption support. Barnado’s Cymru: Smaller adoption agency in Wales but effective recruitment of adopters particularly for children with disabilities Adoption UK: Provide support for Adoptive parents through helpline, support groups, campaigning on their behalf for increased adoption support services. Also initiated work with schools to educate professionals on issues affecting children in school who have been adopted After Adoption: Support Services to Birth Parents - effectively work with young people and Adult Adoptees. Strategic Adoption Partnership Forum (aforementioned Agencies, BAAF and Children In Wales) have developed a forum to consider how we can work collaboratively in respect of service delivery of Adoption services in Wales. Wendy Keidan Director BAAF Cymru 3.2.12

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British Association for Adoption and Fostering (BAAF)—Written evidence Appendix 4 BAAF CYMRU RESPONSE TO CONSULTATION ON SOCIAL SERVICES (WALES )BILL (please note we have only included for benefit of The Select Committee our response on consultation on 6.1:Establishment of National Adoption Service ) Context This consultation response is informed by the organisation’s experience of working within the field of Adoption and Fostering and within the wider context associated with children and young people in care and on the edge of care. Where appropriate we have also sought to represent the views of other professionals with whom we directly work. 6.1

The Establishment of a National Adoption Service

88)Do you agree the functions that a National Adoption Service will be responsible for ,as set out in paragraph bb? In principle BAAF Cymru agrees with the functions as set out in paragraph bb. It is important to note that with any proposals for change first and foremost the child remains as integral to this change agenda. Any realignment of adoption functions must be with the central premise of improving outcomes for that child. We fully support any recommendations that will provide a consistent National approach to Adoption, with a strong focus on providing National leadership and accountability for service delivery. This National leadership has the opportunity to provide a transparent and tangible framework by which standards and performance are measured. Whilst adoption is a service for children, prospective adopters deserve nothing less than a first class service that is efficient, welcoming fair and responsive. We believe that a National Adoption Service could be ideally placed to strategically co-ordinate national recruitment campaigns that raise awareness and encourage more adopters to come forward to address the current shortage of adopters that presently exists in Wales. It is also important that the National Adoption register is aligned to national strategic recruitment campaigns. The National Adoption register will serve as a rich seam of information on children waiting for adoptive families. However a targeted recruitment strategy must be supported by a robust and responsive early response to enquiries from prospective adopters. This is presently inconsistency across Wales with similar issues around inadequate resourcing of such services by experienced practitioners able to manage enquiries sensitively and responsively. This could be addressed by the establishment of a National helpline service, serviced by an experienced workforce who could respond effectively to the scope and range of calls being made. A national enquiry service can also be used to collate data, analyse trends and plot variations in interest from different regions. We note that the National Service could also be responsible for the training and assessment of prospective adoptive families. Whilst we would welcome a national consistent framework, accountability co-ordination and guidance about how these services are managed and implementation of these services needs to be delivered either by regional collaboration or locally. We must also take into account the needs of those adopters wishing to receive

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British Association for Adoption and Fostering (BAAF)—Written evidence services through the medium of Welsh. There are presently some good examples where training is being delivered across a number of local authorities in order to minimise delay. However there are inconsistencies across Wales about at what stage do prospective adopters receive training in their assessment process. Some report that these are completed too long before the assessment begins and are completed in a vacuum. National guidelines about timescales for each stage of the process would be helpful both to reduce present inconsistencies but also produce a framework that can transparently plot trends and variances in the assessment process. However in developing proposals for reform we must not be driven by data alone as this can present a misleading picture and can be easily misinterpreted. It is crucial that any new proposals maintain the primacy of rigour in ensuring the assessment of prospective adopters is carried out appropriately and effectively. We are clear that there are changes required at each stage of the adoption process to remove unnecessary delay but not at the expense of depth and quality of analysis, assessment and professional judgement that could increase the risk of adoption breakdown. Generally the process can take six months but for some this can be longer as each applicant enters their adoption journey at a different stage. Adoption assessments are a complex professional task that requires a confident and competent workforce that is robustly supervised and managed. We welcome the principle that a National Adoption Service will enable the concentration of specialist skilled persons to enhance the efficiency and quality of the assessment process. However co-ordination and geographical base of this workforce requires thought. Adoptive families comment on continuity of worker from assessment through to post approval as an important factor in safeguarding child and family. A research study by Julie Selwyn and Hilary Saunders (Adopting Large Sibling Groups –Aug 2010) has cited this as a stabilising factor post placement. In addition effective communication between child care worker and adoption worker is imperative as are the dovetailing arrangements between the adoption service (particularly if cited within a shared service) and the permanence functions and specific duty towards the individual child retained by the local authority. There is no evidence to suggest that Panels contribute to delays in the approval of prospective adopters. They presently provide robust quality assurance from a range of independent and expert advice in order to make recommendations on the suitability of adoption applications. Whilst we can see advantages in considering (alongside other functions) a national framework for Panels across Wales and indeed a more collaborative approach to shared Panels between agencies (change of regulations will be required if there are more than two agencies sharing panels) or indeed a national register of individuals recruited to constitute Panels as and when required, co-ordination of such arrangements will require high level detail and planning. A recent medical advisors group which BAAF facilitates stated that an unintended consequence of such proposals could result in being asked to make a professional judgement on the medical analysis of another colleague. We note the proposal for the commissioning of Adoption Support Services. It is important that any outsourcing of adoption support services enables accountability to ensure full implementation of the Adoption Support Services Regs (2005). This must also include multi agency accountability to offer assessed services to children and their families. Provision of adoption support arrangements must include birth parents so that alignment of responsibility

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British Association for Adoption and Fostering (BAAF)—Written evidence between of child care services (which remains locally based) and adoption services (which could be regionally located) is clear. 89) Do you suggest any additional functions that should be included? As highlighted in Q 88 – 1. National Recruitment strategy 2. National Helpline Service 3. National Register for Wales National register for England and Wales presently managed by BAAF so would need to consider impact and implications if this was a Register for Wales. Unintended consequence if a separate Welsh register was established would be to reduce pool of adopters available to meet needs of children who could be successfully placed with English adopters. A cross Country arrangement would need to be implemented to minimise this risk. 4. Research - Adoption is rooted in a rich evidence base informed by some empirical studies and much good practice. A National Adoption Service would be well placed to commission research that could inform practice. For example research into disruption to learn lessons and inform future practice. 5. Inter-Country Adoption - A National Adoption service could oversee this very specialised work by experienced practitioners. 6. RM presently delivered nationally (However this service is for Adoption and Fostering. Need to consider implications for service if clear delineation between Adoption and Fostering) 90)Are there any other barriers to the current arrangements that should be considered in the development of the Social Services ( Wales) Bill? BAAF Cymru have recently submitted a consultation response (16.5.12) on the implementation of a recommendation from the FJR that ‘should be placed for adoption’ recommendations be removed from the Adoption Agencies (Wales) Regulations 2005. We feel it would be helpful to refer to this submission in respect of implications particularly in respect of role of Panel and duty of ADM. We urge that any implementation of proposals is accompanied by Statutory Guidance to ensure adoption agencies are clear on the information to be provided to the ADM. This decision needs to be informed by those with specific adoption expertise as presently occurs. Clarity will avoid delay resulting from legal challenges by those representing birth parents. Guidance will also need to cover expectations of ADM in respect of competence and independence and recording of decisions. It will also need to reflect a shared understanding (between child care and family placement colleagues as well as between adoption panel and agency) to the matching panel in relation to

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British Association for Adoption and Fostering (BAAF)—Written evidence information about child (which won’t under new arrangements have been previously heard) that informs critical decisions on match of child with family. Under the best possible circumstances matching is not an exact science. It would be an unintended consequence if the proposed process diluted the robustness of this process. Further clarification is required about the legislative framework proposed for a National Adoption Service. We note that it will not be inspected under Adoption Agency (Wales) Regulations 2005 but will be governed by the Care Standards Act 2000. There needs to statutory guidance accompanying any such arrangements to ensure level of scrutiny about how services are delivered. There are resource implications in respect of any change. To ensure a service that is delivered by those with necessary knowledge and skills will inevitably involve reorganisation of current arrangements. This can create anxiety within existing structures so need to be mindful that appropriate consultation and consideration is given to those affected by proposed changes. There are also financial resource implications particularly if change is to be effected in the delivery of post adoption support arrangements. Efficiency savings could be released by children leaving care through adoption (research Hadley Centre compares financial cost of adoption in comparison to child remaining indefinitely in foster care). However there needs to be a fundamental review of how budgets are organised within present arrangements in respect of the Looked After Children’s budget and Adoption budget. Consideration could also be given to releasing any efficiency saving realised from removing ‘should be placed recommendation’ by panels to support post adoption support costs. If Welsh Government decided to promote concurrency arrangements they would need to consider how this will be implemented in practice if approval of foster carers remains responsibility of LA under Fostering Services (Wales) Regs 2003 and approval of Adopters is discharged to the National Adoption Service. Adoption Support Arrangements - There needs to be a clear understanding of who is responsible for post adoption support if child remains responsibility of LA post placement (not Adoption order) and adoption support for adoptive parents is outsourced by the National Adoption service. Wendy Keidan BAAF Cymru 25.5.12

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British Association for Adoption and Fostering (BAAF)—Written evidence Appendix 5 Adoption and Children Act 200224 S12 – Independent Review of Determinations Established the power to set up the Independent Review Mechanism S45 – Suitability of Adopters (2) Establishes the power to make regulations on the matters to be taken into account by an adoption agency in determining or making any report in respect of the suitability of any persons to adopt a child (2) Makes provision that in determining the suitability of a couple to adopt, proper regard is had to the need for stability and permanence in their relationship S94 - Restriction on Reports Restricts the preparation of adoption reports to those who are suitably qualified and creates an offence in contravention of that requirement and sets the tariff upon conviction. S125 – 131 – Adoption and Children Act Register Established the power to set up the Register and prescribes its function. Adoption Agency Regulations 2005 Part 2 - Establishes the functions of the adoption panel and an agency and medical advisor to the panel Reg. 21 – Requirement to provide counselling and information (prior to the application) Reg. 22 – Duties of the adoption agency following an application to adopt including setting up a case record containing specified information on the suitability of the applicant to adopt. Reg. 23 – Requirement to obtain an enhanced CRB on the applicant and other members of the household aged 18 or over. Specifies those offences that debar an applicant from being considered as an adopter. Reg. 24 – Requirement to provide preparation to adopt (as the agency considers appropriate). Includes (24(2)) – (a) Age range, sex, likely needs and background of children who may be placed for adoption (b) The significance of adoption for a child and his family (c) Contact between child authorized to be placed or adopted with parents or other relatives The details of the relevant statutory framework contained here are a selected and abbreviated summary of existing provisions. For a full working perspective on this framework, reference back to the published statutory documents must be made. 24

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British Association for Adoption and Fostering (BAAF)—Written evidence (d) The skills necessary to become an adoptive parent (e) The agency’s procedures in relation to assessment and the placement of a child (f) The procedure in relation to placement for adoption and adoption Reg.25 – Prospective Adopter’s Report – (2) Agency must obtain information on prospective adopter as set out in Part 1 of Schedule 4 of the regulations (3a) Agency must obtain a written report from a registered medical practitioner about the health of the prospective adopter following a full examination 3(b) A written report on each of the interviews with nominated personal referees (4) Relevant information from the applicant’s home local authority in a written report (5) The Prospective Adopters Report shall include – (a) Information set out in Part 1 Schedule 4 (b) Summary on the health of the applicant written by the medical advisor (c) Relevant information from the home local authority (d) Agency observations on information from Reg. 21, 23, 24 (e) Agency assessment of applicant’s suitability to adopt (f) Any other relevant information (7) Establishes the discretion to submit a brief report to the Panel (8) Duty to notify the applicant of the referral of the application to the adoption panel including giving the applicant a copy of the PAR and an invitation to submit any observations in writing to the panel with 10 day of notification. (9) Establishes the duty of the agency to submit the PAR and other reports to the panel at the expiration of the notification. Reg.26 – Establishes the duty of the Panel to consider the application and make a recommendation on suitability (3) Panel may consider and give advice to the agency about the number of children the prospective adopter is suitable to adopt, their age range, sex and likely needs (4) Before making a recommendation, the panel must invite the prospective adopters to the panel. Reg.27 – Established that the adoption agency must make a decision about suitability (2) Establishes that no member of the panel shall take part in any decision (3) Establishes that the applicant must be notified in writing of their suitability to adopt (4) – (10) identifies the right to apply to, the procedure for and the timescales for the IRM

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British Association for Adoption and Fostering (BAAF)—Written evidence Part 1 Schedule 4 Information about the Prospective Adopter 1. Name, sex, date and place of birth and address including the local authority area 2. A photograph and physical description 3. Whether the prospective adopter is domiciled or habitually resident in part of the British islands and if habitually resident for how long he has been habitually resident 4. Racial origin and cultural and linguistic background 5. Religious persuasion 6. Relationship (if any) to the child 7. A description of his personality and interests 8. If the prospective adopter is married or has formed a civil partnership and is applying alone for an assessment of his suitability to adopt, the reasons for this 9. Details of any family court proceedings in which the prospective adopter has been involved 10. Names and addresses of three referees who will give personal references on the prospective adopter, not more than one of whom may be a relative 11. Name and address of the prospective adopter’s registered medical practitioner 12. If the prospective adopter is – a. Married, the date and place of marriage b. Has formed a civil partnership, the date and place of registration of that partnership; or c. Has a partner, details of that relationship 13. Details of any previous marriage, civil partnership or relationship 14. A family tree with details of the prospective adopter, his siblings and any children of the prospective adopter, with their ages (or ages at death) 15. A chronology of the prospective adopter from birth 16. The observations of the prospective adopter about is own experience of being parented and how this has influenced him 17. Details of any experience the prospective adopter has had of caring for children (including as a parent, step-parent, foster parent, child minder or prospective adopter) and an assessment of his ability in this respect. 18. Any other information which indicates how the prospective adopter and anybody else living in his household is likely to relate to a child placed for adoption with the prospective adopter 19. A description of the wider family of the prospective adopter and their role and importance to the prospective adopter and their likely role and importance to a child placed for adoption with the prospective adopter. 20. Information about the prospective adopter’s home and the neighbourhood in which he lives 21. Details of other members of the prospective adopter’s household (including any children of the prospective adopter whether or not resident n the household) 22. Information about the local community of the prospective adopter, including the degree of the family’s integration with its peer groups, friendships and social networks

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British Association for Adoption and Fostering (BAAF)—Written evidence 23. Details of the prospective adopter’s educational history and attainments and his views about how this has influenced him 24. Details of his employment history and the observations of the prospective adopter about how this has influenced him 25. The current employment of the prospective adopter and his views about achieving a balance between employment and child care 26. Details of the prospective adopter’s income and expenditure 27. Information about the prospective adopter’s capacity to a. Provide for a child’s needs, particularly emotional and behavioural development needs b. Share a child’s history and associated emotional issues; and c. Understand and support a child through possible feelings of loss and trauma 28. The prospective adopter’s – a. Reasons for wishing to adopt a child b. Views and feelings abut adoption and its significance c. Views about his parenting capacity d. Views about parental responsibility and what it means e. Views about a suitable home environment for a child f. Views about the importance and value of education g. Views and feelings about the importance of the child’s religious and cultural upbringing; and h. View and feelings about contact 29. The views of other family members of the prospective adopter’s household and wider family in relation to adoption 30. Any other relevant information which might assist the adoption panel or adoption agency The Suitability of Adopters Regulations 2005 Sets out the matters to be taken into account by an adoption agency when determining or making a report on the suitability of a person to adopt. The Restriction on the Preparation of Adoption Reports Regulations 2005 Restricts the preparation of prescribed adoption reports to registered social workers with prescribed experience or supervision. Adoption Statutory Guidance 2011 The Statutory Guidance is very specific and sets out duties that are required to be complied with except in justifiable exceptional circumstances. This includes 

timescales for responding to prospective adopter inquiries, advice and information sessions and an expectation that from the point of application to panel recommendation will take 8 months

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British Association for Adoption and Fostering (BAAF)—Written evidence    

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monitoring of timescales with explanations for their non-compliance recorded on the applicant’s case record monitoring and reporting every 6 months to the executive performance in respect of timescales, and the demand for adoptive placements and the supply of adoptive parents and adoption disruptions and changes of plan the plan to ensure a sufficient supply of suitable adopters against past demand, future likely trends and work in consortia with the voluntary sector and the Adoption Register. This includes recruiting adopters from bme backgrounds. The response expected of the agency to prospective adopters including being welcoming, inclusive, impartial and supportive and ensuring that it is made clear that are very limited automatic exclusions to becoming an adopter. It is also expected that full information about the process will be made readily available in written form and easy access given to explaining that information. An expectation that foster carers expressing and interest in adopting a child they are caring for is explored in a positive and supportive way The requirement that statutory checks can only commence once an application has been submitted and accepted by the agency. Where this is so, the agency must open a case record. Clarifying that where there are delays in receiving CRB’s, this must not delay the rest of the assessment process. Due regard is paid in designing the preparation course to the curriculum set out in the practice guidance. It is also made clear there is some flexibility in the content of the preparation course depending on the experience and circumstances of the applicant. It is also made clear that the work of preparation can continue during assessment. An emphasis on the assessment being objective and inquiring with information evaluated and analyzed for its relevance, accuracy and consistency. Relevant Information should be used from preparation undertaken. The importance of the health assessment being based on information from all relevant medical records and being fully evaluated for its relevance to the capacity of the prospective adopter to parent throughout a child’s minority. Inclusivity is stressed together with the provision of support in relevant circumstances.

Care Standards Act 2000 sections 23 and 49 S23 - Sets out the power of the Minister to publish national minimum standards S49 – the application of S23 to relevant local authority functions National Minimum Standards - Adoption The Standards are written on the basis of existing legislative requirements and their intended outcomes. They can be split into those that apply to -

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British Association for Adoption and Fostering (BAAF)—Written evidence The Child STANDARD 1 - The child’s wishes and feelings STANDARD 2 – Promoting a positive identity, potential and valuing diversity STANDARD 3 – Promoting positive behaviour and relationships STANDARD 4 – Safeguarding children STANDARD 5 - Promoting good health and wellbeing STANDARD 6 - Leisure activities STANDARD 7 – Promoting educational attainment STANDARD 8 – Contact STANDARD 9 - Providing a suitable physical environment for the child .

It is warm, adequately furnished and decorated, free of avoidable hazards, is maintained to a good standard of cleanliness and hygiene and is in good order throughout. Outdoor spaces, which are part of the premises are safe, secure and well maintained. The adoption agency has a written policy concerning safety for children in the prospective adopters’ home, and in vehicles used to transport the child, which is regularly reviewed in line with the most recent guidance from relevant bodies. The policy is understood and successfully implemented by prospective adopters.

Prospective Adopters STANDARD 10 - Recruiting and assessing prospective adopters Replicates the detail of the Adoption Agency Regulations 2005 and the Adoption Statutory Guidance 2011. Recruitment Toolkit The Department for Education and Skills commissioned and made available a range of materials as an Adopter Recruitment Toolkit for agencies. Preparing and Assessing Prospective Adopters - Practice Guidance In order to support practitioners and agencies in their work, the Department for Children, Schools and Families issued practice guidance. The Guidance contains 7 chapters and closely follows the issues identified in the Review and its subsequent interpretation into regulations and statutory guidance. The chapter headings are – 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

Information and counselling Checks and references Adoption preparation Starting the assessment Assessing adoptive parenting capacity Assessing family and environmental factors Adoption perspective

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British Association for Adoption and Fostering (BAAF)—Written evidence BAAF Publications BAAF have continued to publish and develop a range of materials to support different stages of the process. These include – 1. A template for the Prospective Adopter’s Report including guidance notes 2. A package of materials for preparation courses including a Trainers Guide and Applicant’s Workbook. 3. An extensive range of materials under the title ‘Making Good Assessments’. 4. Guidance on undertaking an assessment with a strong emphasis on the analytic components of undertaking and writing the PAR. Appendix 6 CONTACT FOR BABIES IN CARE PROCEEDINGS – TAKE AWAY MESSAGES •

Contact is probably a too narrow term for what must be the primary focus – promoting the healthy development of a vulnerable infant in the most difficult of circumstances – separation from its parents and family or origin in the context of abuse and or neglect.

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The arrangements for the infant must focus on ensuring that the routines, familiarity and emotional and physical attentiveness of the child’s primary but temporary carer are not unduly disturbed by any other arrangement. If that is a foster carer then they must be identified as the primary carer.

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The plan for every infant will need to be specific to that infant and its circumstances but with the primary objective of ensuring the infant’s healthy development.

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Where contact is planned, its purpose must be discussed and agreed and evaluated against the child’s age and their developmental needs.

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There is no evidence that the frequency of contact per se is related to rehabilitation of the infant back to his or her parent/s. Successful rehabilitation for infants is strongly related to motivation and determination on the part of parents from before and shortly after the birth of the baby, abstinence from the use of drugs and alcohol, separation from abusive partners and the availability of a range of support services.

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The plan for contact should be explicitly addressed in all planning and review meetings and coordinated with any issues decided by the courts. This should continuously be evaluated against the plans purpose of facilitating the child’s developmental needs. A distinction needs to be made where contact is being used to assess the parenting capacity of the child and that, which is a more general maintenance of the relationship between the child and parents and the parents and child.

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The child’s Article 12 rights under the UNCRC and their ECHR 8 right to a private life should be explicitly addressed by all those responsible for the care and plan for the child.

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British Association for Adoption and Fostering (BAAF)—Written evidence •

The parent/s must be counselled and supported to understand that the plan for the child including contact arrangements are made to ensure and promote their child’s healthy development. It is in the best interests of the parent/s whatever the eventual plan to ensure that the interim arrangements for the infant including any placement with a foster carer is intended to secure their healthy development.

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Any transport arrangements are explicitly evaluated for the stress they place on the infant including the potential for physical injury.

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That relevant professionals are trained and supported to hear, listen to and take into account what the baby or young child communicates about what he or she thinks should happen when adults are making decisions that affect them, and to have these taken into account in the plans that are made.

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That early child development should be a part of the training of all professionals involved in care proceedings to enable them to make the best interim and long term plans for infants and young children.

Biehal, N. (2010). Belonging and permanence : outcomes in long-term foster care and adoption. London, BAAF. Brodzinsky, D. and J. Palacios (2005). Psychological issues in adoption : research and practice. Westport, Conn. ; London, Praeger. Dance, C. and A. Rushton (2005). "Predictors of outcome for unrelated adoptive placements made during middle childhood." Child and Family Social Work 10: 269280. Department of Health (1999). Adoption Now: Messages from Research. D. o. Health. Chichester, Wiley. Farmer, E. and E. Lutman (2012). Effective Working with Neglected Children and their Families: Linking Interventions with Long-term Outcomes. London, Jessica Kingsley. Farmer, E. and J. Selwyn (2012). "Your family, your voice: Growing up with relatives or friends." Retrieved 2nd July 2012. Fursland, E. (2010). Facing up to Facebook: A survival guide for adoptive families. London, BAAF. Fursland, E. (2011). Foster Care and Social Networking. London, BAAF. Harris, P. (2008). The Colours in Me: Writing and poetry by adopted children and young people. London, BAAF.

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British Association for Adoption and Fostering (BAAF)—Written evidence Hodges, J. and M. Steele (2000). "Effects of abuse on attachment representations: narrative assessments of abused children." Journal of Child Psychotherapy 26(3): 433 - 455. Hodges, J., M. Steele, et al. (2005). Change and Continuity in Mental Representations of Attachment after Adoption. Psychological issues in adoption: research and practice. D. Brodzinsky and J. Palacious. Westport, CT, Praeger Publishers: 93-116. Macaskill, C. (2002). Safe contact? : children in permanent placement and contact with their birth relatives. Lyme Regis, Russell House. Masson, J., J. Pearce, et al. (2008) Care Profiling Study. DOI: http://www.bristol.ac.uk/law/research/researchpublications/2008/care-profiling-summary.pdf Neil, E. C. (2000). "Contact with birth relatives after adoption : a study of young, recently placed children. [electronic resource]." Neil, E. C. (2010). Supporting post adoption contact in complex cases : briefing paper. [London, Dept. for Education]. Neil, E. C. (2011). Supporting direct contact after adoption. London, BAAF. Quinton, D. (2012). Matching in Adoptions from Care. London, BAAF. Rushton, A. and C. Dance (2004). "The outcomes of late permanent placements: the adolescent years." Adoption and Fostering 28(1): 49-58. Rushton, A. and E. Monck (2009). Enhancing Adoptive Parenting. London, BAAF. Schofield, G. (2003). Part of the family : pathways through foster care. London, British Association for Adoption & Fostering. Schofield, G. and J. Simmonds (2011). "Contact for infants subject to care proceedings." Family Law 41(June): 617-622. Schofield, G. and E. Ward (2008). Permanence in foster care : a study of care planning and practice in England and Wales. London, BAAF. Selwyn, J. (2010). Pathways to permanence for Black, Asian and mixed ethnicity children. London, BAAF. Sinclair, I. (2007). The pursuit of permanence : a study of the English child care system. London, Jessica Kingsley.

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British Association for Adoption and Fostering (BAAF)—Written evidence Wade, J., N. Biehal, et al. (2011). Caring for Abused and Neglected Children: Making the Right Decisions for Reunification or Long-Term Care. London, Jessica Kingsley. Ward, H., R. Brown, et al. (2012). Safeguarding Babies and Very Young Children from Abuse and Neglect. London, Jessica Kingsley. July 2012

272

British Association for Adoption and Fostering (BAAF)—Supplementary written evidence

British Association for Adoption and Fostering (BAAF)— Supplementary written evidence Draft Legislation on Adoption: Amendment to the Adoption and Children Act 2002 Comments for the House of Lords Scrutiny Committee Section 1(5), Adoption and Children Act 2002 (England) The intention in introducing this clause into the Adoption and Children Act 2002 was to ensure that what had become an important issue in society in general but specifically in adoption – a child’s relationship to their ‘religious persuasion, racial origin and cultural and linguistic background’ – was given ‘due consideration’ in any assessments, planning and decision making undertaken by an adoption agency. This reflects a widely acknowledged recognition that a child’s identity was an important part of their development and that these four factors were an important part of that identity. That is recognised in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child under Article 20 that states that for children deprived of a family environment: Children who cannot be looked after by their own family have a right to special care and must be looked after properly, by people who respect their ethnic group, religion, culture and language. While the making of an Adoption Order severs the child’s legal relationship with the birth family, it has been long established that the child’s knowledge about their original family and the reasons why they were relinquished or removed from them is an on-going, life long issue. There are many aspects to this and the child’s interest in and perspective on this will change over their life, diminishing or intensifying in cycles over time. Their ethnic origins, culture, religion and language will play a part in this and it is generally acknowledged that legally severing the child from their birth parents should not result in any general sense of severing them from aspects of their heritage. This is the principle coded into Article 20 and into Section 1(5). Continuity, Change and Difference in Making an Adoption Placement An adoption placement cannot meaningfully be seen as some form of continuity from the past. The act of placing a child for adoption means that the child becomes a part of new family and community with its own values and beliefs derived from its ethnicity, culture, religion and language and other factors. The family may share aspects of the original birth parents ethnicity, culture, religion and language but there cannot be any meaningful sense of an unbroken continuity. Indeed there is usually an explicit objective to terminate the child’s link to some aspects of sub cultures where this involves for instance criminality, drug abuse and child maltreatment. This is the challenge for adoption agencies and the courts in identifying a suitable match and the making of the Order - How to respect the child’s origins as per Article 20 and

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British Association for Adoption and Fostering (BAAF)—Supplementary written evidence give due consideration as per section 1(5). If this is a challenge for the court and the agency, it a significant life long challenge for the child and the adoptive parent/s. A second challenge often resides in addressing the issues that arise from the visible differences between the child and their adoptive parent/s. These may result from skin colour, hair texture, height or other physical differences. They may result in questions being asked in the family – ‘Why don’t I look more like you’ or ‘I wish I looked more like you’. They may result in questions being asked in the community – ‘He/she looks very different to you – is he/she really your child?’ These may be gentle questions but they may intensify into discriminatory or racist comments or even attacks. Adopted children and adoptive parents need to be prepared for these possibilities and they will often need support in doing so. There is a view that some adoptive parents may be in a stronger position to manage these issues especially if they have direct experience themselves of racism or discrimination. This may be so but the evidence for this is limited. What is much clearer is that these issues of difference must be given ‘due consideration’ at the time of placement and then through the rest of the child’s life. Not to do so would be naïve with serious consequences for the child’s welfare and development. The difficult question for agencies and the courts to take account of at the point of the match or the making of the order is what are the conditions that best identify a placement that is in the strongest position to address these challenging questions of continuity, change and difference over the child’s lifetime. In particular the question that might be asked is will the degree of similarity or difference between the adopter/s heritage and characteristics and those of the child promote the child’s welfare and meet their needs? There will never be a ‘perfect match’ in the sense of ’sameness’ and the concept is meaningless. But there will be opportunities for a ‘coming together’ of the child’s heritage and circumstances and those of the adopter/s. As one example, placing a Muslim child with Muslim adopter/s is likely to result in the child developing their Muslim faith in a meaningful way even if there are different beliefs within Islam distinguished by Sunni and Shia denominations. Placing that child in a Christian or Jewish family is unlikely to promote their Muslim identity in a meaningful way although there is no absolute certainty even in this. But how the child relates to these issues over the course of time will be determined by them and the circumstances they find themselves in – rejecting their faith as one possibility, modifying it as another. These are challenging questions as the judgement and decision made at one point in time (in the match) is attempting to be predictive of what then follows over subsequent years. Predicting how a family life will develop over that time in its values, beliefs and circumstances in the context of communities that change over time is very difficult if not impossible. There will of course be other factors relevant to the match apart from ethnicity, culture, religion and language as identified in section 1(4)(d). The child may have special needs or there may be developmental uncertainty. They may have full and half siblings. There may be safeguarding issues in relation to the family of origin which impact on where the child can be placed. Whatever these are, there is nothing in 1(5) as currently drafted that suggests that that consideration of these issues will be overridden by considerations of ethnicity, culture, religion and language.

274

British Association for Adoption and Fostering (BAAF)—Supplementary written evidence

A second set of issues will arise from the characteristics of the adopters themselves. They will have their own individual profiles resulting from their life experiences which will have embedded in them as individuals values and beliefs derived from their originating family’s ethnicity, culture, religion and language. Other experiences will have altered this along the way and particularly if they are a couple, the influence of one partner on the other. How their values and beliefs influence their views of parenting and becoming an adopter will have been an important part of the home study. Their strengths and vulnerabilities and capacity for change will be identified in the report to panel that considers their suitability. It would be expected that this report will address the issues of the capacity of the adopter/s to address any child’s need including the development of their identity, how they might respond to difference and how they might respect the child’s origins. Section 1(5) sets this in an appropriate context through the use of the term ‘due consideration’. Questions of ethnic, cultural, religious and language beliefs and values are fundamentally important issues in society and they are no less so today than ever they were. Striking out section 1(5) in England may be taken to indicate that these issues are no longer of any importance and in that sense this amendment would not reflect these fundamental beliefs. But it is also important to acknowledge the fundamental changes in English society as beliefs and values and the impact these have on lived experience have changed. These impact not just on the multi-ethnic, cultural, religious and language groups in society but the ways these groups have come together to inter-mix, relate to as well as challenge each other. Although there are aspects of this that have some stability to them, every group in society is challenged to either sustain, or modify or adapt existing ways of living. This is particularly marked for children in care where their heritage is often a highly complex mix of ‘coming together’ of adults from different groups – where their identities defy easy explanation or naming. This is also often true in adoptive couples who may mix many different origins and heritages. While stability and continuity are important for individuals and families, change and evolution are equally so. Describing a child or an adopter’s heritage and their beliefs and values defies easy identification although stock phrases are often all that is available. If anything, this only re-emphasises the value of a clause that requires giving ‘due consideration’ to these issues. There is a widely stated problem that children from minority ethnic backgrounds wait considerably longer or have their adoption plans changed more often because a suitable or ‘perfect match’ cannot be found. The evidence for this is identified in a thorough study of three local authorities undertaken by Selwyn (2010) The Department for Education has re-stated there statistics in a graph in the Adoption and Special Guardianship Data pack. However, it is important to note a number of issues in this evidence. By far, the greater number of children from minority ethnic backgrounds with adoption as the plan are from mixed ethnic backgrounds. The numbers of Asian, Black or other minority group children are very small indeed. Children from mixed backgrounds have a slightly longer pathway to adoption than white children but black children have a considerably longer pathway. The proportion of children leaving care through adoption as a proportion of all children leaving care in any one

275

British Association for Adoption and Fostering (BAAF)—Supplementary written evidence year is about the same for both white and mixed ethnicity children but it is significantly lower for Black or Asian children. This suggests that practice has changed in relation to mixed ethnicity children but there are serious problems in the placement of other minority ethnic children. But it is difficult to identify whether this is a practice issue arising from not placing ‘trans-racially’ or an issue that adopters are just not available for these children at all or that there are other factors adding to the difficulty. Whatever, it is a serious problem and a solution does need to be found. But it is difficult to see how striking out 1(5) in England is a solution. Whatever, solution might be found, the child’s ethnicity, culture and religion and language will still need to be ‘duly considered’. These factors do not evaporate because the law has deleted a proportionate clause. There is nothing in law or statutory guidance that gives pre-dominant influence to ethnicity, culture, religion or language in any adoption related matter. That has been so since a government circular in 1998, LAC(98)20, and reinforced in statutory guidance ever since. Evidence suggests that in many respects this is being complied with in relation to children from mixed minority ethnic backgrounds. At the same time, there is evidence to suggest that some problems remain in the placement of some minority ethnic children. If there were to be a solution generated by primary legislation then this should be the solution currently in operation where in our view it is both proportionate and compliant with human rights and convention duties and responsibilities. It is to be debated whether this clause gives undue prominence to four issues that should be appropriately set alongside other issues that are of relevance. These are identified in section 1(4)(d). Whether amending that particular clause to include ethnicity, culture, religion or language gives a better sense of balance in relation to the child’s is worthy of discussion and debate. But alongside that there would need to be exploration of the current problem and this should be pursued as a matter of great urgency. At the very least this should include specific campaigns and appropriate follow up to recruit sufficient numbers of adopters and those who are in a strong position including access to post placement support to adopt minority ethnic children who are hard to place. This would require being open minded about what a potential match might look like and that might mean considering all the child’s needs and the significant advantage to them of being placed for adoption. It may be that an amendment to 1(3) that makes it clear that no one issue in 1(4)d or 1(5) can be given overriding influence that creates delay in making a decisions by the court or adoption agency. Conclusion There are problems in the adoption system in placing some children from minority ethnic backgrounds and this must be addressed as a matter of urgency. This will take creativity and an open mindedness in recognition of the society we live in and its opportunities and challenges. It will also require resources and the further development of practice. We are of the opinion that section 1(5) is not the problem and further that it is proportionate and enables compliance with international duties and responsibilities . Change is required to ensure that every child with adoption as the plan is placed with adopters in a timely way that best ensures their welfare and needs are met. But the problems at the heart of this need to be properly identified and appropriate solutions identified specifically in relation to those problems. We do not believe that this will result from striking out section 1(5) in England.

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British Association for Adoption and Fostering (BAAF)—Supplementary written evidence

16th November 2012 Selwyn, J. (2010). Pathways to permanence for Black, Asian and mixed ethnicity children. London, BAAF.

Draft Legislation on Adoption: Amendment to the Children Act 1989 Early Permanence through ‘Fostering for Adoption’ Comments for the House of Lords Adoption Scrutiny Committee “The duty will apply where the local authority has decided that the child ought to be placed for adoption and it has matched the child with an approved prospective adopter who is also a local authority foster parent, but it does not yet have authorisation to place the child for adoption” – Explanatory Note Agency Decision Maker’s Decision (9A) Subsection (9B) applies where the local authority are a local authority in England and— (a) are satisfied that C ought to be placed for adoption, The agency decision maker’s decision that a child should be placed for adoption usually takes place towards the end of care proceedings. In many cases a local authority will not apply to remove a child from their birth family until they are completely satisfied that there is no other option and will be confident when they issue proceedings that adoption is the best and most likely outcome for the child. However, the formal decision is not made until proceedings have started, the parents have had an opportunity to obtain their own expert evidence if necessary, the court has ordered further or expert assessments and any family members have been identified and where the local authority have decided not to proceed with those who express an interest in becoming the child’s carer. The case of Re B [2008]25 has alerted local authorities to the risks of challenge and resulting delay to the proceedings if they make the decision too early. As a result, most local authorities will not make the adoption decision until all expert evidence and assessments have been filed in proceedings. This is typically only two months before the final hearing and could become less if the expectation on courts to complete care proceedings within six months results in the imposition of tighter timescales. Waiting for the local authority decision that a child should be placed for adoption before considering a ‘Fostering for Adoption’ placement means that the reduction in delay in a child’s placement with their potential adopters is the time between the decision and final hearing, which we anticipate will be less than two months in most cases.

25

Re B (Placement Order) [2008] EWCA Civ 835

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British Association for Adoption and Fostering (BAAF)—Supplementary written evidence Matching (9A) Subsection (9B) applies where the local authority are a local authority in England and— ………………… (b) have decided that C ought to be placed for adoption with a person who is a local authority foster parent and has been approved as a prospective adopter, Matching does not take place until the local authority is authorised to place a child for adoption and there is nothing in the proposed clause or draft Regulations to change this. Indeed, formal family finding outside the local authority’s own approved adopters does not take place before the placement order. Family finding publications such as Be My Parent and Children Who Wait cannot accept referrals from local authorities where they are not authorised to place unless they have a court order allowing the child to be advertised in the these profiling publications. The Adoption Register also requires a court order permitting referral to the Register when the local authority does not have authority to place. In Re K (Adoption: Permission to Advertise) [2007]26 the High Court warned that permission to advertise a child as available for adoption would be unlikely to be granted before a final care order had been made. While there is no specific prohibition in legislation against a local authority matching a child with prospective adopters pre-placement order, it is implied, and logical, that a local authority may only make the decision that a child should be placed for adoption with particular adopters once they have the authority to place that child. Before a matching decision can be made, the Adoption Agencies Regulations 2005 require the child’s case to be considered by an adoption panel. Regulation 32 requires that before a matching recommendation can be made, the agency must have decided that the child is suitable to be placed for adoption. The Regulations allows those two recommendations to be made at the same panel, but as the responsibility for making a recommendation on a ‘should be placed for adoption’ decision has been removed from panel since Septemebr 1st, this is no longer possible. After the ‘should be placed for adoption’ decision by the agency decision maker, the child’s case will have to be referred to panel for a matching recommendation and then back to the agency decision maker for a matching decision. This process will be a cause of delay before the obligation to place a child in a ‘Fostering for Adoption’ placement becomes operational. We would strongly oppose any suggestion that the matching decision should be made without panel consideration and recommendation. We do not believe that the removal of the ‘should be placed for adoption’ decision from panel has delivered the intended reduction in delay but that it is likely to have reduced the quality of scrutiny and reflection available for children’s cases. Recruitment of Carers We are aware, from our experience of publishing Be My Parent and running the Adoption Register, that legal uncertainty is one of the factors that makes a child ‘harder to place’. Prospective adopters are reluctant to make the practical and emotional commitment to care

26

Re K (Adoption: Permission to Advertise) [2007] EWHC 544 (Fam)

278

British Association for Adoption and Fostering (BAAF)—Supplementary written evidence for a child when they are aware that the court may refuse a care and placement order, either returning a child to his parents or placing him with friends or family. Concurrency projects have been able to overcome this difficulty for some carers and for some children. Carers are able to see the clear advantages for very young children of having a consistent carer throughout the care proceedings (often taking a year or more) and of not having to change placements after having achieved a strong, positive relationship with their primary carer. They are willing to accept the risks both for the sake of the child and to enjoy the benefits for themselves of having their adoptive child from birth or from a very young age, something that would otherwise be possible only if they were to be matched with one of the very small number of relinquished babies. Neither of these advantages applies to ‘Fostering for Adoption’ cases under the proposed legislation. A child will have been removed from his or her birth family and placed in shortterm foster care for several months between the local authority has issued care proceedings and the agency has made its adoption decision. Foster to Adopt will not prevent a placement move at a crucial time in the child’s development with all the consequences that result from this. The advantage to the child of that move being just a couple of months earlier than it would have been under a placement order may not be significant enough to persuade prospective adopters to accept the potential risks of the placement. It will also be challenging to prepare and support the ‘foster carers’ in their different responsibilities as foster carers under fostering regulations. There are also risks for the child in them being properly prepared for a fostering placement that may become an adoptive placement when at an older age than babies placed under concurrent planning, they have the capacity and indeed the agency has a legal duty to appropriately inform them of the nature of the plan. We believe that it will be extremely difficult to recruit prospective adopters to ‘Fostering for Adoption’ as presently constructed because of the shortened timescales. We also believe that adoption agencies may be reluctant to expose their approved adopters to the identified risks and uncertainties of these placements including the practical and financial implications. Other Issues The clause places a duty on the local authority to make the placement with the prospective adopters once they have made the SBPFA and matching decisions, unless it is “their opinion” that the child would be better placed elsewhere. It is not clear whether there is any role for the court in the process. The fostering to adopt placement will be a major change to the interim care plan, and will often require a variation in the contact arrangements as well. How will parents or the Children’s Guardian be able to challenge the placement? The only sanction that the court has is to refuse to renew the interim care order (or to revoke the interim care order under the proposals to make interim care orders last until final hearing). Courts have used this to oppose concurrent planning, and have asked the local authority to suggest an alternative care plan. This will not be possible under ‘Fostering for Adoption’, as the local authority will be under a statutory duty to place with particular carers. The duty on the local authority to consider placing the child in a potential long-term placement does not arise until after the ‘should be placed for adoption’ decision and matching decision has been made. We are concerned that local authorities who are less than enthusiastic about these placements can simply avoid this duty by holding off on making the decisions. We would have

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British Association for Adoption and Fostering (BAAF)—Supplementary written evidence preferred a more general duty to consider long-term stability for all children as soon as they become looked after. If the child has been matched and is living with the prospective adopters, the child will become ‘placed for adoption’ as soon as the placement order is granted, depriving the parent of the opportunity to apply to revoke the placement order if there is a change in circumstances (by operation of s24(2)). Conclusions We are concerned that the measure, intended to compel earlier placement once certain conditions are met, may instead be interpreted as creating pre-conditions to early placement, so that local authorities will be reluctant to consider concurrent planning or other early placement options before the ‘should be placed for adoption’ and matching decisions have been made. There are already doubts expressed by some local authorities, and even by some courts, that concurrent planning is lawful, which these provisions do nothing to remove. The way in which the measure is constructed means that a child removed from his or her birth family will have to spend some time in a short-term foster placement before a ‘Fostering for Adoption’ placement is arranged. This attempts to address the needs of the child in avoiding delay in moving into a permanent placement, but does nothing to address the need of a child for stability. Any change of carer is unsettling and traumatic for a child, and it is disappointing that this measure does nothing to reduce the number of potential placement moves for a child. We would have preferred a more general duty on a local authority to be obliged to consider placing any child coming into their care in a placement that would be available to that child throughout its childhood if so required. This would have benefitted children being considered for long term fostering or for permanent placement with family and friends as well as that small proportion of children in care for whom adoption is the plan. Even for children for whom adoption is the plan, we consider that it would have been more productive to use legislation to encourage and support the use of concurrent planning and to extend the use of concurrent planning to older children. In addition to concurrent planning we believe that there are many cases where a local authority will know from the outset that adoption will be the inevitable plan for the child because of the circumstances of the birth parents and birth family. In these cases the advantage to the child of one move, from birth family to potential permanent carers, would be significant. We regret that this proposed legislation does nothing to introduce or support such a practice in appropriate cases. Summary We strongly and enthusiastically support the principle of early placement of children with their permanent carers as being in the best of interests of the child, reducing delay and disruption in the child’s life. We do however have serious concerns about the ability of this proposed legislation to deliver this for children. The principles of early placement are effectively embedded in concurrent planning where the parties agree that this is in the child’s best interests with the uncertainty and anxiety carried by the adults whatever the eventual outcome. The learning and opportunities established by these projects have been hard won, so while not being straightforward, provide the most obvious route to creating an enhanced framework in ensuring that more children benefit from this opportunity.

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British Association for Adoption and Fostering (BAAF)—Supplementary written evidence

16th November 2012 Fostering for Adoption – Summary concerns 1. Duty to place in Fostering for Adoption placement does not arise until after Agency has made the decision that child should be placed for adoption and has formally matched the child with prospective adopters. 2. Local Authorities can avoid the duty simply by not completing the ADM decision and matching. 3. Agency decision maker’s decision – comes late in care proceedings and the child will have had to have spent months in foster care before this point is reached. 4. Matching – cannot take place until after the agency decision maker has made their decision, building in further delay. 5. Family finding outside local authority’s own resources cannot take place until after placement order. 6. Even where adopters are available within the local authority, the child’s placement is likely to be brought forward by a matter of weeks in comparison with waiting for the placement order. 7. Adopters and their social workers are unlikely to be willing to accept the risk of taking a child pre-care order when the advantages to them and the child are so small. 8. The child’s parents have no opportunity to challenge the local authority’s decisions, rendering the process liable to challenge on human rights grounds. 9. There is the potential for confusion between concurrent planning and Fostering for Adoption – if the latter requires so many formalities before placement, what is the justification for concurrent planning placement without those formalities? 10. Even if the scheme worked well, it would be bringing the average time for placement down by making a small difference to the timescale for many children, without making a significant difference to the experience for any. 11. If the duty to place with permanent carers (wherever possible) arose as soon as the child came into care it would be compatible with, and support, concurrent planning and family placements. This might not be possible for a large number of children, but for those where it did apply it would make a significant difference to their experience. 12. Carers would be more prepared to accept the risks weighed against the significant advantages to themselves and to the child of early placement. 13. It would be a genuine foster placement, so not susceptible to legal or ideological challenge as ‘adoption by the back door’.

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British Association for Adoption and Fostering (BAAF)—Supplementary written evidence

19th November 2012

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British Association of Social Workers (BASW)—Written evidence

British Association of Social Workers (BASW)—Written evidence INTRODUCTION I.

BASW is the UK professional association for social work, led by and accountable to a growing population of approximately 14,500 social worker members. Our members work in frontline, management, research and academic positions in all social work settings across the UK. BASW members share a collective commitment to those values and principles that will secure the best possible outcomes for children and young people, adults, families and communities.

II.

BASW welcomes the opportunity to be able to respond to this very important and timely inquiry in the context of the government’s current focus on adoption policy and practice. Our concern is that the timescale to submit evidence is incredibly short i.e. one calendar month. This has limited our reach in terms of being able to consult fully with BASW members who have an interest in this subject; whilst we have sought the views of our Children and Families Reference Group and a number of members who are specialists in adoption work, there will be a great number of members who we know would equally like to express their views on this but would need more time to respond.

III.

Finally, we would also like to point out that the four oral evidence sessions held so far have not included the perspective of social workers whether they work in local authorities, the voluntary sector or the independent sector. We hope that there will be opportunity for the oral evidence of social workers to be heard after the recess but nevertheless worry that it is all too often the case that social work practice becomes the central focus of debate without social workers themselves being afforded opportunities for direct engagement. To slightly coin a phrase, there is a danger that social workers are reduced to ‘objects of concern’ rather than being invited to the table as participant partners in the process of change.

RESPONSES TO QUESTIONS Background a. Do we have the right structure for adoption? BASW members would argue that in the main, current legislation and guidance is sound however, as always, it is down to implementation - hence, in some parts of the country, there are examples of excellent practice whereas in others there are major shortcomings. In this respect, we would certainly support some of the proposals in the government’s adoption action plan to bring about major improvements to the adoption system but it is vital that the issue of resources is not ignored in this debate; quality services to children require investment as well as good leadership, including a wellsupported workforce empowered to carry out the work effectively. Unfortunately, the cuts to public services are having a profound effect on the capacity of children’s social 283

British Association of Social Workers (BASW)—Written evidence workers struggling to cope with the sheer volume of the work coming into their departments which inevitably compromises quality as evidenced in BASW’s State of Social Work Survey. (May 2012) (www.basw.co.uk) b. Should we be concerned about the falling number of adoptions? Why are the numbers falling? There are likely to be several factors that need to be interrogated; for example, we need to clarify whether numbers are falling because there are less children available for adoption or whether children being made subject to placement orders or who are relinquished are not being placed. We also need to take into account the many other routes to permanency for children such as the increased use of special guardianship – it is difficult to disaggregate the data i.e. how many of these children would previously have been adopted, remained in the care system or become the subjects of residence orders. It must be noted that adoption is not the perfect for solution for many children who come into care. Paradoxically, another factor is the increase in the number of care proceedings. Although this raises the number of children in the care system and therefore should increase the number of children available for adoption, this assumes that there are the resources available to deal with both the court work required to obtain care orders and the work towards adoption. At a time of constraints on budgets this proves to be an even greater challenge to local authorities and this can inevitably lead to prioritising, leaving behind the more difficult cases. Legislation a. What impact did the 2002 Act have on the adoption process? The 2002 Act laid a strong foundation for effective adoption practice in many areas. These include the roles of the LA’s agency decision maker, the adoption panel, adoption support, intermediary services, access to adoption records, and tracing birth families. It also provides good legislative framework and guidance regarding inter-country adoption. We were particularly pleased that it required social workers undertaking adoption work to have suitable experience i.e. 3 years post qualifying and that it recognised that independent social workers are also an important constituent in undertaking adoption work. One of our members states that prior to the 2002 Act, it was possible whilst in care proceedings to identify the adoptive placement and advise the court in final care plans of the actual time it would take to place the child, and general details of the proposed family as the adopters had been identified. Since the 2002 Act, this has changed and practitioners are told that a placement search cannot start until a Placement Order has been made and this search is outside the scrutiny of the court and can become delayed.

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British Association of Social Workers (BASW)—Written evidence b. Have all aspects of the 2002 and 2006 Acts been implemented appropriately and successfully? Regrettably, in terms of post adoption support whilst the intention was there the reality is patchy which is disappointing, for both the adopted child and the adopters who should have an entitlement to good and sustained support if needed. Our members report that services to meet post-adoption support have diminished over the last year with reductions to funding leading to out-sourced provisions reducing or ending. c. Is further legislation required to improve any aspect of the adoption system? We would just like to reiterate the importance of collating data on adoptive placement breakdowns; this is something that local authorities need to record and share with the DfE so that we understand the situation both locally and nationally. It is also information that should be interrogated by Ofsted inspectors so that we have a much better understanding of frequency and cause of breakdowns/disruptions in order to improve practice and reduce the likelihood. d. Can you as a respondent identify a problem and tell us if, and if so where, the legislation (including regulations), needs to change? Where there is a limited likelihood of an adoptive placement being found and the search is time limited to, for example, 6 months, it might be helpful for the case to be adjourned for the search to happen and if no-one is found in the agreed timescale the care plan could revert to one of LTF (long term fostering). At present, where a placement order is made and an adoptive family is not found, when the care plan reverts to LTF the matter goes back to the court for revocation of the placement order which requires the child to experience further litigation of 12 months or longer after the order has been made. BASW members would also concur with the Ofsted Report: Right on Time: Exploring Delays in Adoption April 2012 which could find no evidence of Adoption Panels contributing to avoidable delay which runs counter to the view purported in the Family Justice Review. We would argue that they provide an important role of independent scrutiny and quality assurance of decision making and therefore, all of their functions should be retained and not remitted to the local authority decision maker. We fear that by reducing their role this will increase delay as we do not think it is possible for the decision maker to effectively undertake the work of the adoption panel. One of our members is a procedures writer and has spotted the following problems with the Adoption Agencies (Panel and Consequential Amendments) Regulations 2012:The amendments apply when an adoption agency is making a decision as to whether the child ought to be placed for adoption. In specified situations the adoption agency will be prohibited from referring the case to the adoption panel before making the decision. In

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British Association of Social Workers (BASW)—Written evidence all other situations the effect of the Adoption Agencies Regulations 2005 remains unchanged – the adoption agency is required to refer the matter to the adoption panel. The statutory guidance on adoption has been amended to explain the effect of the change – in Chapter 2 (Deciding if a Child should be Placed for Adoption) at Paragraphs 64 and 67 – 69. There is a table attached to paragraph 64 setting out the difference between those cases in which the adoption agency is required to refer the matter to panel and the cases in which it is prohibited from doing so. In brief – if the adoption agency is required to apply to court for a placement order the matter must not be referred to panel, in all other cases the matter must be considered by panel before a decision is made. In practical terms, this means that if the child is relinquished for adoption the case must be considered by the adoption panel and in all other cases it must not. A child cannot be relinquished whilst care proceedings are in progress so while there are current care proceedings the matter must not be referred to the adoption panel. The table attached to the guidance sets this out clearly. Unfortunately it adds an extra category (Category 3 in the table) - Care Order made and the birth parent has indicated they will consent to their child being placed for adoption, but the agency considers there is a possibility that the birth parent will change their mind and not give their consent. This is where the problem arises. The second column of the table says although this table says to refer the case to the adoption panel, the case could be referred direct to the decision-maker to decide whether the child should be placed for adoption if there is strong evidence that the birth parents will change their mind and not give their formal consent. In deciding which course of action to take, the agency must take into account the effect on the child of any unnecessary delay. There are two problems here. The first is a discrepancy between the two columns: the trigger in the first column is “there is a possibility that the birth parent will change their mind”, but the condition in the second column is “there is strong evidence that the birth parents will change their mind”. There is a risk that practitioners will try to bypass the adoption panel based on no more than a possibility of a change of mind. Unless the misunderstanding is picked up quickly the consequence of this will be exactly the delay it was intended to avoid. The second problem is more serious. This guidance is based on the likelihood that a parent may change their mind. Although the trigger is strong evidence that a change of mind is likely, this is still no more than a possibility: at the time the parents are indicating that they will consent to adoption. The Regulations are clear that in this situation the case must be presented to panel. What would happen if the parents do not change their mind or if they do change their mind but at a later stage? •

To avoid delay the matter is put to the decision maker directly.

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British Association of Social Workers (BASW)—Written evidence • •

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The parents are currently indicating that they consent to adoption. Can the decision maker legally decide that adoption should be the plan for the child? S/he may refuse to make a decision without a panel recommendation. If the decision maker agrees that the parents are likely to withdraw their agreement at a later stage s/he may make the decision. But since the parents have not yet withdrawn their consent, a referral must be made to Cafcass to witness the consent. Cafcass will ask for information about the actions taken so far. It will be clear that the adoption agency has made, or plans to make, a decision that the child is suitable to be adopted, but that decision is not (or will not be) valid under the Adoption Agencies Regulations. In this situation will Cafcass witness the consent, or will they require the adoption agency to arrange a panel date first? A further possible problem arises if the parents continue to maintain that they consent to the adoption. The case must be presented to the adoption panel and the decision maker – but can the decision maker now make an unbiased decision, taking into consideration the recommendation of the panel? S/he had already made a decision on the case before panel considered it. Will this require the adoption agency to find another decision maker? These problems are likely to introduce significantly more delay than if a panel date is set at an early stage.

Our member also spotted a further anomaly with the amended adoption guidance on a lesser scale. The guidance has been amended on the website and there is also a full version that can be downloaded and printed off but the front cover has not been updated, so it still says "First Revision - Feb 2011". Given that there were amendments in April 2011 as well as the June 2012 changes, this is confusing and needs correcting. Time taken in placing children a. Is excessive time taken in placing children? Do some groups of children take a disproportionate length of time? Placing children in adoptive placements tends to vary between local authorities. Some local authorities appear to rely on local consortia whilst others will also consider national searches. Given the limited placement availability for BAME children, children with disabilities, older children and sibling groups, BASW members acknowledge that in some cases, there can be an over optimistic 'search' which can go on for years with children living in limbo waiting for an adoptive placement which may never materialise. This is extremely damaging for children and they will often say that they have not been adopted because 'no-one wants them'. We would argue that there is a need for a more rigorous approach and realistic timescales for local authority searches for adoptive placements to prevent children being left in temporary situations where they are not allowed to settle as they are continually told that they will be moving on. In this respect, we support the view that there is a need for local authorities to have robust procedures to prevent this type of scenario from occurring.

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British Association of Social Workers (BASW)—Written evidence Good examples from practice include those local authorities that meet on a monthly basis to consider the position of all children waiting for adoptive families taking into account what is being done and what else should be done to try to identify a family. In this way, children do not become over-looked and drift is minimised. Local authorities also tend to fare better where they have utilised all existing resources and are not just reliant on in- house and local consortium resources. b. What aspects of the adoption process, including pre-process care proceedings, take most time? BASW members would certainly concur with the findings of a recent Ofsted report ‘Right on Time: Exploring delays in adoption’ (2012) ’ which identified that ‘the key factor causing delay in tracked cases was the length of time for care proceedings to be concluded before an adoption plan could be confirmed.’ However, what we also think is very significant in the findings of this report is that ‘a substantial number of children had been known to children’s social care services for a considerable length time before entering care; delay in entering care proceedings jeopardised good outcomes for children’. Many of our members have reported on numerous occasions their sense of frustration about being deterred from instigating legal proceedings particularly in relation to children suffering from neglect; Community Care typified the problem in January 2012 reporting that according to an Action for Children report, 51% of social workers said they felt powerless to intervene in cases of suspected neglect because of high thresholds and inadequate resources. c. Do the various parts of the system – local authorities, adoption agencies, courts and others – work effectively together? As resources become more limited members report that this sometimes causes friction between agencies for example, the local authority finalising assessments may be delayed due to new circumstances, putting pressure on both the adoption agency and the already overstretched court leading to delay and tension. d. Could the adoption process be speeded up, whilst ensuring that necessary safeguards are preserved? Whilst social workers are absolutely committed to the principle of making timely decisions, we also have concerns that speeding up the adoption process could resurrect the dreaded ‘target driven’ culture which ironically the Munro review was keen to depart from given that the emphasis became less about child centred practice and more about mechanistic adherence to timescales. Care needs to be taken to ensure that the expectations are realistic ones. For example, in terms of completing care proceedings within 26 weeks, the statutory guidance on adoption states that a child must have a permanence plan by the second (four month) review. This leaves very little time to formally approve adoption as the plan and prepare an application for a placement plan. However, the guidance does not recognise this

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British Association of Social Workers (BASW)—Written evidence anywhere – for example, by noting that in the case of a “subsequent sibling” of a child who has been adopted or for whom there is a plan for adoption, it may be possible to identify adoption as the likely permanence plan much earlier and start preparation, or by noting that where early attempts to return the child to the family fail, it may not be possible to apply to court for a placement order within the care proceedings and a separate application may be needed. Our advice to the Government is not to be overly prescriptive on meeting timescales; where care proceedings can be completed appropriately within 26 weeks that is fine but it will not always be achievable or in the best interests of children. Currently, according to Coram, the average time taken for concurrent planning is 39 weeks plus 6 months to final adoption order. Similarly, the FDAC (Family Drugs and Alcohol Court) model also averages 39 weeks for care proceedings. Given that both the work of Coram and FDAC are quite rightly held in high regard by the sector and the government as in many respects, they represent the ‘gold standard’ in exemplary practice then surely they will not be penalised for exceeding the target but rather commended for achieving the best outcome for a child in terms of care proceedings. Moreover, there are sometimes very good reasons for care proceedings to exceed desired timescales which need to be taken into account. Sadly, we need to reiterate that according to our members, the greatest challenge to meeting the new targets are the shrinking resources which we fear could end up being very costly to vulnerable children leading to corners being inevitably cut resulting in poor practice and decision-making. e. How widely used is concurrent planning? What are its advantages and disadvantages? We understand from the Coram interim report ‘Concurrent Planning Study’ published this month that it is still a relatively small number of local authorities that have adopted this model and so there is clearly scope for it to be used more widely. However, the study is also clear that it is only suitable for a relatively small cohort of young children and so whilst it has many merits it also has its limitations; not all adopters would be able to cope with the uncertainty of concurrent planning and Coram do not recommend it for children over 24 months. Our concern is that the government is not necessarily presenting it in these terms but rather giving the impression that it is the panacea which is not helpful. One of our members argues that it could potentially be very difficult for adopters to care for babies who are born addicted to drugs; experienced foster carers are better skilled to care for these children during the first few months of their lives. Potential adopters may struggle to cope with the withdrawal symptoms these babies present. We must not lose sight therefore in investing in all aspects of the system including the need to secure high quality foster care as well as recruiting suitable adopters. Concurrent planning also requires additional resources for training and support to both adopters and social workers and so it needs to be budgeted for in order to develop expertise within authorities.

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British Association of Social Workers (BASW)—Written evidence f. What are the reasons for the variations in time taken to place children by different local authorities? It is important to consider that not all local authorities are identical; some may have much higher populations of children in need as a result of greater social deprivation and argue that they are not as well off as some of their counterparts in respect of their allocation of funding from central government. The NSPCC report ‘Smart Cuts? Public Spending on Children’s Social Care’ (June 2012) found that the cuts are having the greatest impact on English urban areas and those authorities that have a high proportion of looked after children which is very worrying. To go back to a previous point, the variations in time do not always mean that local authorities are doing poor work; for example, two low scoring authorities in the recent publication of adoption ‘league tables’ have both responded by saying that they have zero or few adoption breakdowns and so they are excelling in the area of placement stability. Moreover, one of them cites that they have a good record of placing ‘harder to place children’. Nevertheless, we would argue that effective leadership of children’s services is crucial and that includes having a clear vision for all forms of permanence planning including adoption. The number of potential adopters a. Are there enough potential adopters coming forward? Are there shortages in particular ethnic groups? Evidently not; our understanding is that children on adoption registers outnumber prospective adopters by 5 to 1 and it is not purely about numbers; according to Ofsted: ‘nearly all local authorities cited a shortage of suitable adopters who had the required capacity to meet the needs of children as a key reason for delays in adoption’. In this respect, we need to acknowledge that there is something of a mismatch between the children placed for adoption and those coming forward to adopt. As already stressed, children are likely to have experienced significant trauma in their lives which means that they have complex needs which can feel overwhelming to potential adopters. Perhaps we should consider what ‘adoption’ means contextually today and make sure that it is pitched appropriately from a PR perspective; candidates often come into the process with a very different set of expectations and so that is why adoption preparation needs to be extensive and thorough as it is life-changing experience for both the adopted child and the adopters with many benefits but it needs a great deal of emotional investment and support to mitigate the risk of adoption placements breaking down if we want to get it right. How do we ensure the best “fit” for a child, and is trans-racial adoption relevant to this issue? The government has already said a lot on this issue, accusing local authorities of holding out for the perfect match yet this is not borne out in practice confirmed by the findings

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British Association of Social Workers (BASW)—Written evidence of the Ofsted report which could find no evidence of this. BASW does not believe that there is a need to alter current legislation and policy in this area and would argue that what we already have in place is sufficient. We are disturbed that recent government comments about this give rise to unhelpful stereotypes of social workers as being overly rigid as a result of ‘political correctness’. This is not the case but certainly plays into the hands of some of our less well informed colleagues in the media. We do not live in a ‘race neutral society’ and it is right that adoption agencies consider a child's ethnic origin, culture, language and religion as significant factors when considering the most appropriate placement for a child. This does not mean that BAME children should only ever be placed with adopters with the same ethnicity etc. but it does mean that they need to be placed with adopters who are sensitive to all their needs and possess the skills, knowledge and understanding to help them to build positive identities. The Adoption Statutory Guidance for the 2002 Act stipulates that “a prospective adopter can be matched with a child with whom they do not share the same ethnicity, provided they can meet the child’s other identified needs. The core issue is what qualities, experiences and attributes the prospective adopter can draw on and their level of understanding of the discrimination and racism the child may be confronted with when growing up. This applies equally whether a child is placed with a black or minority ethnic family, a white family, or a family which includes members of different ethnic origins”. Nonetheless, this does not negate our responsibility to actively recruit adopters from Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic backgrounds given that there is a shortage of adopters from these groups. Demographic profiles of communities are not static and need to be reflected in our range of carers. Why do some potential adopters drop out during the adoption process? This is another area where some sections of the media tend to regularly promote an image of social workers as being bigoted towards potential adopters as headlines scream out at us that named individuals were rejected on the basis of their age, weight or ethnicity. What less responsible journalists forget to say is that actually not everyone who puts themselves forward is suitable to adopt children and it is vitally important that we have effective screening processes to ensure that we root out those where adoption may not actually be right for them. After all, ultimately, we are here to meet the needs of children and these are often children with a complex range of issues which can be very challenging and demanding for their carers. It is fair to say, that those who put themselves forward to adopt may have a very different set of expectations. Some may come to realise that adoption is not for them during the assessment process and we respect their right to withdraw and change their mind; some may encounter changes in their lives whilst undergoing assessment such as a relationship breakdown. If candidates complain that they were in any way treated unfairly, this needs to be explored and seen in the context of there being a necessarily rigorous assessment process that is child centred and challenging for the right reasons. Nevertheless, we also accept that there may be those who have grown disillusioned during the process in terms of the time it has taken or an initial poor response and the

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British Association of Social Workers (BASW)—Written evidence process of progressing applications to adopt could be streamlined and expedited in some areas; for example, second time adopters and foster carers applying to adopt should have their re-assessments done quicker and more effectively. Have the changes to eligibility introduced by the 2002 Act impacted the number of potential adopters? The changes to the Act did increase the variety of people who are now able to apply to adopt children including unmarried partners, single people and same sex couples. This has increased the opportunities as aimed and without this it is likely that there would have been less adoptions to date. b. What will be the likely effect of the measures proposed in the Department for Education’s ‘Action Plan for Adoption’? From previous experience, we would have to acknowledge that if there is a political drive to improve the adoption process then this will inevitably mean that there is a greater focus on adoption on the part of local authorities, voluntary adoption agencies and courts (in respect of the Family Justice Review) which is to be welcomed. There are many elements of the Action Plan for Adoption which we welcome and we support the objective of sharing and growing good practice across the piece. However, we would add a note of caution in terms of introducing a league table approach obsessed in measuring adherence to rigid timescales. There is a danger that this will only serve as a blunt instrument that is short on yielding qualitative information about overall performance and heavy on blame and conversely, can become a perverse incentive that does not have the desired effect of improving practice. This is very much at odds with the Munro vision of ushering in a very different culture in child protection work. Also, in a climate of scarce resources there is a risk of other forms of permanency planning becoming the poor relation as the focus becomes adoption leaving the majority of looked after children out in the cold. The government is quiet on the adoption support element in the action plan, particularly in providing a statutory adoption allowance and other services. Yet we know that adoption is a lifelong process, linking/matching/placing for adoption is only the beginning. A consistent and responsive adoption support service is the key to the stability of an adoptive placement. Members welcome the pre-qualification training and preparation suggested in the Action Plan. Does the number of agencies inhibit the number of potential adopters recruited? BASW values the mixed economy of both statutory provision and third sector voluntary adoption agencies; it is vitally important that we develop our expertise in this area in order to build upon and improve adoption practice in the future. However, our 292

British Association of Social Workers (BASW)—Written evidence members tell us that currently the problem is not one of over-supply and as a result of the spending cuts it is worrying that for example, some voluntary adoption agencies have had to close as a result of funding drying up and conversely, members working in local authorities have seen reductions in staffing levels at a time when there is a high demand for their services which does not bode well for the future. A member working for a voluntary sector provider told us that she had responsibility for over 50 adopted children as a full-time worker but due to a reduced service contract she had the same children to support but with only half her original hours. c. Does the recent increase in knowledge about early child development affect the balance between children’s rights and parental rights? This is a pertinent question and it resonates with the ‘damned if you do’ syndrome for social workers; another stereotype pedalled again by some of our friends in the media is the notion that social workers are ‘over -zealous child snatchers’. This has not always been helped by comments that have been made notably by those in the legal profession about the state’s power to remove a child from its birth family i.e. “After the death penalty the most draconian act that the state can do is remove a family's child” (Nigel Priestly, Lawyer, Channel 4 News 13 March 2012) A few years ago, BASW alongside others found itself battling with the judiciary over cases where children were subject to ICOs (Interim Care Orders) but judges where reluctant for social workers to remove these children as a result of some case law precedents; (Re L (A Child) [2007] EWHC 3404 (Fam) , Ryder J. required that the ‘court must consider whether there is an imminent risk of really serious harm’) Thankfully, this decision was subsequently re-interpreted by the Court of Appeal which held that Ryder J had not intended to change the law and raise the standard for removal set in the earlier cases but it had had an impact on practice nevertheless, particularly in cases of neglect. Typically, one BASW member describes her experience as a member of an adoption panel: ‘many of the children coming to panel have been harmed pre-birth by excessive parental use of drugs and alcohol. They are then subjected to abuse, neglect and domestic violence so by the time they are brought into care it is not unusual for the children to have significant learning disability which may be a lifelong condition. Some of the children have delay of 3-4 years (at ages 610) attributable to early trauma, not organic cause. Most of the children will have attachment and behavioural difficulties.’ Whilst there is a need for all concerned to strike an appropriate balance between the rights of the child to family life, (article 9) and protection from harm (article 19) U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child 1989 it is important that society backs social workers in undertaking the responsibility on its behalf to effectively safeguard vulnerable children. However, the social work profession can find itself being hamstrung by the fashion of the day. As one member puts it “we are now paying the price for an earlier political stance that said it was draconian for the state to interfere in

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British Association of Social Workers (BASW)—Written evidence family life. This, despite the fact that for many children our intervention saves their lives. There are children who have been exposed to repeat assessments and too many failed attempts at rehabilitation - the rule of optimism gone mad!” Court proceedings a. Do court proceedings take undue time in the adoption process? There is not a simple yes or no answer; each case should be judged on its own merits; not all delay is bad especially if the end result is in the best interests of the child and produces positive outcomes. It has been said time and time again, that these are often complex cases with a number of factors that need to be taken into consideration. However, all parts of the system are under enormous pressure so inevitably with demand outstripping supply there will be delays as a result of limited resources which is not good and if we do not do something to shore up the capacity then it does not matter how we rearrange the deckchairs on the ship. Would the recommendations of the Family Justice Review substantially alter the position? Whilst there are many laudable objectives in the Family Justice Review such as trying to unify quite a disparate and complex system at times and make it a much more user friendly service, the fundamental question has to be is there enough capacity in the system to meet current and future demand? In a climate where we have seen the closure of some courts, cuts to public services and more to come against an increased need for services comprising complex cases, it is very difficult to contemplate the end result of the Family Justice Review being better outcomes for children. The language used at the beginning of the review was one of the need to make efficiencies and for change to be ‘cost neutral’; setting a timeframe of 26 weeks for completion of care proceedings does not seem reasonable in these circumstances and could leave professionals with the feeling that they have been set up to fail. “My main concern is that workers will be singled out for criticism when the overload is caused by funding cuts and system failures rather than individual incompetence.” (BASW member) Moreover, there are a number of recommendations that lack any credible evidence base with which we take issue. Firstly, limiting the role of adoption panels to reduce delay; Ofsted certainly did not find any evidence to support this hypothesis. One of our members argues: “Why fix something that is not broken? Major delay in finalising adoption plans for children is not caused by the adoption panel – there are provisions in legislation and practice to have emergency/extraordinary panels to meet the needs of children.” Secondly, we were dismayed that the panel bought into the myth that the assessments produced by ISWs acting as independent witnesses were a duplication of the work of the local authority social worker and Cafcass and added more significant delay to proceedings. Happily, research has now been published on 19 April 2012 by Dr Julia Brophy: The Contribution of Experts in Care Proceedings: Evaluation of the work

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British Association of Social Workers (BASW)—Written evidence of independent social work assessments which clearly demonstrates that none of these assumptions are correct and that the contribution of ISWs brings added value to complex proceedings. Key findings include:       

There was no evidence that ISW reports cause delay to court hearings ISWs produce high quality reports to tight deadlines ISWs provide new information to the court There was no evidence of routine duplication with a current local authority core assessment ISWs have ‘added value’: they are independent, highly skilled and experienced (median 24 years in child protection work) They are child focused and successful in engaging parents with a history of non cooperation with local authorities Most instructions were joint, involving parents, the local authority and the child/children’s guardian and ISW appointments rarely result from parents seeking second opinion evidence based on human rights claims. Far from causing delay, the use of ISWs in complex cases can play a significant part in assisting courts to reach timely and sound decisions. Without their input, it is more likely that court timetables will be extended because of a lack of evidence, e.g. work from inexperienced staff that has to be redone: this makes wrong decisions for vulnerable children and miscarriages of justice more likely. There is significant spare capacity in this sector that is not being deployed because of structural barriers, not least the Legal Services decision last year to cap ISW fees at a rate way below other comparable professionals. Since this fee cap came into force delays for children awaiting ISW assessments are increasing as advocates appeal decisions made by the LSC. We are aware of a case involving a baby girl who has been waiting 6 months for decisions to be made about funding the ISW assessment – this despite the court having made a direction that such assessment was necessary. We therefore support the launch of an inquiry into the family justice reforms proposed by the government in the Children and Families Bill by the All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Child Protection where some of the above concerns can be raised.

b. How effective are provisions for the representation by guardians of children in court proceedings? Sadly, in our view there has been an erosion in the role carried out by guardians as a result of an overly bureaucratic system characterised by top-down management which has led to many experienced guardians leaving the service as they do not feel that they can practice ethically in what has become a very oppressive climate. In some situations we know that children are not even being seen by their guardians as a result of rationing resources reducing their role to a paperwork exercise. Such changes have demoralised the workforce.

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British Association of Social Workers (BASW)—Written evidence “Difficulties for guardians are often the restrictions placed upon their practices by Cafcass e.g. limited visits, not being able to attend contested hearings in full etc. It is our contention that guardians must be allowed to undertake their responsibilities unfettered. If the guardian is being entrusted to make recommendations regarding the future life of a child, they should be trusted to know the extent of the enquiries they need to make in order to provide an informed decision.” (BASW member) This situation is somewhat ironic when the Munro review clearly spelt out the dangers of an overly bureaucratic, target driven child protection system where the use of professional judgement was scant. In the past, children’s social workers saw the guardian role as good career progression once they had gained sufficient experience in child protection work. Typically, social workers who advanced to guardians had a minimum of 5 years experience. Sadly, this is no longer the case as the bar has been significantly lowered. How effective have placement orders been in facilitating the placement and adoption of children compared with “freeing orders”? One of the problems with freeing orders was that they were a “one way street” – it was difficult to discharge the order if the child still needed some legal protection from the lifestyle of the parents. This has been corrected not only in the definition of placement orders but also for the remaining freeing orders; but, there remains the problem that in terms of competing priorities, applications for discharge of orders generally come lower than applications for new orders. c. How common is it for care proceedings and placement order proceedings to be heard together or consecutively? What are the advantages and disadvantages of this approach? Members report that in their experience it is common for care and placement orders to be heard together and they view this positively: this reduces delay and cost as evidence in relation to both orders can be heard together. It can also be less traumatic for families as they are only required to attend one hearing for a decision to be made. d. How will changes to legal aid impact, if at all, on adoption proceedings? Post-adoption support a. How, if at all, has the 2002 Act impacted upon the provision of post-adoption contacts and support? Sadly, BASW members report that there continues to be minimal post adoption support and this tends to be a factor with foster carers who want to keep the child long term but are reluctant to see adoption as a positive option as all supports, including financial, will become limited or non- existent should they pursue an adoption order. b. Are measures needed to enhance post-adoption financial and other support for (i) adopted children; (ii) adoptive parents, (iii) birth families? Emphatically yes. Time and time again, there is universal agreement that children entering the care system have a range of complex need as a consequence of their 296

British Association of Social Workers (BASW)—Written evidence birth families having a propensity towards substance misuse, mental health issues, domestic violence. The overwhelming majority of children who are adopted will require some degree of therapeutic re-parenting and integrated service planning and delivery. Most of the children will have attachment and behavioural difficulties. They therefore, need extensive support to ensure they reach their potential and of course their adopters need to be supported to cope with the demands that are made of them. Sally Donovan (adopter) shares her experience in Community Care (May 2012) of her council providing good support and, several times a year, hosting a free, four-day therapeutic parenting course. However, the system still has echoes of previous times when the children being placed were often little different from other children within their extended adoptive family. Consequently, the support to which adopters (and special guardians), quite reasonably, feel entitled feels grudgingly given – and at times arbitrarily withheld. It would be useful to have a clear statement of the support to which they are entitled and the circumstances that trigger this entitlement. Inter-country adoption a. Have the inter-country adoption safeguards introduced by the 2002 and 2006 Acts proved successful? b. Would you recommend any change to the legislation to make inter-country adoption simpler? c. Are there any special challenges in adopting children from particular countries or regions? Access to Information a. Has the 2002 Act made it easier for adopted adults and/or birth families to trace their relatives, should they wish to do so? Other permanent placements a. What has been the effect of the introduction, in the 2002 Act, of ‘special guardianship’? It does seem that the use of special guardianship in practice is significantly different from the policy intention. However this may have been partly because the policy intention was misjudged. It is important that we have reliable national information about the use of this order and we therefore look forward to hearing about the findings of the research the Social Policy Research Unit of the University of York is doing on the use and outcomes of special guardianship. The impression is that it is substantially being used as a route out of the care system into the care of extended family – but there are repeated concerns that these are at times arrangements made “on the cheap” with little or no support offered, that the status of the arrangement is forced because the carers would not meet the requirements of the National Minimum Standards for Fostering and that inappropriate pressure is applied to persuade the carer to make the application. In short there are questions about whether local authorities may sometimes work on the

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British Association of Social Workers (BASW)—Written evidence assumption that it is intrinsically better for the child to live with relatives outside the care system than to be in any sort of placement in the care system. b. Is special guardianship an effective alternative to adoption, especially for those of school age (i.e. 5 and older)? We certainly believe that special guardianship can provide an effective alternative to adoption, particularly for the age range stated. It encourages family members and others to become legal guardians and therefore provide a safe and supportive home to children, often in an environment in which they are already settled and comfortable. c. What is the best way to ensure permanent and consistent placements for children? We need to ensure that we have an even handed and proportionate system for all 65,500 children who are looked after; adoption is not the only means of securing permanence for children unable to be cared for by their birth parents. Residence orders, long-term fostering and special guardianship orders are also reasonable and good ways of safeguarding children’s best interests. For some children residential provision is the most appropriate option to meet their needs. Adoption after all, is the best plan for permanence for only a small proportion of children in care. d. Would earlier interventions in cases of children with difficulties have an effect on the number of children who need to be adopted or otherwise permanently separated from their birth family? It is essential that a balance is struck in our services between preventative work and heavy end child protection work which are after all part of the same continuum and it should not be a case of either or. In children’s services it certainly has become top heavy in terms of everything being weighted towards intervening when situations have significantly broken down and one only has to look at the level at which thresholds are set. In our opinion, this has a lot to do with the increase in child protection plans and care applications that is causing ‘meltdown’ in the system. This of course runs counter to four independent government commissioned reviews (Munro, Allen, Tickell, Field) which convincingly make the case for early intervention yet Sure Start centres are closing, youth services are virtually non-existent and the list goes on. “I'd just like to say that things are going from bad to worse on the frontline of child protection and children in care services. I know that I can only speak with regard to our own department but we are seeing compulsory redundancies, an unhealthy turnover of staff and 'restructuring' which means instability and a lack of continuity for children in care. Clearly, this is a poor model for social work practice and for the children we serve. Major loss issues - no time for people to say goodbye and many of the workforce disappearing. Not quite what Eileen

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British Association of Social Workers (BASW)—Written evidence Munro had in mind. Unfortunately, the local authority option ( which is where the workers are badly needed) is becoming increasingly unattractive to experienced social workers. I am afraid too that the chaos after the cull (and when they realise that we don't have enough social workers to do the work) will result in short term expensive solutions - more short term contract agency workers which, with due respect to them, is not the way to offer stability for children in care and those subject to protection plans.” (BASW member) Monitoring a. Do ‘adoption scorecards’ provide an appropriate means for monitoring the performance of local authorities with regard to adoption? It is vital that we learn from the mistakes of the past so that meeting adoption targets in itself does not become the overriding imperative at any cost - effectively serving as a perverse incentive. The Munro Review should really be a cautionary tale to us about the perils of a target driven, top-down blame culture that is not child centred. An experienced guardian warns that it can result in some children being pushed down the adoption path when this is not right for them. In her experience some local authorities are promoting adoption as the preferred option for any child under the age of 12 years. “In the last couple of years I have dealt with a number of children aged between 7 and 10 years where the care plan was adoption, and the children had an understanding of what this would mean and were strongly opposed to being adopted. Current policies do not seem to allow for proper consideration of the views of older children in relation to adoption. If an older child is not committed to the idea of being adopted and having a new family, the likelihood of being able to get them to accept a new family will be limited and the likelihood of placement breakdown will become unacceptably high. Permanent fostering needs to be considered as a viable option for older children who are not able or willing or suitable - to accept an adoptive placement. Alternatively, consideration could be given to seeking adults who would wish to care for children under SGO arrangements which would be more acceptable to the children concerned.” b. How robust are current systems for monitoring the i) number of adoptions made, ii) the number of children awaiting adoption, and iii) the amount of delay experienced by those awaiting adoption? The adoption panels have a role in this, and the current performance indicators used by local authorities and Ofsted inspections are good in monitoring the number of children with adoption plans, those who are waiting and the length of time they have been waiting, and when adoption orders are granted. What is missing (and we believe this is now being addressed by the DfE) is the number of children whose adoption plans have been changed, and reasons for these, and also disruptions in adoptive placements. The new data collected will be useful.

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British Association of Social Workers (BASW)—Written evidence Key points 

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Social workers to be given opportunity to provide oral evidence to the inquiry and not be marginal in the process. BASW is in the midst of establishing a project group of its members to look at adoption and produce a report from a more practice based perspective. Adoption is important but only constitutes a small part of permanency planning as it is not suitable for the vast majority of children in care, so we need to make sure that there is equity in the system otherwise this can have a detrimental impact on the welfare of thousands of children if the focus is skewed to this one area. We support efforts to improve adoption practice but they need to be congruent with other reforms in children’s services. The introduction of ‘league tables’, adoption scorecards and rigid timescales is in complete contradiction to the findings of the Munro review and the direction of travel of moving away from a target driven, blame culture. With the best will in the world, quality services to children cannot be achieved without proper resourcing. This is patently not the case currently, which is already having an adverse impact on vulnerable children and families. Post adoption support should be made a clear entitlement to adoptive families rather than the piecemeal situation we have now. Successive governments need to exercise greater objectivity when commenting on adoption in the public domain and not misconstrue it, as this can damage the reputation of the social work profession and ultimately does not help to promote greater awareness of the ‘real issues’. Government recommendations at the very least should be supported by good evidence bases and research rather than be formed on the basis of hearsay and assumption. Early intervention has a critical part to play in enhancing the lives of vulnerable children and families and positively alter their trajectories. It requires our political leaders to have the courage of their convictions and make these investments in the lives of our children and young people to build their social capital and benefit the individual and communities. Children’s voices should not be lost in the quest to meet targets. A ‘bottom up’ approach would not be out of place in the ‘big society’.

18 July 2012

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British Association of Social Workers (BASW) and College of Social Work Faculty for Children and Families—Oral evidence (QQ 589-621)

British Association of Social Workers (BASW) and College of Social Work Faculty for Children and Families—Oral evidence (QQ 589-621) Evidence Session No. 10.

Heard in Public.

Questions 589-621

TUESDAY 6 NOVEMBER 2012 Members present Baroness Butler-Sloss (Chairman) Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top Baroness Eaton Viscount Eccles Baroness Hamwee Baroness Knight of Collingtree Baroness King of Bow Lord Morris of Handsworth Baroness Walmsley Lord Warner ________________

Examination of Witnesses Nushra Mansuri, Professional Officer, British Association of Social Workers, Sarah Smith, Member, British Association of Social Workers, and Sylvia Chew, Steering Group Member for the College of Social Work Faculty for Children and Families

Q589 The Chairman: Thank you, all three of you, very much for coming. I am sorry you have been delayed, but you could see we had the former Minister, who was giving us very helpful evidence. We had an extremely helpful submission from BASW answering the specific questions that we sent and, so far as BASW is concerned, we thought what we would do, rather than asking you to go through what you have already said, is to ask some supplemental questions. As far as Ms Chew is concerned, I gather you did not see this until yesterday afternoon? Sylvia Chew: That is correct. Yes. The Chairman: We would obviously be very interested in any comments you would like to make, both on the questions and on any of the responses of BASW. 301

British Association of Social Workers (BASW) and College of Social Work Faculty for Children and Families—Oral evidence (QQ 589-621) Sylvia Chew: All right. Q590 Baroness Walmsley: The first question, which you have seen and you have answered, is that the Munro review sought to move away from that compliance culture, which we appear to have had for many years, with the renewed emphasis on professional judgment. Did you feel there was a tension between the recommendations of the Munro review and the new emphasis on timescales, which we had from the Family Justice Review and, of course, the new adoption scorecards, and whether it is possible to prioritise both of those very important considerations? In answering, could you say any more about resources? I notice on page 2 of your evidence you raise a serious concern about the amount of resources available, given that the number of children going into care has increased very considerably over the last few years. Nushra Mansuri: Thank you. I would just like to bring your attention to another inquiry that is going on right now. It is the APPG on Social Work. We did a survey—which I think I mentioned in the evidence—that was called The State of Social Work across the UK, and I believe that was published back in May. The first evidence session took place in Westminster last week, and we are having two further sessions. What is important here is trying to capture what is happening across the country, in terms of social work services. Our survey received a substantial amount of responses from people working in children’s services, describing the dayto-day challenges that social workers face. Obviously, we have the challenge of a demand for the service—quite rightly—but then there is an issue about the adequacy of that supply. The evidence is something we are already gathering, in terms of the survey and what that threw light on, and then of course there is the inquiry that is now going on. I think it is important that this Committee should take cognisance of that, and we can share any information. Q591 The Chairman: Could you just help us about this? Are you drafting some papers for the APPG? Nushra Mansuri: Yes. It is quite a big exercise for us as a professional association. The Chairman: Is it separate from what you have been sending us? Nushra Mansuri: I believe there will be more supplementary papers from that inquiry, and I am very happy to make sure that we share them with you. The Chairman: It would be very helpful if you let us have what you are giving the APPG. We would find that very useful. Nushra Mansuri: Yes. That is great. We will do that. Q592 Baroness Walmsley: Does Ms Chew want to add anything to that? Sylvia Chew: For the College of Social Work, the issue is making a distinction between timeliness and timescales, and that is very important. Adoption is a very serious business. We are breaking the ties between a child and their birth family, and it is important that we have time to give that consideration. From the point of view of the College of Social Work, they have two developments, which are of concern relating to timescales. While we welcome the Family Justice Review’s finding that care proceedings are taking too long, we do think that for some children 26 weeks may be too short a time to push through those orders. The second is,

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British Association of Social Workers (BASW) and College of Social Work Faculty for Children and Families—Oral evidence (QQ 589-621) obviously, that Ofsted’s planned inspection regime will deny top rate to any council that takes longer than a year to place children for adoption. Our duty as social workers is to ensure the best interests of the child. I think that is more about permanency in general and then adoption specifically for some children. There are obviously a range of options for permanency for children. What is important—and I completely agree with the Family Justice Review’s views on frontloading for care proceedings, and making sure our assessments are sound beforehand—is that we want to make sure we have given parents every opportunity and support to care for their children, and that would include early help. The College of Social Work surveyed their children and families faculty, and they had 323 respondents to that. I thought you might be interested in that survey, in which 89.8% of respondents agreed that delay was damaging for children, whereas only 5.3% disagreed. They felt that it was right to be timely, in terms of speeding up the adoption process, but they were very concerned about adoption breakdown—and I know Tim Loughton has just spoken about adoption breakdown. They thought that it was important that we have a balance about making sure that it was the right parents for this child and—I am sure you will ask us about that later— making sure that then those adopters were supported, both during the matching process but also after the adoption has happened, to prevent adoption breakdown. Q593 Baroness Walmsley: Do you feel that the scorecard understands the nuance between timeliness and timescales? Is the scorecard appropriate, given the difference that you have just pointed out? Sylvia Chew: I do not think the scorecard takes sufficient account of adoption breakdown. It looks at the process to adoption but I do not think it has thought about the longer-term outcomes for children. I think that should be taken into account. Baroness Walmsley: Does anybody else want to add anything before I move on to question 2? The Chairman: No. Does anyone want to ask anything on question 1? No. Q594 Baroness Walmsley: Question 2 is: do you consider that the reforms initiated by the Family Justice Review will improve levels of trust between the courts and the social workers? Are social workers currently in a position to deliver those quality and timely decisions that are required, which will hopefully alleviate the need for lots of additional expert witnesses being called by the courts? My supplementary to that one is about something that, again, was on page 2 of your evidence—this is for BASW—about legislation. The second paragraph of section A on page 2, under the heading “Legislation”, says, “Prior to the 2002 Act, it was possible, while in care proceedings, to identify the adoptive placement and advise the court in final care plans of the actual time it would take to place the child, and general details of the proposed family as the adopters had already been identified”. You say that, since the 2002 Act, that is no longer allowed. Do you think we should go back to that? Sarah Smith: I have to say that was actually my comment. Baroness Walmsley: Do you think we should go back to that?

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British Association of Social Workers (BASW) and College of Social Work Faculty for Children and Families—Oral evidence (QQ 589-621) Sarah Smith: At the moment I am a children’s guardian and I have been for a number of years, but as a social worker I can remember doing care plans, in the late 1990s, early 2000s, where we would have the placement identified and where my final evidence to the court would be, “These are the reasons why we need these orders, and if you give us these orders this is what we will now do with them”. We would have it set up so the children would be placed very, very quickly. I remember one child, a seven-year-old, where we had an in-house adopter. They were moved within a very short timescale of the final orders being made. What I find now is that I am invariably told in proceedings that nobody will even start the search until there is a placement order. Q595 The Chairman: Can I just ask about that? This Government is obviously enthusiastic about placing children with foster parents who may be adopters. From what you are saying, that would go back to before the 2002 period. Are the three of you in favour of assessing potential foster parents who might be adopters, at a stage before the placement order? Sarah Smith: Yes. For myself I have also had that experience, which sadly did not work, with a little girl who was five last year, whom her foster carer had wanted to adopt. She said she could not get a child to adopt, so had begun fostering with a view to adopting the child she chose to foster. Sadly, that broke down after a year. Yes, I am all for it if you have foster carers who would go on to adopt, if they are assessed as suitable, because it minimises the change for the child. It is heartbreaking when you see children who are so settled in a foster placement—the plan is permanency for adoption and they have to make that break. For older children, I have to say my big issue at the moment is where we are looking at older children for adoption. They do not want to move again. I have had children, seven, eight years old sitting literally with their arms folded saying, “If that judge says, ‘Adopt’, I am not going. They cannot make me,” because they do not want to leave the foster placement they have often been in for a year or two years. They do not want that move again. So, yes, I agree with having carers who were dual-approved for fostering and adoption, if you could. I understand one of the arguments against that is, quite often, if a carer wishes to adopt it can be absolutely heartbreaking for them—they grow to love that child and then suddenly that child is not available for adoption and moves away from them. That is one of the downsides, but there are people out there willing to take that chance. Baroness Walmsley: We need to explore this issue of why practitioners feel they are not allowed to start the search until the placement order has been made, and whether that is correct. The Chairman: That is contrary, as far as I can understand it, to what this Government is asking for. Sarah Smith: Let me just say that this is my clear experience in every single potential adoption court case I have now and that I have had as a children’s guardian. Q596 Baroness King of Bow: How many are there, roughly, just to give us an idea? You said this was your clear experience. How many cases are you talking about?

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British Association of Social Workers (BASW) and College of Social Work Faculty for Children and Families—Oral evidence (QQ 589-621) Sarah Smith: I would say about 50% to 75% of my caseload are cases where placement orders are going to be sought. On every single one it is very clear to the court. It is put in a statement to the court and the court will be told, “We cannot start the search until we have a placement order”. Baroness King of Bow: What number of cases? You gave me percentages but I just do not know what— Sarah Smith: I am sorry. I average about 15 to 20 cases. At my height I think I had 61 children attached to my name, which was not a good time. Q597 The Chairman: It would be helpful to hear from both of the other two speakers about this because this is obviously a very important issue. Sylvia Chew: While, in principle, searches cannot start for prospective adopters, the 2002 Act has fundamentally changed how social work practice happens. One of the things that we lost from prior to the 2002 Act is the idea of best interest. We used to be able to go and decide that the best interests for a child would be adoption, and then we would start the search. I think waiting for the placement order has had an impact on that, so panels will not hear things until after the placement order has occurred. Nushra Mansuri: In the call for evidence, and for BASW to ask the question of social workers, that is always an opportunity to test something out and we have had experiences of that before. Sarah’s experience was also the experience of other social workers within the association, so I think that needs to be seriously looked at. Sarah Smith: Let me just add very quickly that one of the things I have been told from adoption teams is that, given the option of a child who is subject to a placement order, so is available, or one who is still in proceedings, 99% of the time the prospective adopters will go for the child who they know is going to be available rather than the child who may be at some point. Q598 Baroness King of Bow: Could you let us know a bit more about your view on whether social workers are governed by a culture of optimism, when it comes to thinking that they will be able to change parental capacity in the families that they are dealing with? In your written evidence to us, on page 4, under point A, under “Time taken in placing children”, you acknowledge that in some cases there can be an over-optimistic search, which can go on for years. You say that you want a more rigorous approach and realistic timescales. Is that about changing the culture, and how do you do that? Nushra Mansuri: How do you change the culture? Baroness King of Bow: Yes. You do feel that sometimes there is an over-optimistic approach on the part of social workers looking for the perfect match. Sorry, no, we are not talking about that. Nushra Mansuri: No.

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British Association of Social Workers (BASW) and College of Social Work Faculty for Children and Families—Oral evidence (QQ 589-621) Baroness King of Bow: Looking to change parents, they will over-optimistically think, “These parents can change, they can become good parents for these children. We will leave the children with them”. Nushra Mansuri: I would say there might be an element of that, but I would never make a sweeping statement and say that is generally how social workers are because I do not believe that to be the case. You could very well argue the opposite because we have seen an unprecedented number of children subjected to child protection plans, and obviously care applications have increased. They have gone beyond 10,000. It depends how you look at it. It is important for social workers to be well managed and supervised because, of course, you work close up with a case. Lord Laming made some very good points on this. He talked about a rule of optimism. He talked about healthy scepticism, and I think disguised compliance. I think those were three things that he said. They are important for all professionals. As we know, tragically sometimes, working in situations with families, we have to be so careful about how we are being drawn into a situation, where perhaps people are trying to conceal what may well be happening behind closed doors. That is where BASW would argue for, so importantly, the quality of supervision. That should never just be a tick-box exercise, but something that is in depth and we are encouraging social workers to reflect on their practice. I suppose I go back to people having the time to do this, and I would also argue from the survey that social workers do not have enough time to spend with children and families. Eileen Munro has said enough about this, has she not, in terms of the levels of bureaucracy and what we hope for in terms of the recommendations for her inquiry. I would not like to brand my profession as people who are overly optimistic about families. In fact, in our evidence, I think we said that a few years ago social workers were quite frustrated about children being left in situations in their families where they were arguing with the courts about, I suppose, threshold levels, and was it okay for a child, who they believed to be neglected or emotionally abused, to still remain in that situation. Some of the courts took the view that it was quite draconian perhaps to remove a child, so I think there are many different ways of exploring this one. We are always concerned about stereotypes that are put on our profession, and I think one of the things that BASW members asked me today was to try to debunk some of the myths, if possible. Baroness King of Bow: In a word then, would it be correct to say that you do not think social workers try too hard to keep birth families together? Nushra Mansuri: I think that, in the spirit of the children, we have Section 17 of the 1989 Act saying, “Where possible, we should try to work hard to ensure that children can be brought up within their families,” but obviously there are limits on that. It is about understanding the legislation and what our duties are in regard to that in the best interests of children. Q599 The Chairman: Ms Chew, you wanted to add something. Sylvia Chew: I would also disagree that there is a rule of optimism, but we have a duty as social workers to ensure that we give families the best chance. I think it comes back to social work education and training, so the College of Social Workers have developed the professional capabilities framework, which is looking at the framework within which social workers are taught, post-qualification training and ensuring there is critical reflection and analysis. I would

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British Association of Social Workers (BASW) and College of Social Work Faculty for Children and Families—Oral evidence (QQ 589-621) agree with my colleague from BASW that supervision is crucial to this. It is very easy to be drawn into families and you do need a supervisor standing outside saying, “Enough already. I think it is time to draw the line here”. The other thing is that it is essential, when we enter into proceedings, that we have the right evidence, that we have gathered evidence very carefully, and that we have demonstrated to the court that it is the right time that children are removed from their families. The two things go together. The Chairman: This moves into training, does it not? Q600 Baroness Eaton: Obviously it is a demanding job, which has always been viewed with both admiration and concern in equal measure sometimes. Could you tell us whether you think that there is sufficient training in the undergraduate degrees on adoption, and should there be a post-graduate specialism? Should that be required? Are some of the good adoption social workers often lost to management positions, and perhaps should we be looking at another new career progression on the back of that? Nushra Mansuri: There are quite a lot of questions there. We received these questions, I think, last week, and I was doing something else last week. I sent the questions around to members, and tried to glean from that some responses, which I have managed to type out today. In the terms of the first question about the undergraduate degree, we have had a social work taskforce and a social work reform board look at social work across the board, including education. We know that we are in a period now of an action plan, and obviously social work education, pre-qualifying and post-qualifying, is part of that remit, so we know there is variation in some of those programmes. I would also say that in a three-year degree you could never learn everything about social work. That is impossible, so there have to be some limits on that. Also it is the quality of the placements. People who know a lot about social work will know there are big issues for students, in getting the quality placements that they require to help give them the confidence and experience to go out to practise. That is what I would like to say on that one. Perhaps I can just read what some of our members have said about the other questions, I hope that is okay. As far as the postgraduate specialism in adoption is concerned, they want to point out that it is not adoption social workers who take care proceedings through the court; it is the local authority social workers. Most adoption social workers work with the processes involved when adoption has already been identified for a child. I think the point they are trying to make is that people who work in adoption and fostering teams tend to be some of the most experienced social workers that we have, which is a good thing, and it is a very specialist area, whereas in front-line social work teams we may have less experienced people. We know that for a fact. Sometimes I would argue that there is a skills gap when you look at local authority front-line social work, so there are issues there. We would hope that the Munro proposals and the new structures will allow social workers to take routes to seniority without going into management, which I think is a vision for the whole of social work as well. As I said, we have concerns about the public spending cuts and whether that will have a negative impact. Some of our members are already reporting that. One of the positive things in the 2005 regulations was the requirement—this goes back to social workers who specifically work in adoption—that a social worker who writes any reports relating to adoption must have at least three years post-qualifying experience in children’s work, including

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British Association of Social Workers (BASW) and College of Social Work Faculty for Children and Families—Oral evidence (QQ 589-621) adoption experience, or if they do not they have to be supervised by somebody else, and we think that is very important. Adoption social workers are proud of the fact that they have that experience and that wealth of knowledge, and they have chosen to work in this specialism. What I feel we are lacking, in terms of qualified social workers, are the opportunities for continuing professional development. We have just had a change of regulator from the General Social Care Council to the Health and Care Professions Council, and we used to have to submit evidence for something called post-registration training and learning. With the new body it will be continuing professional development but, in my opinion, social workers do not get sufficient time to take opportunities to advance their learning when they are in practice. Sometimes, again, because of the austerity that we are in, we will see training budgets get cut. Then it is harder for local authorities to release people because of the pressures they are under. It does not make sense, obviously, because we need social workers to have that time to be well researched and to go on training courses and develop their knowledge, so I think there is a bit of a dilemma there. Q601 Baroness Eaton: Can I pick up on the postgraduate, the specialism? You did not say whether you think that is a good idea or not. Nushra Mansuri: PQ, the post-qualifying awards, I believe are being looked at anyway. We have always taken the view in BASW as well that, because social work is so diverse, when we have postgraduate training it should reflect whatever specialism a person is interested in and works in, and that would include adoption. Baroness Eaton: Okay, thank you. The Chairman: Give Ms Chew a chance to answer also. Sylvia Chew: Yes. We did survey our members on this, and what social workers came back with was that they wanted more training as an undergraduate on various things: 80% wanted more on adoption, but there were also issues around child development attachment theory, and the relevant research from neuroscience, which you will be aware is showing the impact on children’s brain development of neglect, particularly in the first two years of life. Social workers felt that, on the whole, they did not get sufficient training as part of their undergraduate degree or their MA. Of course, we are working at the moment around employee standards, which have been produced by the Social Work Reform Board. That is around local authorities working with colleges of further education, in order to ensure better postgraduate training for social workers. Again, we think adoption should be alongside a range of long-term permanency arrangements for children, so that social workers have their eyes open to the range of options and what is right for each particular child. That may include long-term fostering for some children and that may include special guardianship for some children. We are very excited about the role of the advanced social worker, which would allow social workers to remain in practice and not necessarily go down the management route. I am head of children’s social care in the London Borough of Kingston, and I can say that we are developing that advanced practitioner role within all of our teams, both the long-term teams and our assessment teams, to enable social workers to remain in practice and not move into management. 308

British Association of Social Workers (BASW) and College of Social Work Faculty for Children and Families—Oral evidence (QQ 589-621) Q602 Baroness Walmsley: Is there a case for some sort of entitlement, as with the teaching profession where they have to do five days CPD every year? Would that be appropriate for social workers, or would it be totally inappropriate because of the different nature of the work? Nushra Mansuri: We did have that with the General and Social Care Council, who now no longer regulate us, but perhaps you can remind me how many days it was. Sarah Smith: It was 15 days over three years. Nushra Mansuri: With the new regulatory body it is about the quality and what is that experience of learning about, which is important. It is not just about the certificates and the hours. Again, I would go back to supervision. If social workers are having good supervision, then part of that supervision experience should also include looking at their needs for continuing professional development. There should be a partnership between the social worker and the employer about their interests and their training needs and their learning needs, and how they can access that. There was a vision—again within the Munro review—of how we would develop a learning culture. That has been spoken about for a long time as well, even prior to Munro. It is quite frustrating, because those places where we work should also be the places where we learn, where we are able to have access to the internet, get journals, perhaps work with other groups of social workers, and have learning circles. We are so far away from that. I think it would be a bit of a revolution to increase the awareness and the learning within the profession. Sylvia Chew: I would just like to add to that, as someone who has always worked within local government and continues to work with local government, I do not have quite such a pessimistic view about access to learning for social workers and their ability to develop within their career. Q603 Lord Warner: It has become very clear to us that there is a huge diversity and range in the size of the adoption workloads, in particular, between local authorities, and some are trying to get round it. It is very much a minority trying to get round this, through federating or partnerships of one kind or another, but I think they are still very much the minority. Are you concerned that some local authorities’ adoption workloads are simply too small to ensure best social work practice and good continuing professional development? I would like to hear both from BASW and from the college on that. Sylvia Chew: I think it is a point well taken, and that is of course why we have adoption consortiums, where we are working together as a consortium of north London or south London. We also need to think about permanence. I know I have repeated this over and over again, but it is about permanence for the child and it is about how we ensure permanent placements. I think there is a larger caseload when adoption teams are also looking sometimes at special guardianship and also assisting with long-term fostering. The Harrow example, with the links with Coram, is a very interesting model to look at. Where I work at the moment we are looking about whether we can work more in partnership with Richmond, so we can work across boroughs. I think if you ask my adoption team in my borough they would not say that they were underworked. They are working with about 20 children at the moment looking for adoptive placements, and obviously that does take a significant amount of work, not only

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British Association of Social Workers (BASW) and College of Social Work Faculty for Children and Families—Oral evidence (QQ 589-621) assessing adopters but also using various media in order to find the right family for children. Perhaps we need to think on it more broadly. Nushra Mansuri: When we raised this question with our members nobody was coming forward and saying that that was a concern for them or that there was any evidence of that. I would say, if we are looking at local authority social workers, because so many of them are newly qualified, that is where it is important. Again, it is about that they are well supported and, where you have more experienced social workers, it is where they can learn from some of that experience if they are doing something for the first time. If it is the first case that they have ever been involved in, where adoption is an issue, then they must have the support in place to guide them through that, but I think that is where there is more of an issue in the workforce. Q604 Lord Warner: I am a bit puzzled by these answers because some authorities are joining together in partnerships, consortiums and federations, because of their concerns about the workload scales, but you seem to be saying it is not all that important and that size is not important. I am a bit puzzled what the message is coming across. Sylvia Chew: I interpreted your question as whether to have a small team looking for adopters for a small number of children was effective and efficient. The consortium gives us a lot of things. A consortium gives the sharing of knowledge and it gives a sharing of a pool of adopters, because obviously children are very rarely adopted with an adopter from the same borough that they live in, so we are often looking outside the authority for adopters. So it gives a pool of adopters and it allows pooling of training, further development and issues like that. I just find it very difficult to answer the question about whether I, and the authority that I manage, should have an adoption team or not. I think that is something that we need to give a bit more consideration to. I would pick up the point from BASW in that having that adoption team within the local authority means that those experts are sat there side by side with the social worker, who is planning for the child, at the beginning of the care proceedings and planning through it. That knowledge and skill is there. That dialogue happens face to face. If you remove that outside the authority I think you do lose something. Q605 Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top: The status of social workers has taken a battering over the years. I confess to you I trained long before any of you and moved on. The college is one attempt to improve the professionalism and the status of social workers. What do you think are the priorities to do that? Then I want to know how BASW and the college are working together, if you are. Sylvia Chew: I will start off by saying that I do not think they are mutually exclusive, and I am a member of BASW and a member of the College of Social Work so there is no exclusivity there. Obviously I am here to represent the College, and I think the College of Social Work is extremely important. What was evident, particularly after the death of Peter Connelly—and we did take a bashing as a profession—was that we had no one person or organisation to stand up and support us. I was working in Haringey at the time and I managed a team of very demoralised social work professionals. As a college this is what we aim to do. We aim to see ourselves as a centre of excellence of social work and a guardian of professional standards, providing resources to members to uphold and strengthen those standards. We support continuing professional development of social workers so that they can build on skills, 310

British Association of Social Workers (BASW) and College of Social Work Faculty for Children and Families—Oral evidence (QQ 589-621) confidence and judgment, and we have special interest groups, which is not just face-to-face meetings but is virtual. I am not too good at it myself, but it is virtual and you can blog and you can send in views. We see ourselves as the guardian of professional standards and of professionalism. We want to empower social workers to take control and responsibility of their own standards. We are emphasising the need for good initial and post-qualifying education and we are working very hard with our education institutes to do that. We aim to have an influential role within the profession and the development of government policy. I cannot go into the nitty-gritty of our relationship with BASW, but we do talk to each other and our negotiations are ongoing. I would hate it, as a social work professional, if that interaction is seen as the be-all and end-all, because I think both BASW and the college have very clear roles in supporting the social work profession. I am personally very proud to be a member of both of them. Nushra Mansuri: BASW was one of the leading organisations during the time of the social work taskforce that was calling for a college of social work to be set up, but I have to say we have been quite disappointed about that particular process and sadly, if anything, I think it has been divisive and it has caused disunity among the profession. So yes, we do have issues about the college being funded initially by the Government and how that has been undermining all the other existing professional associations, not just BASW. If we look at family justice, we have social workers who may be guardians or independent social workers who will also be members of Nagalro or perhaps Napo, and we also consider the England-only remit of the college to be a shortfall in this establishment. We just question the appropriateness of local authority money being used to pay for membership of the staff of the college. That was recently promoted, I think, by the government Minister Norman Lamb, at the directors’ conference in October. We are questioning the way there is an endorsement scheme for university programmes, but we also have something that is similar with the HCPC, so there might be some duplication there. We have some questions about how the college may enhance the status of the profession when we have had these issues to contend with. Q606 Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top: It is not very encouraging those of us who want to see social work being respected by the outside world, is it? Nushra Mansuri: If we are looking at an organisation that is speaking for social workers, then it has to be an organisation that is independent. That is the question that comes up on something else here today, but we can use the same arguments about: we have to have an organisation that is truly independent and independent of government, so that it can speak very clearly for social workers. Some social workers would say there is a compromise there in terms of the relationship. Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top: Is there not a difference between social work and social workers? Nushra Mansuri: There is also a connection. Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top: Of course there is a connection, but it is about the professionals.

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British Association of Social Workers (BASW) and College of Social Work Faculty for Children and Families—Oral evidence (QQ 589-621) Nushra Mansuri: I am not arguing from a trade union point of view here. BASW has always had a code of ethics. That is a code of ethics for social work and that is about promoting standards in social work. It is social workers who obviously deliver social work. Let us go back to the question of why we wanted the college to be established. At that point in time, after the death of baby Peter, social work was in a very difficult place, and social workers were bearing the brunt of the criticism from society at that time or from the media. Q607 Baroness Walmsley: I am a bit puzzled by your answers. You say that you called for the college to be established, and yet you say it has been very divisive and I want to know why it has been so divisive. Is it the legislation that has made it so? Is it the politicians that have made it so? Is it the profession that has made it so? I would have thought that you might be rather glad that the Government is putting some money into improving the quality of social workers. If an organisation is funded by the Government it does not have to be a creature of that Government. I think successive Governments have taken that view. Nushra Mansuri: I think it is about establishing a body that takes social workers with it. We would like to have seen a more bottom-up approach. There are other organisations, including BASW, that exist to represent the interests of social workers, so on a practical level it would have been good to have brought all of these organisations together and said, “Well, what do we have? What already exists, and how can we improve on what we have?” I know that this inquiry is about adoption legislation and I did not want to create a situation where this now becomes the main focus. The question was there and I had to answer it, and I have been asked to answer it. The Chairman: We are grateful to both of you for your viewpoints. We have to move on to other questions. Q608 Viscount Eccles: Can we go to other routes to permanency? You have given us some interesting answers on the question of special guardianship and you say, among other things, that the practices differed from the original intention. We also asked you a question, which rather posed the special guardianship as an alternative to adoption. If we get away from the alternative and just think about special guardianship in its own right as one of the hierarchy of solutions to permanent placement, how do you see it in its development from the 2002 Act? Nushra Mansuri: I did raise this question with members, so I am just going to share some of their views on this. One member is saying, “Special guardianship enables children to remain within their extended family rather than be adopted,” so we know that. “This is something we should all promote if children can be cared for safely and securely with their own wider family.” This member goes on to cite some research. It is DfE research. It is a report called Safeguarding Children: A comparison of England’s data with that of Australia, Norway and the United States. There is some interesting comparative data here about the use of, I suppose, special guardianship. In each of the four countries under review, foster care is the most common placement type, which we would probably expect, and that has been the case since 1999. In 2010 between 73% and 92% of children were in foster placements, but then this person goes on to say, “There are marked differences in the proportion of children in care placed with relatives, kinship carers or friends”. What we have in England is 11% compared to the United States where it is 25%. Then if we look at Australia it is 46%. He also mentions Norway. I think there have been policy

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British Association of Social Workers (BASW) and College of Social Work Faculty for Children and Families—Oral evidence (QQ 589-621) initiatives designed to promote the use of those placements there but we do not have a figure on that. The special guardianship orders were designed “to provide permanency for older children who value the existing relationships with their birth family, and to allow carers who have a religious or philosophical objection to the concept of adoption to offer permanency”. We know that it is being used more widely than that. We do not know the answer to the questions. It is about: if it has changed from the intention, is that a good or a bad thing? This is where we need some research and some evaluation. A colleague of mine said that the University of York Social Policy Research Unit is apparently doing some research— The Chairman: I must ask them. Nushra Mansuri: Yes. I just think we need to know so much more. There are concerns about whether it is being used inappropriately. Is this a way in some situations for local authorities to save money? It could create a perverse incentive. I do not know because I do not have solid evidence of that, but I think we need to be extrapolating far more information about how they are being used. Obviously the important thing is about the benefits to the children that were involved, whatever their age range may be, and the different type of arrangements that might be in place, so I can only say we need to know a lot more information on the merits of this. Sylvia Chew: It is important that we have a range of options for children in terms of permanence. It is important that children have someone who will be their parent to adulthood and beyond. Without being flippant, I always think it is important to know who you ring up when you are 26 and you do not know how to cook your chicken. My son rang me up and asked me how to cook a Victoria sandwich, and then said it was for 20 people and could I double up the numbers. That is what children need. They need someone who is going to be there, and they need the security of knowing that that parent is going to be there through their life. It offers a good option for older children with family ties, particularly if they need security and someone who can make day-to-day decisions for them in their life as they grow older. It is not the be-all and end-all to everything. It will be very interesting, when the research comes out, to see where the breakdown lies and where we should not be in this position. I think there is sometimes a push from the court, that special guardianship is always the best option. We just need to be careful that we also give it proper consideration alongside what else is right for the needs of particular children. The Chairman: Can we move on? Q609 Lord Warner: Can I just ask you a question so I am clear about this? It is individual social workers who are making the case for special guardianship. It is not local authorities, per se. The point of looking at a child and reviewing the case, it is a social work practice issue, is it not? You were saying earlier that local authorities may have decided but at the heart of this is social work practice, is it not? Sylvia Chew: It is social work practice, but I think that is also determined by the local authorities’ views, the supervision and the training that goes on. I am head of children’s social care, my lead as head of children’s social care is that what we need to ensure is that children

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British Association of Social Workers (BASW) and College of Social Work Faculty for Children and Families—Oral evidence (QQ 589-621) have parents, whether that be in their own home, whether that be through special guardianship or adoption or long-term fostering. It is also about the court process. I am sure Sarah will have a view, in terms of a children’s guardian being there in court to represent the child’s needs and also express an opinion. I think it is a variety of things so, yes, it will be the individual social worker, but that lead will also come from a senior management lead and through supervision. It will also be discussed as part of the court process, which may involve expert opinions and almost definitely involve the views of the guardian. Q610 The Chairman: I will move on now to ask about independent reviewing officers and about Cafcass guardians, but first the IROs. The real question that we need to try to find out is: how effective are IROs and how independent are they? Are they able to challenge a social work decision on adoption if they feel that it is not right? That is as an example. Sarah Smith: Not just speaking as a children’s guardian, but last year part-time I was also safeguarding manager for IROs in an authority outside of London. That authority were not effective—I will be extremely blunt. I have raised this with the authority because, when my IROs challenged concerns over decision-making, the head of service of that authority threatened disciplinary action to them and I say that quite openly. I appreciate that is not the same across the country and that there are some very good boroughs that welcome IROs challenging decisions, but it is so much down to the individuals who are responsible for managing the service. The authority I was in, we were outside of children’s services. We were supposed to come under quality assurance but it did not stop what I saw as quite blatant bullying, completely inappropriate, particularly as the concerns being raised—not all about adoption but some were—were very legitimate. One included a child being hurt at school, which had been ignored. I have a real concern as to how much IROs are allowed to be independent while they remain under local authorities. I know that is not the official stance of NAIRO because I was at their recent conference and they were clear that, on the whole, they wanted to stay within local authorities, but unless you have a management structure that is genuinely supportive of the IRO role and understands the IRO role, and their need to be independent and their need to constructively challenge, you are not going to get beyond the situation we have now. To be blunt, in some places, it is not working. Q611 The Chairman: We were told by the MP who just gave evidence before, Mr Loughton, that Leeds, for instance, has a very good IRO system and so quite simply what you are saying is that there is very major variation around the country. Sarah Smith: Yes, and as a guardian I work with IROs on a fairly regular basis and I work across London. In some of the boroughs I deal with, the IRO word is the rule. What the IRO says goes. The IROs will raise their concerns over cases and they are very much listened to. On others I have IROs who quite openly say to me, “Well, we do not want to rock the boat too much because we are only agency or on a contract”. It is not good, and it is has not changed. I was an IRO a few years back and saw exactly the same happening, and I do not see how it is going to change. Even with Munro, even with legislation, even for recommendations, it is so much down to the individuals in charge and their actual approach. Until that approach—and, yes, the culture—changes, I do not see how it is going to change on the ground floor, and it is the children who suffer because it is the children who should have this person speaking up for them if things are not right. Again, at the NAIRO conference they were saying, I think, that 80%

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British Association of Social Workers (BASW) and College of Social Work Faculty for Children and Families—Oral evidence (QQ 589-621) of children in care are saying that they are in good placements. That means one in five are saying they are not. Sylvia Chew: I would just like to add to that. It is not as simple as them taking the IRO service outside the local authority, because I think there is also an issue about quality assurance and making sure that you are getting good quality. My experience as a social worker—which was not that long ago—is that what children like is to have continuity of an independent reviewing officer, particularly where social workers come and go. Often the independent reviewing officer is the person who has been very permanent in their life if they are employed through the local authority, so I think it comes back to quality assurance. Whether they are inside the local authority or outside the local authority, we need to be sure that they are robust. They do need to be independent, they do need to challenge, but we must ensure that what they are providing is a good service. Q612 The Chairman: We need to move to Cafcass and, in general, the representation of children by guardians in the court proceedings. Are Cafcass guardians able to give sufficient time to the children who require their support? Sarah Smith: No, is the quick answer, and that would be my response. I work as a selfemployed guardian, and I know for myself I will negotiate with Cafcass in advance if I believe a child needs more time than would ordinarily be seen as acceptable. I hear horror stories from solicitors on a regular basis about cases going to final hearing where children have not been seen. I hear that there are recommendations that parents do not need to be seen, and I have been repeatedly told that it is the social worker’s job, when your role is to decide about making your own inquiries as to what information you need to be able to properly advise the court. If I decide I need to see a child more then I will go and see that child more, but as I say, I have to negotiate in advance. Q613 The Chairman: Could I just ask a bit more? When I was a judge I do not think I ever had a guardian appear before me who had not seen the family and had not seen the child, but I gather there are quite a lot of reports being given by telephone conversations or not actually being in touch. Is this so? Sarah Smith: This is what I understand. This is what I am hearing more and more from solicitors. I do not believe it is the official Cafcass line. I have sat at an APPG meeting some time ago, where Anthony Douglas was speaking and he was very clear that every child should be seen. To me—I am sorry, again I am going to be a bit blunt—that is going to be a top official line. What is going on underneath? I had one solicitor saying to me recently, a very reliable solicitor, that they had had a talk from somebody senior at Cafcass—and she was going to try to dig out the name for me—who was saying that children do not need to be seen. I can understand with newborn babies. Yes, you are not going to go and have a great relationship, but if the children are a bit older you need to see them in the placement, you need to get an understanding of where they are at. If they are old enough to express a view you need to get a proper understanding of that as well, particularly, as I say, for older children, and local authorities are now saying any child under the age of 12 needs to be considered for adoption. Children coming up to the age of 12 have clear views on what they want to see happening in the future. I have had a 10-year-old who sat and pondered and debated long-term fostering or adoption, and came up with many reasons why she would prefer to be adopted even though

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British Association of Social Workers (BASW) and College of Social Work Faculty for Children and Families—Oral evidence (QQ 589-621) she knows it would be difficult to find someone for her. You cannot do that on a phone call or one visit. Sylvia Chew: I do not have very much to add to that, except that I think it is important that guardians meet children and that they are social workers of experience, who have had experience working with children, and that they are not someone who is relatively newly qualified and has come to the profession recently. The move between Cafcass employing guardians, rather than self-employed guardians, I think led to less experienced guardians ad litem. To be perfectly honest, it is important that they have done the job and that they understand the court process, the social work process, but also have the communication skills to talk to children. The Chairman: I have been looking at the time. We are going to have to move on. Q614 Lord Morris of Handsworth: Can I take you, by way of a question, to perhaps the most debated topic in the adoption debate? That is matching children with adopters. How much emphasis should be given to the ethnicity of a child when seeking a match with potential adopters? Have social workers ever given too much emphasis to ethnicity and do you welcome the prospect of legislation in this area? Sylvia Chew: I would like to start on this. I think it is a very complicated issue, but what is absolutely right is that children grow up with a sense of their culture and their identity, and that is absolutely fundamental. Can that happen with adopters who are not of the same ethnicity as them? Yes, but they need to have thought through very carefully how they are going to do that, and how they are going to support a child, particularly when we live in a very racist society. We have asked social workers what they thought about that and I think their comments speak volumes. One said, “This is a complex area. I feel that only looking for the perfect match about ethnicity is not realistic. However, the importance of culture and ethnicity cannot be overlooked”. Then they add, “Many of the adopters in my local authority are not willing to consider children from a different ethnic or cultural background”. Another said, “The idea that there is an excessive emphasis on ethnic matching is a myth”. I think the importance is that, yes, of course we do not want to wait years and years for a child to find the perfect match with the perfect parents who reflect their culture and their identity, but the adopters must be able to see that child through difficult times. They must be able to see them through what happens at school. They must be able to see them through their searching, particularly as they grow older, around their identity and what is happening for them. That is fundamental. That takes us back to the length of the assessment process and the adopters must have had a chance to think that through. Then I think it leads to a final question—which I know you are going to get to—about post-adoption support and how we support children in that process as they grow older and they explore themselves. Q615 Lord Morris of Handsworth: How much emphasis has been given to the issue that adoption is not just for a day or a month or a week, it is for life? Sylvia Chew: Huge. That is why the adoption process and the completing of an adoption assessment is such a lengthy process. I have had experience of doing those assessments myself, because it is exploring the child now, the child as they grow older, the child as an adult, the child when they hit difficult times. Perhaps it is not one of the questions you have asked, but it 316

British Association of Social Workers (BASW) and College of Social Work Faculty for Children and Families—Oral evidence (QQ 589-621) is important to think around the child as they explore their identity with their birth family. Whereas before we had quite a lot of control about when children had contact with their birth family, with Facebook and social media this issue has become more complex— Lord Morris of Handsworth: “Who do you think you are?” Sylvia Chew: Exactly, “Who do you think you are?” It is about that. It is about the children much more likely to have information about their birth families now at an earlier time. It is much easier for birth parents to get in contact with children and raise those issues. This is about finding parents for children and all those things have to be considered. It is not going to be a completely simple matter, and that is often right because with children from mixed heritage, from mixed parentage, those issues have to be explored and there has to be postadoption support to come back and explore those issues as the child gets older. The Chairman: Do either of you disagree with that? Nushra Mansuri: No, we agree. We absolutely agree. The Chairman: I am looking at the time, but if you agree it maybe we could move on. I know that Lady Knight wants to ask a rather different question from question 11, but we do need an answer to question 11 as well. Q616 Baroness Knight of Collingtree: Yes. I have no intention of missing that out because it is very important indeed. Ms Chew made reference earlier to the importance of keeping ties with the birth family and, therefore, I want to ask about the question of keeping siblings together. How much do you feel that trying too hard to keep siblings together is costing too much, bearing in mind that breaking ties has already been established as a bad thing? How do you balance the need to keep siblings together with the cost? Sylvia Chew: We are back to timeliness again, are we not? Starting with sibling groups, on the whole the feedback from the social workers we spoke to was that we would want to keep sibling groups together, unless there was a particular reason. Sometimes it is about the individual needs of those children and sometimes there is a particular need for a particular child, which means that they may be best placed on their own or there may be an abusive relationship between a child and other children in the family, which then may place those other children at risk if those children were placed together. You cannot wait forever to say, “We are going to wait for the family who is going to come and take this family of eight siblings”. It may never come, so we then have to balance that up with timeliness. If you are going to separate children, the important thing is that you then look at how they have contact with each other. That can sometimes be done very nicely with informal sibling contact a number of times a year. I can think of a particular family I worked with in the past where the adopters got on very well, so those children met for birthdays and informally rather than formal contact. Ideally, our feedback is that we would like to place sibling groups together if that was possible. Baroness Knight of Collingtree: You do not decide by the cost, you decide by the advantage to the child.

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British Association of Social Workers (BASW) and College of Social Work Faculty for Children and Families—Oral evidence (QQ 589-621) Sylvia Chew: Everything has to be about children. I feel passionately about this. This must be about the needs of children. As a profession, if we do not start from the child and the needs of the child then we should not be doing the job. Q617 Baroness Knight of Collingtree: Thank you very much. I want to clarify this in my own mind, having struggled with care to read the whole of your report, which is so important to us. You seem to be saying on page 2 that adoption is too expensive, almost as if you were generally not too much in favour. Then I struggle on until I get to page 13 and I read, “Adoption is unsuitable for the vast majority of children”, which amazed me. I know it is not always successful but could you clarify your attitude here? Nushra Mansuri: Sorry, I think that is our submission to the original call for evidence. When we say that adoption is not suitable for the vast majority of children, what we are talking about is the general care population of children in England, which is something like 65,000 children. As my colleague was saying earlier on, it is looking at what is the best plan for them, looking at permanency planning for all of these children, so some of those children will be rehabilitated. They will be able to go home. That is a good option for them. That is the best option for them. Some of those children may be older, and so adoption may not be the best option for them. We have already spoken about special guardianship orders, so that would also be in the best interests of a certain percentage of children. I think I cited some research where we know that the majority of children are looked after by foster carers, so it is looking at the entire population of children in care. Approximately, there are plans for perhaps 5,000 of those children where adoption would be the most suitable option for them, so that is what we mean by that. That is not taking a negative position on adoption. It is looking at the fact that we start with the child and what is the right plan for each child in the care system, all 65,000 of them. Baroness Knight of Collingtree: I had the impression that we were being told by you that, in your opinion, adoption was a route that was, one, too expensive and, two, it would not suit most children anyway. I am wrong then and that is not what you were trying to say. Nushra Mansuri: I am sorry if we misled you in any way, but that is not the view that we wanted to be taken forward by anybody. Baroness Knight of Collingtree: I am pleased to hear it. The Chairman: We are running very late. We have kept you a long time, so we will just ask Lady Hamwee to ask the last question. Q618 Baroness Hamwee: Going to post-adoption support, Ms Chew, you have mentioned it, and the BASW evidence talked about it in a number of places. You have told us you think there should be more data and a clear entitlement to post-adoption support services. Can you tell us what sort of services you think are required and whether social workers are equipped to provide them, or is this something specialist that needs to be provided and brought in? Sylvia Chew: Interestingly, I think there are three sorts of post-adoption support. There is the post-adoption support that is provided to adopters, which is very generally available, and obviously it moves—I think I am correct in saying—after three years, from the placing authority to the authority where the child is placed. Then there is support for the children and young

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British Association of Social Workers (BASW) and College of Social Work Faculty for Children and Families—Oral evidence (QQ 589-621) people themselves, which may be within a family therapy or a family context, and then—I think the bit that we probably do badly—is the adoption support that we provide to parents whose children have been removed. There are some interesting schemes working with parents of children who have been removed. I think we probably do not get that bit right, and we very rarely provide that. It has to be on the needs of the adoptive family, so for some they may be able to access universal services or tier 1 CAMH services, which I worked in. Most recently we had a contract with the Tavistock, who provided more complex work with children. Sometimes it is okay for the social worker to do, sometimes I think it is far more complicated and then it does need specialist support to come in. If it needs family therapy or psychotherapeutic support, then I think it is absolutely right that that is brought in or it comes in through CAMH services and tier 2 and 3 services. Q619 The Chairman: What would you like to add? Nushra Mansuri: I would like to say that the social work component for adoption support is important. Listening to adopters themselves, we know that it might not be from day one, but it could be a few years down the road that there are issues within the placement and that is when the family does need the support, whether it is the child, the young person, or whether it is the adoptive parents. It is not just about the social work support. Listening again to adopters, they may feel frustrated that education and health, for example, do not recognise that they have adopted a child and there are specific needs there, and they need support for that, and there should be recognition of that. I have some examples about medical advice, in terms of health and development. There may be some genetic implications in terms of a child’s background, familial health and birth family history, so these are important areas. On the health information about implications of parental substance misuse, sadly, we know often when we are taking children into the care system that that can be quite a factor in a number of families that we are working with. Of course, not everybody is aware of those kinds of issue, so it is about a potential for learning impairment as a result of alcohol or drugs in pregnancy, that kind of thing. Speech and language advice is important. I know that when I was doing front-line social work, and when I was involved in adoption cases and we had the adoption panel, so much attention was given to these kinds of issue for children, and quite rightly so. That is why we have the medical experts on the panel sometimes, to look at the needs of that child and obviously with the reviewing process within care plans as well, so there is a whole variety of needs that could be apparent in these children. You had evidence given to you by Lynn Charlton about two weeks ago, and we felt that her evidence was something we would support fully, in terms of the therapeutic focus for children and also for the adopters themselves. I think there is one adopter who talks about some good practice with her local authority, where the local authority put on training and support for the adopters themselves around therapeutic parenting. Again, if you look at some of the children, and some of the trauma they have experienced in their early lives, these are important support mechanisms that should be available but they are just not available across the piece. Q620 The Chairman: Sorry to interrupt you, but I am thinking of the time. Should there be some statutory requirement that local authorities are obliged to offer post-adoption support? Nushra Mansuri: Yes. We support that.

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British Association of Social Workers (BASW) and College of Social Work Faculty for Children and Families—Oral evidence (QQ 589-621) Sylvia Chew: But I would agree with my colleague on the talks about cross-partnership; I think we need to be thinking about how health and education also provide that. Q621 Baroness Hamwee: Do you think there should be some sort of adoption passport to services? Sylvia Chew: I think that sounds a rather good idea. I kind of like that. Sarah Smith: Because it is an offer, is it not? You are not saying this is what you have to have. It is an offer, so that the adoptive families will know this is what can be available if you feel you need it. Baroness Hamwee: I wonder if I could just add this for the Committee, but I would like our witnesses to hear it. We have talked quite a lot about post-adoption support for children and adopters and Ms Chew has rightly reminded us about the birth parents and I think that is possibly something that the Committee needs to look at. The Chairman: It is an important point. Yes, you are absolutely right. Thank you very much for making that point, because I think it is one that so far we have not given sufficient attention to. We are extremely grateful to all three of you. We have kept you well beyond the hour. Sarah Smith: Can I just for two seconds ask for one brief thing, and this comes from our workers in IRO? When placement orders are made and the scrutiny of the court is over—the guardian, lawyers, everybody goes away—if the child is not then placed in an adoptive family, going back as an IRO a year on, two years on, three years on, it is absolutely heartbreaking to hear children of seven, eight and nine saying, “Well, we were going to be adopted but nobody wants us”. The care plan is still adoption, even though the reality is it is not going to happen. Something needs to be done to make sure that there is proper scrutiny after the placement order is made, so that if you are not going to find an adopter then, for goodness sake, let those children know that it is going to be long-term fostering. The Chairman: Thank you very much for reminding us of that very important point. Thank you, all three of you, and, as I say, I am sorry we have kept you rather beyond the hour. Thank you very much.

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British Association of Social Workers (BASW)—Supplementary written evidence

British Association of Social Workers (BASW)—Supplementary written evidence BASW’s response to supplementary questions for oral evidence session on the 6 November of the HoL Select Committee Inquiry into Adoption Legislation We are pleased to have the opportunity to represent the voice of the practitioner in this inquiry – so often, this is missing in these type of exercises and arguably should be the starting point. BASW is currently involved in an Inquiry led by the APPG on Social Work that was prompted by the findings of our State of Social Work Survey earlier this year. The first oral evidence session was held last week and the witnesses were practising social workers. There will be an additional two sessions also giving voice to practitioners presenting key organisations and policy makers with the opportunity to listen. We will also provide you with the written documentation that is generated by this inquiry once it becomes available. Munro Review and Family Justice Review 1. The Munro review sought to move away from a ‘compliance culture’ in social work, with a renewed emphasis on professional judgement. Is there a tension between the recommendations of the Munro review and the emphasis on timescales found in the Family Justice Review and adoption scorecards? Is it possible to prioritise both timeliness and quality when making decisions about adoption? In our original written evidence to this Inquiry, we made the point that the issue of timeliness in making decisions about children's long term care is not simply related to the care proceedings process. (The Ofsted report ‘Right on Time: Exploring delays in adoption’ (2012) also found that ‘a substantial number of children had been known to children’s social care services for a considerable length time before entering care; delay in entering care proceedings jeopardised good outcomes for children’ BASW members tell us that whilst the Public Law Outline process is generally viewed positively by most social workers, there has been a definite effect in delaying proceedings being brought to court in some cases. This is particularly true in cases where concerns are about neglect and emotional welfare of children rather than cases of serious physical or sexual abuse which are more likely to lead to emergency action. “More frequently now the legal planning meetings which we hold prior to court applications result in legal advice which delays the start of proceedings and even if the proceedings themselves are faster the overall effect is that decisions in many cases still take as long. So it is not just a matter of the legal process but the threshold of when to consider permanent removal of children from parents. Decisions about thresholds are extremely complex and there are degrees of subjectivity in any decisions about what constitutes 'significant' harm. Politicians and commentators speak as if there is a simple process for assessing ‘good enough’ parenting and when we have made this decision it is a simple matter of putting it into effect. There will always an invidious choice about where to set thresholds and this is inevitably set by the courts. If the process is speedier it will

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British Association of Social Workers (BASW)—Supplementary written evidence inevitably mean making it easier to remove children permanently from their parents. Casting a wider net will of course protect many children who are living in unacceptable situations but it will also mean removing more children from families where their outcomes would have been better than we predicted. Politicians of course want it both ways. They want social workers to act more swiftly in situations where children need to be safeguarded from abuse and neglect but they want fewer mistakes where action is disproportionate and oppressive. In any system can we really have it both ways?” 2. Do you consider that the reforms initiated by the Family Justice Review will improve levels of trust and confidence between social workers and the courts? Are social workers currently in a position to deliver the timely, high quality assessments and planning requirements which will alleviate the need for independent experts and high levels of judicial scrutiny? If not, what needs to be done? In order to answer this question, we would have to once again highlight the findings of our State of Social Work Survey which is currently the subject of an APPG Inquiry. Social workers up and down the country told us that they simply cannot cope with the demands that are being made of them in terms of unmanageable caseloads, a lack of administrative support, not enough time to work directly with children and families, and a lack of appropriate support and supervision which makes the work in some cases dangerous. Given this scenario, we think that it is an extremely tall order expecting local authorities to meet the 26 week deadline and this could lead to shortcuts in practice which inevitably, undermine the quality of assessments and the decision making process. We also need to take into account the inexperience in the workforce which sometimes creates the lack of trust and confidence between social workers and courts and make sure that we are investing in intelligent workforce planning not only for today but for the future. We have a significant number of highly experienced social workers in their fifties and sixties who will be coming up to retirement and this is the expertise we risk losing. We should be taking a proactive approach now and developing mentoring of the newly qualified by the more experienced in order that our future workforce will have the right skill levels to carry out complicated pieces of work such as risk assessment and develop more specialist knowledge in areas such as working with parents with learning disability, substance use and mental health issues. The question on the use of independent experts assumes that there should never be a need for them which we find extraordinary; for example, social workers are not clinicians and there are times when we need to draw on the expertise of a number of specialisms to help courts in their decision-making. BUT, we are not sure if this part of the question is another attempt to discredit and question the authenticity of ISWs Independent Social Workers). Unfortunately, the MoJ and the LSC have gone to extraordinary lengths in recent years to single out ISWs acting as expert witnesses in care proceedings by in the main, denying that they are indeed ‘independent experts’ and capping their fees to a rate that makes it untenable for them to practice. This was all done without an evidence base apart from spurious comments from some quarters about ISWs duplicating the role of LA sws and guardians, usually being drafted in respect

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British Association of Social Workers (BASW)—Supplementary written evidence of second opinion, human rights claims made by parents and finally adding to court delays. Thankfully, we now have some research about the effectiveness of ISWs acting as expert witnesses in family courts carried out by Dr Julia Brophy and her team earlier this year on behalf of the University of Oxford. The key findings of the research were that the input of the ISWs brought added value to proceedings, certainly didn’t duplicate previous work but provided a more specialist assessment that could help to resolve some of the more intractable cases and finally, rather than adding to delay, the majority of reports were filed in good time (the exceptions usually due to circumstances outside the ISW’s control i.e. change in the family’s circumstances) resulting in more timely solutions to care proceedings. One of the conclusions is that the involvement of ISWs can actually help with the imperative of meeting the 26 week timescale for care proceedings. Dr Brophy and her team are about to embark on the second stage of this research, this time focusing on judges experiences of ISW assessments. We look forward to the findings being published possibly in spring 2013. Social work culture and practice 3.

To what extent, if at all, do you agree that social workers are governed by a ‘culture of optimism’, particularly regarding parental capacity to change? Do they sometimes try too hard to keep birth families together? Again it should be said that s17 of the 1989 Act clearly says that the LA will promote the upbringing of children in need by their families. That said, the culture of optimism is a feature of all child protection work which has always been an issue for social workers to be mindful of. Lord Laming provided us with some important insights about ‘the rule of optimism’, ‘healthy scepticism’ and ‘disguised compliance’ when dealing with parents who may be doing their utmost to conceal what is really happening to a child behind closed doors. This is why it is absolutely essential that social workers receive good quality supervision from an experienced manager who can look at the case objectively with them and challenge them where they may be unwittingly being drawn in by the adults at the expense of the child. It is absolutely essential therefore, that social workers are given adequate time to work with children and families and get back to what Eileen Munro calls ‘relationship based social work’. Nevertheless, we received an interesting contribution from a BASW member on this about cases involving neglect. “It is obviously most pertinent to the issue of neglect cases where a minority of families are known to services over periods of years. I think there needs to be some special consideration given to how neglect cases are managed through the child protection process and this needs involvement at every level from social workers and other professionals through to senior management and IRO's and legal services. I sometimes wonder whether CP conferences are the best forum for considering long term plans or some other panel - on a par with special courts which deal with domestic violence. Neglect is the most damaging situation and also the most difficult to quantify in the short term as the effects are pernicious in the long term. When politicians talk about timeliness in making decisions for children they do not consider that much of the

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British Association of Social Workers (BASW)—Supplementary written evidence evidence we need in court proceedings takes time to accumulate. Again it is the invidious choice. Do we set a legal threshold that takes time to collate sufficient evidence or do we make the threshold lower and cast a wider net which will inevitably mean more media criticism of social workers who are too eager to remove children. These are complex issues which politicians fudge and want social workers to resolve for them. How many politicians have the courage to stand up and say 'I want it to be easier for social workers to permanently remove children from their parents”. 4.

Do social workers receive sufficient training on adoption on undergraduate degrees? Should a postgraduate specialism in adoption be required? Are ‘good’ adoption social workers lost to management positions, and are other, new career progression routes needed? As far as a post-graduate specialism in adoption is concerned, it is not adoption social workers who take care proceedings through court in most authorities. Most adoption social workers work with the processes involved when adoption has already been identified for a child. The earlier assessment and planning which is the critical issue in making good quality and timely assessments for children are the front line teams. In any event, we know that some of the most experienced social workers work in adoption and fostering teams which sharply contrasts with the years of experience of social workers working in the front line teams. We hope that the Munro proposals and the new structures which allow social workers to take routes to seniority without going into management will help here as elsewhere in social work but this may not be the case if spending cuts are the ultimate priority. Sadly, BASW members are already reporting instances of this. What was positive in the 2005 regulations was the requirement that a SW who writes any report relating to adoption must have at least 3 years experience in children’s work, including adoption experience – or if they don’t to be supervised by someone who does. http://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2005/1711/contents/made

5.

Are some Local Authorities’ adoption workloads too small to ensure best social work practice and good professional development? We are not finding any evidence of this but would argue as in anything, it does help to have experience in particular practice but in situations where the adoption workload may be smaller, it is useful for practitioners to draw on and learn from the experience of others in the team and their supervisors. Good supervision and support, as in all aspects of the job is critical. We need to also bear in mind, that we are likely to have a significant number of newly qualified social workers in local authorities, whether or not they have large or small adoption workloads, they will not have a great deal of experience unless through placement experience as students. All social workers need opportunities to advance their professional development and this has become harder in

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British Association of Social Workers (BASW)—Supplementary written evidence the current climate when one of the first things that is often under attack is the training budget. 6.

How will the establishment of the College of Social Work enhance the professional standing and status of social workers? How will the College interact with BASW? Whilst BASW was one of the leading organisations that called for the establishment of a College of Social Work during the tenure of the Social Work Taskforce, sadly, we do not believe that the way in which it has been established will enhance the status of the social work profession. In our view, the opposite is true given the divisive way in which it has been set up which has created disunity among the profession. We consider it divisive to take government money to undermine ALL the existing professional associations – not just BASW. For example, social workers working in the family justice system, may be members of BASW, Nagalro or Napo. We consider the England only remit of the College to be divisive across the UK. We also question the appropriateness of local authority money being used to pay for membership of their staff to the college (recently, promoted by Norman Lamb at the Directors Conference in October) which begs questions of how the College can claim to be independent and free of any vested interests i.e. employer/employee relations. The issue of continued government funding further compromises its independence and ability to speak out on behalf of the profession. Finally, we would also have to question how some of the College’s money is being spent, including on a totally unnecessary endorsement scheme for university programmes.

Adoption and other routes to permanency 7.

Why do Special Guardianship Orders (SGOs) continue to grow in popularity? Should this be seen as a positive development? Are SGOs sometime sought when an adoption could actually have been pursued instead, particularly with young children? If so, why? Whilst we agree with the concept of SGOs, we need to distil more what is happening in practice. Special guardianship enables children to remain within their extended family rather than be adopted. This is something we should all promote if children can be cared for safely and securely within their own wider family. The DFE Research report Safeguarding children: a comparison of England’s data with that of Australia, Norway and the United States gives some interesting comparative data about this: In each of the four countries under review foster care has been the most common placement type since 1999. In 2010 between 73 and 92 percent of children were in foster placements. However, there are marked differences in the proportion of children in care placed with relatives, kinship carers or friends: 11% in England, 25% in the U.S. and 46% in Australia, although in each of these countries as well as Norway there have been policy initiatives designed to promote the use of these placements. It does seem that the use of special guardianship in practice is significantly different from the policy intention. However this may have been partly because the policy intention

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British Association of Social Workers (BASW)—Supplementary written evidence was misjudged. It is important that we have reliable national information about the use of this order and we therefore look forward to hearing about the findings of the research the Social Policy Research Unit of the University of York is doing on the use and outcomes of special guardianship. The impression is that it is substantially being used as a route out of the care system into the care of extended family – but there are repeated concerns that these are at times arrangements made “on the cheap” with little or no support offered, that the status of the arrangement is forced because the carers would not meet the requirements of the National Minimum Standards for Fostering and that inappropriate pressure is applied to persuade the carer to make the application. In short there are questions about whether local authorities may sometimes work on the assumption that it is intrinsically better for the child to live with relatives outside the care system than to be in any sort of placement in the care system. It is also relevant to ask whether SGOs are being used when Residence Orders would be more appropriate. We certainly need to extrapolate to a much greater degree from practice how SGOs are being used and the pros and cons of this. SGOs are clearly not being used in the way that was intended when they were introduced – to provide permanency for older children who value the existing relationships with their birth family, and to allow carers who have a religious or philosophical objection to the concept of adoption to offer permanency. Instead it seems to be used to offer permanency for younger children in the extended family. This may be a valid purpose but we have not seen any discussion of the possible advantages and disadvantages. Since the SGO is a direct alternative to adoption, we are wondering if there is a case for it to be included when we compare rates of adoption either between LAs or across time? Protecting the interests of the child 8.

How effective are Independent Reviewing Officers (IROs) at monitoring progress in individual cases and challenging local authorities on behalf of children? Is the ‘independence’ of Independent Reviewing Officers compromised by their employment within the local authority? BASW is a member of the Inter-Disciplinary Alliance for Children and share the concerns of the Alliance regarding the lack of independence of IROs and the potential loss of court scrutiny of care plans. BASW recently carried out a survey on the independence of IROs which indicated a huge variation in the IRO service, across the UK, and particularly in England with 87% of respondents indicating caseloads in excess of the maximum 70 recommended by the IRO Handbook. 85-100 is regarded as fairly standard in the current climate. Just 11% of respondents were confident that children are always seen prior to a review. We have also heard of some local authorities planning to reduce the salary for IROs to make savings akin to social work grade which further devalues the role. Some IROs reported that they were being bullied, told to change recommendations or lose their job. This exacerbates our concerns about the proposals in the FJR about the reduced scrutiny of care plans by the courts going ahead

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British Association of Social Workers (BASW)—Supplementary written evidence as it could result in children being the casualties as they get a reduced and often poor service. It will be interesting to see what the study on the role of the IRO in improving care planning for looked after children set up by the NCB (BASW has been invited to join the national advisory) will tell us. We also welcome Ofsted’s thematic inspection of IROs in 10 local authorities. 9.

How effective are provisions for the representation of children by guardians in court proceedings? Are CAFCASS guardians able to give sufficient time to those children who require their support? Sadly, in our view there has been an erosion in the role carried out by guardians as a result of an overly bureaucratic system characterised by top-down management which has led to many experienced guardians leaving the service as they do not feel that they can practice ethically in what has become a very oppressive climate. In some situations we know that children are not even being seen by their guardians as a result of rationing resources reducing their role to a paperwork exercise. The latest we have heard is an argument that guardians do not need to see parents as they are seen by social workers. Such changes have demoralised the workforce. “Difficulties for guardians are often the restrictions placed upon their practices by Cafcass e.g. limited visits, not being able to attend contested hearings in full etc. It is our contention that guardians must be allowed to undertake their responsibilities unfettered. If the guardian is being entrusted to make recommendations regarding the future life of a child, they should be trusted to know the extent of the enquiries they need to make in order to provide an informed decision.” (BASW member) This situation is somewhat ironic when the Munro review clearly spelt out the dangers of an overly bureaucratic, target driven child protection system where the use of professional judgement was scant. In the past, children’s social workers saw the guardian role as good career progression once they had gained sufficient experience in child protection work. Typically, social workers who advanced to guardians had a minimum of 5 years experience. Sadly, this is no longer the case as the bar has been significantly lowered. The Inter Disciplinary Alliance for Children is calling for a new KPI to be introduced which ensures that children are seen by guardians as we know that sadly this does not happen in every case and BASW supports this.

Matching children with adopters 10.

How much emphasis should be given to the ethnicity of a child when seeking a match with potential adopters? Have social workers ever given too much emphasis to ethnicity? Do you welcome the prospect of legislation in this area? It is important to remember that race is a ‘protected characteristic’ under to the Equality Act 2010. Sadly, we don’t live in a ‘race neutral’ society, where racial

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British Association of Social Workers (BASW)—Supplementary written evidence discrimination has been eradicated. It is really important for children who have come into care that they have a strong sense of self and are helped to develop a positive identity. A sense of identity is the one thing that stays with us from childhood through our adult lives. Ethnicity cannot be the only or over-riding consideration for a child being placed for adoption but it is still critically important. In the matching process, our starting point is the child's needs. Ethnicity is important together with other attributes that need to be considered when making a secure match. A family can be the same ethnicity as a child but still not be able to meet all of the child's needs meaning that this would not be an appropriate match. However, we have not come across any cases where social workers have only focused on ethnicity and this is borne out in the findings of the Ofsted report Right on Time who could also find no evidence of social workers holding out for the perfect match. We do not consider that the legislation or guidance needs to change with regards to this area of practice. Sometimes, we don’t ask the right questions i.e.why are Black and Minority Ethnic children over represented in the care system in the first place? AFRUCA – Africans Unite Against Child Abuse certainly raise this issue and have called on the government to put in place a National Action Plan to tackle the over-representation of African children in the child protection and looked after systems. Secondly, are we doing enough to attract adopters from Black and Minority Ethnic backrounds? “I have found many people in my community adopting from abroad whilst Asian children are still in the looked after system in the UK. There are numerous reasons as to why this may be, one reason in particular that I have observed is that for Asian and Black African Caribbean familes there are so many barriers to overcome before they can even be assessed as adopters. In the 5 local authorities I have worked they have all had high levels of children from BME groups, yet this has not reflected in the literature that is produced to advertise adoption, it does not reflect the multiple languages that make up the diverse communities.” (BASW member) 11.

Do social workers try too hard to keep siblings together at an undue cost to individual children? As for siblings - all cases are individual - but sibling relationships are an enormous resilience factor for some children who are separated from their birth family. It is incredulous that we should be reminding politicians about this. Sibling relationships can help to maintain a child's sense of stability and belonging. A report by The US Department for Health and Human Services says the following: ...... a body of research has established that separated siblings in foster care are at higher risk for a number of negative outcomes, including placement disruption; running away; and failure to exit the system to reunification, adoption, or guardianship (Leathers, 2005; Courtney et al.,

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British Association of Social Workers (BASW)—Supplementary written evidence 2005). Girls separated from all of their siblings are at the greatest risk for poor mental health and socialization (Tarren-Sweeney & Hazell, 2005). There is another situation – sequential adoptions of subsequent siblings. The proposal in the current consultation on adoption and fostering for “fostering for adoption” opens up possibilities here – where one or more adopters have already adopted older siblings the LA could approach them to adopt a subsequent sibling, and then place the child there as a foster child while the plan is being ratified. Post-adoption support 12.

What types of post-adoption support services do adoptive families require, and are social workers equipped to provide them, or is more specialist intervention commonly required? BASW supports the evidence presented by Lyn Charlton (After Adoption) calling for post-adoption support to be made a duty. Suggestions by BASW members: Adoptors require a range of support services some of which can definitely be provided by suitably experienced social workers. Some will have to be provided by other professionals.

Some examples:            

Medical advice re: health and development regarding genetic implications of familial health and birth family history. Health information about implications of parental substance misuse i.e. potential for learning impairment as a result of alcohol /drugs in pregnancy. Speech and language advice and consultation. Psychological advice about behavioural and psychological conditions. Advice, support and preparation to deal with aftermath of sexual abuse. Therapeutic input to address attachment issues and assist carers to build strong relationships with the children. Therapeutic work with the children to assist their recovery from past traumatic experiences. Support to manage ongoing contact with siblings Support to adopters to help them deal with the telling of the child’s life story. Support ref helpful parenting techniques for new adopters Emotional support for adopters who are coping with traumatised children. Practical and financial support where necessary. Apart from the medical input much of the support can be provided by social workers including the therapeutic work to deal with trauma and attachment difficulties. Foster carers and other adopters have much valuable experience to offer. In order to provide appropriate support to adopters social workers need access to relevant training.

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British Association of Social Workers (BASW)—Supplementary written evidence

The need for post adoption services is ever more pressing as we try to find adoptive families for older children. There is a direct relationship between the age of the child when placed and the risk of placement disruption. There is plenty of research about this, including Tony Blair's review of adoption when he first came to office and there is similar evidence in the US. Experienced post adoption workers are part of what is needed but some children need a number of services as they often have complex needs which are the result of their early development as well as their experience of being separated from their birth family. We all know they are particularly vulnerable children. Their problems are multi-factorial and there is no single or simple intervention for such children. I think there is insufficient cross national research into what are the best interventions and configuration of services to meet the needs of these children and this is something governments never seem good at i.e. supporting widescale and longitudinal studies. The overwhelming majority of children who are adopted will require some degree of therapeutic re-parenting and integrated service planning and delivery. Most of the children will have attachment and behavioural difficulties. They therefore, need extensive support to ensure they reach their potential and of course their adopters need to be supported to cope with the demands that are made of them. The focus should be on the fact that all children from complex backgrounds will face challenges when it comes to finding a family for them. Therefore we should be investing in post adoption support services. So when families do come forward for care for these special children they are supported throughout with the later life issues which will surface for some of these children. This supplementary evidence was compiled by Nushra Mansuri who would like to thank the BASW members who made contributions to this response at extremely short notice. November 2012

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Ian Bugg, Nicola Jones-King, and Martha Cover—Oral evidence (QQ 622–667)

Ian Bugg, Nicola Jones-King, and Martha Cover—Oral evidence (QQ 622–667) Transcript to be found under Martha Cover

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Roger Bullock—Written evidence

Roger Bullock—Written evidence Providing long-term substitute care for young children Clearing a path through an academic minefield A summary of discussions at various meetings, compiled by Roger Bullock and drawing on contributions from: Margaret Adcock, Sarah Blower, Judith Masson, Elizabeth Monck, Roy Parker, Michael Rutter and John Simmonds. Providing substitute care for children of any age is difficult (Bullock et al, 2006) but it is especially so for very young children who are unlikely to be able to live with their birth families for the foreseeable future because of fears that if they did, they would suffer significant harm. Several solutions to these problems are available – adoption, long-term fostering and kinship care, with various methods, such as concurrent planning and family support, to facilitate them. Each of these has some evidence to back up claims of effectiveness; but likewise few of these options run smoothly and each has been shown to face difficulties. As a result, views on what is best for young children needing long-term care can become polarised into pro- and anti- camps with the numbers of children requiring each type of placement somewhat exaggerated. So what is the situation and can a distanced analysis indicate a path through the arguments? Question 1: What is the nature of the problem and how big is it? The main concern with very young children, say under the age of three, is whether they can live safely at home or need to be cared for elsewhere; and if so, under what legal and social arrangements? The first observation to make is that national statistics need disaggregating to avoid unsupported generalisations. In England, the proportion of children entering care under the age of one in 2010-11 was 19%, a percentage that has almost doubled since 1980 when it was 11%. However the fall in annual admissions to care for all children during that period, from 43,500 to 27,310, means that the actual number is only 11% higher. But this increase is offset by a fall in the figures for admissions of children in the 1-4 age group where there has been a decline of 38%, from 9,135 to 5,670, contributing to an overall drop of 21% for the 0-4s as a whole. So it is not true that local authorities have been ‘swamped’ with young children in terms of numbers, as is sometimes reported in the press; but it is the case that because of the development of alternatives to deal with family breakdown, homelessness and mothers’ hospitalisation, those they do care for are more likely to be victims of serious abuse and neglect. Indeed, in 1967, for instance, ‘mother’s confinement’ was the second most significant reason for admission, forming 17% of the total. The national statistics also highlight the variety of children’s circumstances. For example, two thirds of the 27,310 entries to care in England in 2010-11 were voluntary admissions, which suggests that although the situation was serious, shared care with birth families was feasible. In 332

Roger Bullock—Written evidence contrast, Masson’s study of children involved in care proceedings found that nearly 29% of them were less than one year old. As children on care orders tend to stay longer in care, they apply to 60% of children in care at any one time, indicating a high risk of serious neglect and/or abuse among those who stay for several years. The need for firm action to help young children has been emphasised not only by the widely reported death tragedies that have revealed the dangers facing young children left in abusive situations but also by researchers such as Ward, Farmer and Selwyn who have shown that many young children returned home from care tend to be readmitted following further abuse and neglect; or if they do stay, show poor development compared with those remaining in care. A typical example is a Loughborough University study (Ward and Munro, 2006) that followed up until the age of three 57 babies admitted to care because of actual or likely significant harm. It found that a third of the mothers had already been separated from an older child and that the risk of neglect of the new baby was often apparent before or soon after birth. At the age of three, 15 (26%) of the 57 children were permanently separated from their birth families but especially worrying was the fact that 60% of them had faced a double jeopardy in that they had been kept at home until things became impossible and had then formed a close attachment to a carer before they moved to a long-term placement. Nearly half (28 or 49%) were living with their birth families at the age of three, but 43% of them were considered to be at risk of significant harm because their parents’ behaviour had not changed, although this does mean that in 57% of cases the situation had improved, mostly in the first six months. This situation illustrates the dilemma facing social workers; some families do improve but there is uncertainty about which. Thus, this study identifies a highly vulnerable group of 12 (21%) out of the 57 babies studied who at the age of three were living in very unstable situations in that they were displaying behavioural and developmental difficulties and living with adults who had maltreated them in the past and who seemed unable or unwilling to change. For children in these situations a longterm, stable placement seems a sensible option and the firmer the foundation on which it rests, the better. But the important variable in reaching this conclusion is the quality of social work support offered to the families following their child’s return from care or while their babies were not with them. Does poor quality social work or parent intractability explain the results? Ward considers this but emphasises that social workers did everything possible to keep families together and parents’ rights were respected; so it is hard to envisage how much the outcomes would have been different if other services had been provided. Question 2: What is needed for young children deemed to need long-term care outside their birth family? The answer to this question will have changed over the years in response to social attitudes and as a result of other social circumstances, such as poor housing, inter-generational unemployment and increasing substance misuse in some communities. The development of ideas also reflects increasingly sophisticated knowledge about child development, revisions to attachment theory, greater understanding of developmental stages and brain development, empirical findings about risk factors and follow-up evidence on children’s progress. In addition, service provision is relevant as those sceptical about the benefits of removal from home stress

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Roger Bullock—Written evidence that few resources are devoted to reunification compared with entry to care, even though both tasks have similarities in terms of their aims for the child. As a result, specialist skills with regard to children’s return home from care are rarely available with the few initiatives that have been set up soon fizzling out. A division in professional opinion exists with regard to what is best for children at continuous risk of harm from their birth relatives, centring on the alleged strengths and weaknesses of different options. As in any debate about professional action, there will be cases where the situation makes the decision virtually clear-cut causing the arguments to focus on the groups falling between extremes. Taking discussions about foster care in these situations as an example, critics stress that it does not offer the child long-term security as carers can and do give up at short notice. The arrangements are also under continual scrutiny and maintain the stigma of being in care felt by the child. But its supporters point out that it is just as effective as adoption (which can also break down) and is ethically more desirable where a young child has a close emotional, even if unhealthy, bond with a parent who is unable to care for him or her, perhaps due to alcohol or drug abuse or long-term mental illness. Long-term fostering is seen as providing the necessary physical and emotional care for the child while holding the parental relationship ‘in trust’ until the child is old enough to manage the situation or make their own choice. While there is a growing recognition that such placements are perfectly capable of providing the security and commitment children need (Biehal et al, 2010; Schofield and Beek 2009), there is less clarity about what brings this about and the care arrangements are often counterproductive by ending at age 18, despite statutory leaving care requirements. Of course, it is the case that the increasingly open arrangements in adoption and special guardianship also hold birth family relationships ‘in trust’, but in all cases there should be some recognition that contact can be painful as well as rewarding for the children and adults whatever setting they are in. Several publications have helped to formulate criteria on which placement decisions should be made. The Dartington Practice Tool Going Home lays out factors that predict the likelihood of a child returning home from care and its success. These indicators are robust as they have been derived from prospective follow-up studies of looked-after children. David Jones has charted the conditions for successful rehabilitation, looking at the situation of parents and children, the risks of harm, family interaction and characteristics, professional activity and social settings. With regard to care placements, Schofield and Simmonds have reviewed the effectiveness of different settings while Thoburn and Courtney have discussed the options open to social workers seeking to help children in need of long-term substitute care, all of them seeking to encourage a more sensitive perspective than an either-or view of options. All of these reviews urge caution about being unduly categorical about which settings will meet the needs of which child because of the significance of the background characteristics of the different groups concerned, especially the age at joining the new family, the extent of adversity early in life and the likelihood that the adults will change. When options are well matched to the needs of children and families, the outcomes assessed in numerous research studies are encouraging with regard to placement stability, parent-child bonding and attachments, as well as physical and cognitive development, although children placed when older can face problems in some of these areas.

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Roger Bullock—Written evidence

Thus the debate about the most appropriate option is not so much one of ‘what works’, as all options can be effective if well delivered to the right children and all can fail; it is about the arrangements which ensure optimal child development in a context where predictions have to made in the midst of uncertainty. Question 4: What is the reality? There is a danger that these somewhat abstract discussions about welfare do not ring true for practitioners working with children and families. In order to resolve this, an analysis of the needs and background characteristics of children entering care is necessary but there is a problem in comparing studies because of differences in the composition of samples, the categorisations used and variables such as non-response rates. But if global statements are being made about looked after children, they have to be based on all-inclusive samples so that any sub-groups can be considered in the context of the total population. Two such studies are relevant in this respect. The first involves a scrutiny of 99 sequential admissions to care in an English metropolitan borough in 2004. It showed that the children fell into four groups in terms of their needs. One group comprised 14 children of school age who presented challenging behaviour. This might well have been the result of abuse and neglect and their behaviour often exposed them to danger; but for them the placement issues were different from those of younger children as they were older and had an established network of family and friends, and so they can be omitted from this discussion. Of the 85 remaining children, 31 (Group 1 in Table 1) came from families under stress due to illness or poverty and although parenting was perceived as poor, the risk of harm to the child aroused concern but was adjudged to be relatively small compared with other children. This means that for just over half (53) of the 99 admissions, there were clear protections issue. In 33 cases, these arose from family discord and violence, and in 21 from actual abuse and in its effects. The background and usually overlapping characteristics of the children in these three groups are laid out in the following table (figures are percentages): Table 1: Background characteristics of three groups of children entering care in a metropolitan borough, and in a later study of three local authorities STUDY TWO THREE LAs 2011

Male

STUDY ONE METROPOLITAN BOROUGH 2004 Group 1 Group 2 Group 3 N= 31 N=32 N=21 45% 58% 52%

Aged 0-1

39

100

30

24

335

(N=65) 58%

Roger Bullock—Written evidence 2-3 4-5

17 3

15 15

10 15

0 0

On cp register now On cp register in past Looked after before Currently placed with sibling

39

36

33

56

10

15

40

40

19

18

19

2

26

45

48

8

Recently illtreated Sexually abused Emotionally abused Physically abused Neglect Domestic violence

42

79

67

37

0 10

6 12

29 43

2 5

29

18

14

10

32 26

49 76

57 19

38 46

Parent mental 16 health problems Parent alcohol 10 abuse Parent drug 16 abuse

27

29

34

33

38

26

9

19

25

Plan for return home Likely to be in care for >5 yrs

39

21

0

n/a

10

39

38

n/a

The figures from the metropolitan borough suggest that about a fifth of admissions to care (the 21 children in Group Three) followed concerns about actual abuse and neglect. A quarter of these children are aged less than two and half are under six. A further third of admissions (the 32 in Group Two) result from the effects of serious family discord and violence. One third of these children were aged under two and two-thirds younger than six. Just under 40% of the children in both groups were expected to remain in care for at least five years. Although extrapolation from one local authority to a whole nation is dangerous, it may be possible from this information to estimate the number of very young children entering care for

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Roger Bullock—Written evidence whom a long-term placement is likely to be needed, offering an indication of the size of the problem, although it must be emphasised that a single local authority may be unrepresentative of the country as a whole. If extrapolation is undertaken, the results from the metropolitan borough indicate that 21% of admissions would be expected to fall into Group 3, where the overriding feature is serious abuse and neglect, and that 24% of these children would be under the age of two. On the basis that 24% of 21% of care admissions are grossly abused or neglected infants under the age of two needing a long-term stable placement, a proportion of 5% emerges (24% of 21%). When this rate is applied to the 27,310 annual entries to care in England in 2010-11, a figure of 1,376 children is produced. In the Loughborough research, it was found that by the age of three, 26% of baby admissions were permanently separated from their families and 21% were living at home in risky situations. Application of these two sets of figures to the whole of England indicates that out of the vulnerable group of 1,376 children just identified, by the age of three 26% of them will have been permanently separated from their birth families and for a further 21% this could well happen, figures of 362 and 289 respectively. If we accept the figure of 362 permanently placed children, it can reasonably be assumed that most will have been through the court system and the evidence supporting separation will have been tested very carefully. It is, therefore, the other 289 who are the subject of arguments about living away from home and reunification, and the various legal and placement options underpinning such decisions. Obviously, calculations of this kind can only be tentative, but a safe conclusion is that very young children at risk of harm and needing a long-term substitute placement are a clearly identifiable group and form a minority of children entering care, although a very important one, and a larger proportion of those in care at any one time. They are never a majority of all looked-after children but their needs are pressing and salient. In case practice has changed since the death of Peter Connelly in 2007, a further analysis is offered of recent information, as yet unpublished, on 100 children entering care sequentially in each of three English local authorities in 2010. The sample comprises the 65 children who were under the age of one, extracted from the larger sample of 30027 and their characteristics are laid out in Table 1. These 65 infants represent 17% of all children becoming looked after over the course of the year in the three authorities. Approximately a fifth of them became looked after due to shortterm difficulties, such as a parental illness and there being no friends or family to care for the child. This leaves the majority facing a risk of harm and a potential long-term placement. The background characteristics of the children are presented in Table 1, alongside those from the earlier metropolitan borough study. As would be expected in an all inclusive care sample, levels of abuse and neglect are lower than for the sub-groups 2 and 3 in the metropolitan borough but there are still relatively high levels of domestic violence and alcohol/substance abuse. For research reasons, the sample randomly selected admissions, excluded siblings, asylum seekers, remands and babies relinquished for adoption at birth (very few such children and none at all in one of the local authorities). But these exclusions do not detract from the fact that the 65 children discussed are fully representative of admissions to care. 27

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Roger Bullock—Written evidence

These data appear to confirm that for 80% of children entering care under the age of one, there are serious and enduring child protection concerns. If this proportion were applied to the 5,330 under ones entering care in England in 2010-11, it would have represented 4,260 such children entering care annually. But returning to the earlier figures of 362 and 289, we have seen that the proportions of children out of this 4,260 who might have been permanently placed away from their birth family or living in potentially risky contexts are relatively small, about 8% and 7% respectively, suggesting that these two scenarios are not the most common reasons for providing services to looked-after children. Nevertheless, they form an important sub-group of them. But putting statistical manipulations aside, other observations are illuminating. Reading through the case files for the 65 children in the three local authorities, it is noticeable that the question of permanence and the possibility of adoption do not figure prominently in the early stages where support to parents, placement with the birth family or the immediate issues of foster care are more urgent, even though guidance requires that a plan for permanency is agreed by the four months review. Much of the social work at this stage involves securing foster placements sometimes with an element of twin tracking. This primarily involves assessing the capabilities of parents and/or extended family members to look after the child. Efforts appear to be focused on returning the child home or to other relatives, whereas the other dimension of twin tracking, namely considering a permanent placement, was only marginally pursued in the first 18 months. Services provided to the family early on tend to focus on contact, making sure that parents and children turn up and monitoring the quality of their interaction. Very few evidence-based programmes (such as Incredible Years or Nurse Family Partnership) are offered to families and it is sometimes difficult to ascertain from the case notes how the support they receive is intended to improve their circumstances, even when residential assessments, mother and baby foster care and parenting programmes are used. An important caveat here is that the case files contain very poor recording of service information; for example, there are references to the support that has been offered but little recording of engagement and attendance. At follow-up (between six and 18 months depending on the date that the child became looked after), 15 (23%) of the 65 infants had returned home to parents or other relatives and eight others (12%) had never been separated from their parents although they were legally designated as being looked after. These arrangements were deemed sufficient by professionals and courts to keep the family together, often involving spending time in a mother and baby foster placement or living at home with parents under specified conditions, such as the removal of a violent or abusive adult from the home. The majority of children (42 or 65%), however, did remain in care. In these cases the enduring problems echoed those of other research studies; namely domestic violence, drug abuse, parental mental health and criminal activity that are deemed to place the child at risk of significant harm should he or she return home.

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Roger Bullock—Written evidence Four questions arise from this evidence. The first is what are the options for these children and what is the right thing to do – adoption, open adoption, special guardianship, long term fostering, continuation of what is being done in the hope of rehabilitation and restoration/return to the family? A second that follows asks, is it possible to generalise or argue for a standardised response? Looked-after children are not a homogenous group, even those under the age of one year have different family circumstances, are exposed to different risks and have different ethnic and cultural backgrounds. Third is the question of what is most important - is it the legal security underpinning commitment by adults to take responsibility for the child or is it caring by people committed to him/her? Finally, as many children became looked after with one or more of their siblings, how does this situation complicate matters? It is significant for these discussions to note that in the three authority study, the possibility of adoption tended to come late in the process (unless the situation is clear-cut as in the case of parents who relinquish their babies at birth) and by the time that it was considered, numerous people and agencies were involved, making the process potentially cumbersome and sometimes contentious. Question 5: What would help? So what would help clarify the situation and focus the discussion on the needs of children? Three proposals are offered, one requesting better availability and use of background information, another suggesting reforms to the legal process and a final one requesting clearer wording to describe what children need. Better availability and use of information One contribution to a better understanding of children’s needs would be more accurate, balanced, continuous and sensitive background information and avoidance of selective evidence. Quite often the use of available statistics and research findings seems hasty, and therefore too superficial to interpret adequately what they have to tell us. This equally applies to references to the theories of child development that are cited to justify decisions. A good example of different ways of analysing information occurred recently with regard to the statistics on looked-after children in England. They lay out the percentage of looked-after children who were adopted during the year in each local authority and it was on the basis of these figures that the ‘best’ and the ‘worst’ performers were reported in the media and referred to by the politicians. Two were singled out as the ‘bottom’ two whereas in fact several others had lower proportions than either of them. Admittedly the differences were not great but why pick out them? Then there is the question of what the trend looked like in the ‘high’ and ‘low’ performing authorities. Had one taken an average of, say, the last five years the ‘percentage of looked-after children adopted’ would, in many cases, have looked rather different. Likewise, where there had been a ‘backlog’ of children needing adoption, that had then been dealt with, a subsequent reduction in the number of adoptions might not have been unexpected.

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Roger Bullock—Written evidence It also needs to be explained that in England in the last year, although 3,040 children left care through adoption, 1,740 left through special guardianship and 10,350 returned to their parents or other family members. Taking adoption and special guardianship together produces a figure of 4,780 which is the largest number of children ever that have left care through these two orders. This is not the oft-quoted 60 babies under one or a 5 per cent reduction in adoption, but a 6.5 per cent increase in children being placed. If these figures are compared with the height of adoption figures of 3,800 in 2005, then that is a 22 per cent increase since then. This is not the kind of evidence that usually points to a system in crisis. Despite the overarching responsibility to ensure that we minimise delay in every part of the process and maximise the number of children placed, local variation may not necessarily be an indictmen. There are different local population characteristics and different looked after children profiles. Every local authority cannot be the same: that’s why we have ‘local’ authorities. The heart of practice is the child and in the UK there is a fundamental commitment to the principle whereby meeting the child’s needs is paramount, with adoption a very important part of the response. ‘Naming and shaming’ damages morale, makes workers feel resentful and misunderstood, reducing their confidence to act when the issues are complex. A second example of the caution required when reviewing statistics on looked after children occurs when estimating the proportion of children in care eligible for adoption and the question of just how many children might be potential candidates, leaving aside whether or not this was the appropriate course of action. The total number of children being looked after (65,520 at 31st March, 2011) is often taken as the proper figure from which to calculate the percentage adopted or needing adoption. But this is misleading because a substantial proportion of children could not, or would not, have been considered for adoption as the following list shows. Table 2: The number of children for whom adoption is an unlikely option Subject to special guardianship orders Subject to an interim care order* On remand or committed Subject to protection orders Allowed to be with parents or relatives* Living independently In secure units In young offenders units Missing

1,760 13,660 160 40 3,970 2,460 160 130 110

TOTAL

22,450

(*these are broad categories and may include some children who will subsequently be adopted) This 22,450 represents 34% of the total looked-after population; but it must be a minimum number because there are also more who would have been unlikely to be considered for adoption. They include children admitted to care on a planned short-term basis; those over 16 340

Roger Bullock—Written evidence (13,860 of them); most unaccompanied asylum seekers (2,680 of these) as well as those in settled long-term foster homes where there is no plan to move to adoption. And then there is the question of how 2,450 children already ‘placed for adoption’ (but awaiting the making of an order) should be taken into account in the calculations. It is impossible from the data available to know how many from these groups should be added to the 22,450 above; but there will certainly be some. Would an estimate of, say, 5,000 be reasonable? If so, it would boost the number of looked-after children who might have been excluded from the adoption equation to about 27,500 or 42% of the total looked after, leaving the base figure for the calculation of percentages at about 38,000 rather than 65,520. The proportion adopted from care would then rise from 4.6% (or one in twenty-two) to 8.3% (or one in twelve): quite a difference and one that could lead to a somewhat different discourse about what is happening. Reforming the legal process A second change that would help improve decisions on looked-after children is reform of the legal process, especially the cumbersome process associated with care proceedings. In her scrutiny of 682 children involved in this process, Judith Masson concluded that there is no single cause for this complexity and hence no easy solution. She highlights areas where the situation might be improved but stresses that social workers and local authorities as well as lawyers have to change. In explaining the reasons for the complexity, she identifies several inter-linked factors. These include: the ethos and culture surrounding the process, legal principles about rights, beliefs about the value of different interventions, practicalities associated with cost and diversionary tactics. In addition, some local authorities make things more difficult than necessary for themselves by poor quality work, disrespect for timetables, arguing the unarguable and failing to support their social workers through the court process. There are two contributory factors in all of this. The first is the intrinsic ‘drift’, both before and during proceedings, that arises from professional insecurity and a lack of control and is one reason why so many experts are brought in. The second is the seemingly contradictory message from human rights legislation that there should be respect for both the birth family’s position and the child’s need for healthy development. There is no simple resolution to this conflict other than clarity of intent supported by robust evidence, along with an explanation of how what the local authority has done meets the requirements of the various conventions. To improve the process, children’s services need to look at the structures they adopt with regard to finding satisfactory placements with the aim of reducing delays early on in the process. They also need to be aware of the significance of ‘out of court’ negotiations and to examine how the plethora of various reviews, such as routine assessments, case conferences and child protection meetings, fit together and influence the decision to take court proceedings in the first place. In addition, as mentioned earlier, there needs to be clarity in situations where one child in a sibling group, often a newly born baby, is the focus of concern as this raises a new set of issues that needs to be disentangled early on, otherwise they complicate discussions later.

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Roger Bullock—Written evidence The ownership of plans, the beliefs, values and perspectives that underpin and maintain them and the loss of a ‘continuity’ dimension are the important factors in explaining how the needs of children get subsumed by an overwhelming concern with process. Clearer wording to describe what children need Finally, it is important to note that over the past thirty years, a set of concepts has developed to underpin decisions about the long-term placement of children in care. Some of them, such as ‘attachment’ and ‘identity’ emerged from psychological research but others, such as ‘matching’ and ‘permanency’, are more recent and are specific to child placement. There have also been changes in understanding child development. These include: unequivocal evidence about the importance of early relationships, awareness of the possibility of diverse relationships, the importance of the child’s voice, a perception that he or she is no longer the passive recipient of other people’s decisions and the way needs differ across age groups. It is now recognised that in the second half of their first year of life, children make selective attachments which are multiple and vary in their nature and strength. Psychologists now understand that children are capable of more than one supportive, close and nurturing relationship at a time rather than the single attachment emphasised by Bowlby in his early work. He studied many children who had moved a lot in their first year and noted very poor developmental outcomes and while we are still uncertain about how much these are due to movement or to the poor quality of previous and substitute care, we can conclude that such children are a very high risk group in terms of developmental impairment. While this tranche of knowledge does not give precise answers, it acts as a backcloth to any discussion. It is also inevitable that thinking will change over time as a result of research findings, legal judgements and professional experience. But there is concern by some academics outside social work that the concepts adopted do not adequately express what is intended and may petrify discussions rather than facilitate the outcome professionals want. For example, in a review of the notion of ‘matching’, David Quinton suggests that in seeking placements, ‘We need to move from a situation in which we look for a match based on speculative information and then use services to address potential and emerging difficulties, to a process in which adopters and agencies are part of the ecology of parenting, through which we learn about the needs of children and adopters through an ongoing dialogue between all those who can help’ (Quinton, 2012, p.103). Similarly, the concept of ‘permanence’, first developed in the US and elaborated by Maluccio and colleagues in Massachusetts, is now firmly entrenched in social work language throughout the world but despite this widespread take up, it is not always clear what it actually means, even if its intention as a response to the ‘drift’ identified in many studies in the 1970s is obvious to social workers. It is sobering to recalled that Romanian orphanages claimed to offer permanency. As there is no established bank of research knowledge about permanency as such compared with the other psychological concepts mentioned, it relatively easy for sceptics to raise fundamental questions about what is meant and subvert care plans.

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Roger Bullock—Written evidence It is generally agreed that parenting involves preparing children for change as no-one spends all their life in a single relationship and all families expect their children to move on. In this sense little else other than availability can be considered as ‘permanent’, although it is the availability of a secure base to which they can return that is often sought for children in care. Hence, although the concept does help link past, present and future aspects of children’s lives, it usually does so in an indirect rather than a direct way. Then there is a question of whether permanency can only be provided in a family. Neglected children placed in institutions in England do not do well, despite good intentions, but why? Is it problems intrinsic to residential care, such as difficulties in providing unconditional love, or is it to do with the child’s age? So, rather than make broad statements about what is good or bad for children, we need to consider the quality of what is offered, especially the relationships, and view this in the context of the child’s needs, which for children who stay long in care will include commitment, stability, love and a secure base. Permanency is enshrined as an ideal in social work practice and as a child’s ‘right’ in law but the use of the concept in many official documents seems rigid and there is a danger that this inflexibility could act as a driver forcing agencies to adopt a particular approach that may not be in the interests of some children. For instance, what does permanency mean for older children, those who choose not to stay in their placements, and those whose parents’ are loving but whose capacity fluctuates? Although it is something that should endure throughout a child’s life, its content changes, as do the people and places involved; hence it is useful to think of how permanency applies in chunks of time during a child’s life and not to view it as something static, acknowledging that within this fluidity, there are constants of ‘commitment’, ‘availability’, ‘benevolence’, ‘predictability’ and a ‘secure base’ that need to last for as long as necessary. A narrow view of permanency misses aspects of continuity, relationships and belonging; it underplays the possibility of having effective multiple families; and does not always recognise the seeming contradiction that permanency is impermanent. Given the ‘transience’ experienced by many children, substitute care may merely exacerbate rather than create impermanency. For these children and those for whom social work involvement comes relatively late in life, permanency may have to be built up, perhaps by narrative work to help children understand their past or by conscious displays of family love to show them they are wanted. It is important that professionals do not turn away from this complexity because if it is not addressed, the child’s future is undoubtedly grim. Considerations of permanency offer a framework for decisions, and this should not be undervalued; but the danger is that it can be seen as the only or the most important framework. It then ceases to be helpful and becomes something of a yoke. The danger is of picturing some ‘ideal’ family situation and trying to recreate it when the process should be to decide what we want for the child and make it actually happen. It is likely that there is consensus among professionals and the general public about what society wants to achieve for children, whether in their own families or in substitute care, but permanency may not be the right word to describe it, at least not in every case; thus, we need to define what is needed for children and then think of suitable wording, rather than the reverse. In short, just as we need to disaggregate statistics, we need to disaggregate language.

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Roger Bullock—Written evidence A final comment It is frustrating when discussing difficult issues that demand quick and effective action that the plethora of research studies and professional knowledge is unlikely ever to show conclusively that one option is better than another - there are too many influential variables and too few rigorous studies to support such a claim; but, to paraphrase Albert Einstein, if they cannot provide the right answers. they can at least ensure that we ask the right questions. References: Biehal N, Ellison S, Baker C and Sinclair I ( 2010) Belonging and Permanence: Long-term outcomes in foster care and adoption, London: BAAF. Blower S (2012), Initial findings from a study of children entering care in three English Local Authorities, presentation to CSP seminar, November 2011. Bullock R, Courtney M, Parker R, Sinclair I and Thoburn J (2006) ‘Can the corporate state parent?’, Child and Youth Services Review, XXVIII, 2006, 1344-58. Dartington Social Research Unit (2004), Matching Needs and services: a study of one hundred children entering care in a metropolitan Borough, 2004 Dartington Social Research Unit (2004) Going Home: Findings and guidance to help professionals make good judgements about the reunification of families. Department for Education (2011) Children Looked-After by Local Authorities in England – Year Ending March 31st 2011 Farmer E and Lutman E (2010) Case Management and Outcomes for Neglected Children Returned to their Parents: A five year follow-up study, London: Department for Education, 2010. Jones D (1987) ‘The untreatable family’, Child Abuse and Neglect, XI (3), 409-20 Jones D (1998) ‘The effectiveness of intervention’ in Adcock M and White R (eds.) Significant Harm, Croydon: Significant Publications. Mallucio A, Fein E, and Olmstead K (1986) Permanency Planning for Children: Concepts and methods, New York: Tavistock Publications Masson J, Care Profiling Study - Report and summary http://www.justice.gov.uk/publications/research030308.htm Masson J (2011) Just Following Instructions? The representation of parents in care proceedings, http://www.bristol.ac.uk/law/research/researchpublications/2011/justfollowinginstructions.pdf

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Roger Bullock—Written evidence Quinton D (2012) Rethinking Matching in Adoptions from Care: A conceptual and research review, London: BAAF Schofield G and Beek M (2009) ‘Growing up in foster care: providing a secure base through adolescence’, Child and Family Social Work, XIV (3), 255-66, 2009 Schofield G and Simmonds J (eds.) (2009) The Child Placement Handbook: Research, policy and practice, London: BAAF. Selwyn J (2010) ‘The challenges in planning for permanency’, Adoption and Fostering, 34 (3), 3237. Thoburn J and Courtney M (2011) ‘A guide through the knowledge base on children in out-ofhome care’, Journal of Children’s Services, VI (4), pp. 210-27, 2011 Ward H and Munro E (2006) Babies and Young Children in Care: Life Pathways, decision making and practice, London: Jessica Kingsley Publishing. Ward H, Brown R, Westlake D and Munro E (2010) Infants suffering, or likely to suffer, significant harm: A prospective longitudinal study, DFE RB053, London. July 2012

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Cafcass—Oral evidence (QQ 234–274)

Cafcass—Oral evidence (QQ 234–274) Evidence Session No.4.

Heard in Public.

Questions 234–274

TUESDAY 17 JULY 2012 Members present Baroness Butler-Sloss (Chairman) Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top Baroness Eaton Baroness Hamwee Baroness Howarth of Breckland Baroness King of Bow Baroness Knight of Collingtree Baroness Morris of Bolton Lord Morris of Handsworth Lord Warner ________________ Examination of Witnesses Anthony Douglas CBE, Chief Executive, and Bruce Clark, Director of Policy, Cafcass.

Q234 The Chairman: Good morning. May I say how very nice it is to see you both, and I am sorry that I did not come out to say hello to you because you were not there when I had to come in here. Knowing both of you well, it is extremely nice to see you and we are all, as a Committee, very grateful to you both for coming and for the very interesting graph that you have sent us, which we are hoping that you will speak to. We have had some help, I cannot resist saying, from Lady Howarth as to what the questions might be. She did not draft most of them; they were drafted by our academic adviser. If it is okay with both of you, we will go straight into the questions and Lady Howarth is going to ask the first one. Baroness Howarth of Breckland: I should declare an interest of having worked with these two gentlemen for certainly the last eight years in Cafcass, and I have known Bruce for more time than I am prepared to admit—I am that old. I am just making a declaration. I should declare that I do know them rather well and in a working professional capacity. The Chairman: I think I also ought to declare an interest because I have worked with and known both Anthony Douglas and Bruce Clark for many, many years and it has been a great pleasure to do so. 346

Cafcass—Oral evidence (QQ 234–274) Q235 Baroness Howarth of Breckland: You have had the question. We want to move straight into this question about whether it takes too long for children to be placed for adoption and the subsequent adoption order made. Where in the system do you consider the unnecessary delays to be occurring and how can the decisions be made more quickly but—the key words are—with safeguards for both the child and the birth family? Anthony Douglas: I think we have made progress over the last 10 years. It is not a popular view at times, but there are more children in permanent placements. By that I include adoption, special guardianship, residence orders, and I think Tony Blair’s initiative did help with that. Obviously, at the same time the average time cases take has increased from what was 26 weeks for a care case in 1995 to an average now of 55 weeks, and that average goes up to over 60 weeks if you include the time for a placement order to be heard. For children who need early permanence, who are waiting, that is often far too long. When I started this work we thought of parental rights resolutions as dispensing with parental rights very quickly, too quickly, and therefore there were safeguards built in for parents, and other parties, like grandparents, gradually joined court cases for good reason. The reason that cases take much longer can be explained and at the time it made a great deal of sense to introduce extra protections, but the cost has been too great in terms of time. Most of the debriefs about why show there is no single reason but there are delays at more or less every stage of the process that in particular cases or particular areas have local reasons. Again, there is no single solution. There are a number of steps we can take and I do think at the moment there is some evidence of momentum. The new initiative has undoubtedly led, for example, to directors of children’s services taking the issues of early permanence much more seriously and, considering many of them have education backgrounds and came to children’s social care relatively late, that has been significant because with any system that needs attention you need the most senior figures to treat it as a priority. The biggest challenges, as I see it, are the complexity of cases, the nature of the families we work with, the difficulty of removing all experts, or most, from cases, because the single biggest cause of delay at the moment is the number of experts and the time they take in most places to report, and to have a model of social work and judging that can complete cases that are complex in the sorts of timescales we are now talking about. But it can be done; it is being done in many parts of the country. Derbyshire and Suffolk are good examples, and in Derbyshire over 30% of children looked after coming through the court system are adopted. So there are strong performances in some parts of the country. It has always been difficult extending that across the whole country but the biggest challenge, I think, is to find a level of social work and judging, including guardian social work, that can produce a good enough assessment and a good enough care plan in a short enough period of time to be competent and viable. Then the biggest problem for adoption is the national shortage of adopters. I think a public information campaign, greater awareness, putting adoption higher on the radar, as it has been in the last few months, last couple of years, hugely important, whatever some people’s misgivings, because the risk is of this work being too far down the political radar, especially at a time of spending difficulties. But the shortage of adopters means there are now over 2,000 children legally freed for adoption but for whom adopters are not readily available. I will give you a quick case example, if I may, of a little girl where everybody did everything right, she was subject to a

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Cafcass—Oral evidence (QQ 234–274) care and placement order within five months—this was only a few months ago—and yet six months later an adopter had not been found. She had no additional needs, no special needs. There is a resource problem, and also the pressure of funding, particularly on local authorities, does mean that often the needs of one case are lost in the needs of others. If I could do two things, one would be to put more money into adoption support. I think that is the place for adopters, especially looking after the children who do need to be looked after—that is most important. If I could change one aspect of the law it would be to make the support for adopters a duty after assessment for support, because adoption is a lifelong issue. I say that also as an adopted person with personal as well as professional knowledge. It does not mean that all adoptions need support, but the majority benefit from it. Q236 The Chairman: When you are saying that, to make sure I understand, are you looking for the support during the period that the adoption is going through or more particularly after the child has been adopted? Anthony Douglas: The latter. I do believe the important breakthrough in previous legislation was, for me, the recognition of adoption being a lifelong issue for the adopters, the person adopted and the birth parents. I think that need for support can arise at any particular point and these days adopters have to be short-term adopters, long-term adopters, treatment adopters, sometimes remand adopters in adolescence, and it is much more akin, I think, to foster care in that children will go through various phases during their entire childhood and beyond. The notion of adoption being, as it were, a permanent removal of difficulties is unrealistic. It is much more helpful to think of the need for adoption support being akin to foster care that has a much more developed programme of support. Q237 Baroness King of Bow: I am going to stay with question 1, so we really cannot take too long over it. I am very confused by the case study example you gave. I do not understand how anecdotally there can be so many adopters waiting for babies. I have six friends who are all waiting. How can that be? Is it a problem with the structure, or what is the problem? Anthony Douglas: People get put off. Are your friends approved for adoption? Baroness King of Bow: Yes, they are approved. They have gone through panels; they are approved; they are waiting for a placement. Anthony Douglas: Then that is purely a question for those of us who work professionally with the adoption register and other matching systems. If there are people waiting who could easily be matched, that is where we need to put more effort. Q238 Baroness Howarth of Breckland: Maybe I will ask my follow-up, then. I was going to avoid asking it but it has come later. Do you think that centralising some of the register and ensuring that there is a greater concentration of the adopters in relation to the availability of children would streamline all of this? Would that unblock one of those things that you were talking about? Anthony Douglas: Well, it has clearly been a help. It has led to many successful placements in England and Wales and in the extension to Northern Ireland I hope it is going to do the same. But there is no substitute for good local matching and also not to forget the success of many existing adoption consortia in the UK who have placed children across local authority

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Cafcass—Oral evidence (QQ 234–274) boundaries in the north-west of England, south Wales and north London, for example. But still, as Lady King says, you meet people and the system does not work for them. I think centralising, particularly for children with special needs, does offer a little bit more sophisticated matching of a child with an adopter in another part of the country. But still we have a great number of sibling groups for whom no adopter has been identified. I think we are just not matching people as well as we can and it is why I think that some of the new innovative methods can help, like placement activity days where groups of approved adopters are brought together with groups of children in a controlled environment. For example, through BAAF 17 placements were made as a result of two placement activity days. I do not think it is either/or. I think local authorities and voluntary adoption agencies need to get better at it—we all need to get better at it. Consortia need to stay together; they perform a good function. I think the adoption register has worked, but not well enough for some, and then we need to use some of the new innovative ways of matching children and adopters. What struck me about placement activity days was the way that it supported the crucial falling in love moment between an adopter and a child. Often when you describe children on paper you just get a sense of their problems and you get a sense of the disabilities and not the children. Potential adopters at those days are saying it makes the adoption look that much more possible. Q239 Baroness Knight of Collingtree: Just on this question of support, did Mr Douglas, who stressed the need to give support, mean monetary support or other support? Anthony Douglas: The adoption passport that the Government has been talking about is particularly important because it is talking about, for example, priority for CAMHS services— for child and adolescent mental health services. I think each adoption needs sometimes slightly different support. Adoption allowances have been in for some years and they have been important. Financial support does matter for some adoptions. For others it is having a postadoption support worker that you can ring at any time of the day or night, and at other times it is a specialist service like child or adolescent mental health service where, if it is not provided quickly, the adoption might well break down. Q240 Baroness Morris of Bolton: Good morning. Adoption panels have become a bit of a hot topic recently, with differing views, and I wondered if you thought there were any potential problems in limiting their role. If so, how might those problems be addressed? Bruce Clark: Yes. Of course, the change coming in from September to remove from adoption panels the right to consider children for whom a placement order application is in prospect does eliminate a small piece of what is arguably duplication or overlap that certainly the judiciary have been unhappy about since the end of 2005 when the current regulatory regime came into place. However, I am struck by the fact that Ofsted in its Right on Time thematic inspection found no evidence that panels were causing delay. If there is a bit of duplication—and I think there is—removing it is not unhelpful. The scale of expectation that is imposed on adoption agencies and vested in the agency decision-maker around preparing child permanence reports before submitting placement order applications has not been scaled back at all. The key point for me is the lack of connectedness and fit between the requirements placed on local authorities in relation to their placement order application requirements with the not fully integrated set of expectations placed on local authorities in 349

Cafcass—Oral evidence (QQ 234–274) relation to the review of looked-after children and the further set of expectations imposed by the courts in relation to social work evidence to be provided to support care and placement order applications. So you have got three horses running and taking out one committee from one of the horses does not of itself sort out the wider problem. Q241 Baroness Morris of Bolton: We heard in evidence in another session that a lot of the things that the panels do should really be done much earlier in the process. I wondered if you might want to comment on that. Bruce Clark: The trigger for local authorities to begin considering a placement order application comes a little bit late in the process, in my view. The second review, the four-month looked-after child review, is the point by which the permanence plan has to be prepared, but in fact in practice it is generally the point at which it is prepared, not the point by which. The 20day initial looked-after child review does not generally pay a great deal of attention to the permanence plan. There are real world reasons for that. Early in the life of care proceedings relatives have not properly been identified, the family is in some shock from the child having been removed, possibly on an emergency basis, and it is quite difficult to engage positively until the majesty of the law, in the most positive sense, gets seizure of the case and manages the work of all of the parties, including the co-operation of parents and other family members within the proceedings. Q242 The Chairman: We have heard a lot of different sorts of evidence about whether this regulation is helpful or is actually going to be very negative. We were being told that the panel pulls together the different strands of information about the child and those different strands will not necessarily be pulled together at the moment that the judge is hearing the case. So I am just wondering, Bruce, could the panel sit any earlier or could something happen instead of the panel? This is what we are really looking at. Bruce Clark: I think the discipline of panel meetings serves as a focal point for local authority activity. Possibly the agency decision-maker does not have quite the same ‘scariness’, but you need a focal point for activity, and the panel has acted as that. Q243 The Chairman: But could you have it earlier? Bruce Clark: Yes, you could. Anthony Douglas: Two examples: 11 local authorities in the north-west have concluded a preproceedings protocol that includes faster medical assessments and there are some authorities who are prioritising permanence planning and case tracking from a very early point. It does seem to me from those examples that what is important is not so much, with respect, a committee or a panel but the quality of the work done at an early point. Most courts are looking for a coherent assessment and a coherent care plan. If they got that on day one, they would be delighted. So there is some evidence of momentum in pre-proceedings work that, in terms of parallel planning, does offer some hope with a performance-managed system for early permanence that includes strong case tracking. Of course what it has always been fraught with is an infringement of parental rights, but I think in some of the pilots of pre-proceedings we have just about managed to convince parents that parallel planning is not a fait accompli. However, it is fraught and it is quite difficult. I think it is

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Cafcass—Oral evidence (QQ 234–274) the expertise in panels that would just need to be brought forward into mainstream management of the work. What panels have meant is that often the agency decision-maker has rubber-stamped the panels but what it will now mean is that the agency decision-maker has to do that work themselves. Potentially they can do it earlier and faster, managerially, if the systems are there. Q244 Lord Warner: My long-ago experience as a director of social services bears out what Bruce was saying: that the panels have produced a focus for people to get on with the job. But if we do go without the panels, what I would really like to hear specifically is: would you have confidence that the local authority overall response will be to give this greater focus without the panels, or are we flying blind by just removing the panels without some sort of guarantee that people will respond to that with better permanence planning? Bruce Clark: It is important to bear in mind that the only thing that will be taken is the requirement of the panel to consider the suitability of children for adoption in cases where a placement order application is in prospect. All of the rest of the requirements around the local authority for the work they have to do to prepare and submit a placement order application remain in place. Q245 Lord Warner: Does that mean that you are relatively relaxed, the pair of you, about this change in function for the panels? Bruce Clark: Not at all, because what we need to do is to align the court’s requirements in relation to social work evidence, the looked-after child planning and review regime and the adoption child permanence report and placement order regime. As you may remember, we had a separateness, an apartheid, in the development of looked-after children planning and review in the early 2000s. While the Adoption and Children Act initiative brought the adoption principles into line with the 1989 Children Act principles, which was very welcome and important, it set up an entirely separate set of expectations, and thus today we have 274 pages of statutory guidance in relation to adoption and 196 relating to care planning and review. Q246 Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top: But what is the way forward? That is what we are not getting. Bruce Clark: To align and reduce the rival sets of guidance. Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top: But how? Bruce Clark: In the way that the Government is proposing, in a very radical way, to strip back the assessment framework and working together and serious case reviews. Currently, the drafts are only at 70 pages. That might be going a little bit far, because it now means that there is no common assessment model and there is nothing certain that the courts can expect to receive with an application. That is probably not helpful, but alignment and simplification are things that will take time away from the current durations, which I would draw your attention to are considerably briefer than they were in the mid-1990s when the anxiety spawned the prime-ministerial initiative of that time. We used to be worried about three years, five months; now we are worried about two years, seven months. We used to be worried that 4% of children were adopted from care; now we are worried that 11% of children are adopted from care. As I think the point you made, Lord Warner, at the scrutiny of departmental

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Cafcass—Oral evidence (QQ 234–274) representatives, it is very important to take a longer-term view than merely the last three or four years. Q247 Lord Morris of Handsworth: My question is about the impact of time limits against the background in the reforms in respect of the legal aid system; that is the genesis of it. In your view, is it realistic to place a six-month time limit on care proceedings? Is there a danger that the legal aid reform will have an impact on the timelines of care and adoption proceedings? Anthony Douglas: Of course this has to go through many levels of scrutiny. Whether 26 weeks is the right time—certainly it needs to be considerably less than the current average of 55. The variation between courts, between the best performers who are at about 42 weeks to complete a case and the worst performers who are around 64 weeks, shows that certainly the expectation should be somewhere between 30 and 40 weeks now because the best courts and the best local authorities are doing that. I think, as with adoption, just going back to that and linking it, the key people are directors of children’s services prioritising early permanence for councils, whether it is permanence through adoption, special guardianship, residence orders or going back home, which the majority of children in care do safely with child protection plans. I think, for example, the adoption panel could be replaced by a reference group, if you have a medical adviser who is particularly helpful, so that you do not lose that expertise. But I think for 26 weeks it will take all of us, local authorities, Cafcass, judges, to work very differently. For judges it means the switch from passive case management in which they might agree proposals about experts from various solicitors, to the sorts of active case management that the Chairman demonstrated herself, if I might say without being too flattering, in her cases. You need tough judges and you need a very good social work assessment and you need a very good guardian as the independent voice of the child. If you have those three you can complete cases within 26 weeks. The biggest challenge to that is skill shortages in social workers. Q248 Lord Morris of Handsworth: So it is just in the margins of what is manageable? Anthony Douglas: I do think the legal aid changes will affect private law cases much more than public law cases at the moment. The challenge to the 26-week limit is the nature of the families we are dealing with. Often they are avoidant, and you are making a judgment about whether someone who is addicted to drugs and alcohol can change their lifestyle in a couple of months. That is the judgment of Solomon, and that is what we are having to make in virtually every case. That is why in some cases there is an exceptional track being put in for especially complex cases. Q249 Lord Morris of Handsworth: What are the consequences if we get it wrong? Anthony Douglas: There are miscarriages of justice to children. We hear a lot about miscarriages of justice to parents and that shorter timescales carries the risk of producing more miscarriages of justice to parents, but the greatest miscarriages of justice have been to children left at home too long before proceedings are brought, returned home into unsafe environments—there is strong research about that—or left in limbo in care with no permanence placement identified. Those are the biggest risks, and I think shorter timescales are going to be judged against whether children are served better as a result.

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Cafcass—Oral evidence (QQ 234–274) Q250 Baroness Hamwee: This follows from that, actually. Is there any research that looks at the success of an adoption or, put it the other way, any breakdown, as against the time that has been taken over it? Anthony Douglas: The research is mixed. It is generally showing that adoption is the best outcome for very young children who need a permanence placement—that research holds— and that long-term fostering has an equally positive outcome for older children. That is where I think you are up against the dilemmas that many older children would benefit from adoption and are being denied it, but for all sorts of reasons there might be other options. In relation to the success of it, it is impossible to judge really. I think what is true is that over the years—and I say this as an adopted person—our understanding of adoption has become much more sophisticated. When I was adopted it was because my mother did not have state financial support to look after me. That changed in the late 1960s. There were other breakthroughs in the 1970s in adoption practice in the opening up of adoptions so that people who were adopted could understand a little bit more about their origins. Through the 1980s and 1990s the assessment model got more sophisticated. As Bruce said, perhaps it is now too convoluted, but to go back to an age where the assessment process is compromised would not really help because not everybody is cut out for adoption and people do need several months to prepare for it. More recently, adoption support, which has come in with the duty to provide post-adoption support, has been hugely important. I would say the history from when adoption changed from being private adoptions in 1921 has been very positive for many. There are nearly a million adopted children in the UK today, most of whom are leading very successful lives. What it shows, I think, is that if your adoption is happy then it is the best possible outcome. As with everything else, if it goes wrong, it is very difficult. Q251 Baroness Morris of Bolton: Anthony, you have mentioned this in answer to this question and also you mentioned it in the first, so I just want to pick up on it. You talked about directors of children’s services having to prioritise permanence and leadership. You said that there were good results from Derbyshire and Suffolk. Has that been the driver for that? Has that been a sense of leadership from the top? What has the driver been to make those two authorities better than others? Anthony Douglas: In those two particularly the leadership of the designated family judge. The two judges in those areas take a view that cases can and should be completed quickly and they do not place over-reliance on experts. They say that they are the expert, social workers are experts, children’s guardians are experts, and between them they can deal with nearly every case, apart from cases with a disputed paediatric causation. Obviously if there is a dispute about physical abuse and how that was caused and whether it was accidental or non-accidental, it is vital for a court to have expert paediatric advice. In the bulk of cases we are dealing with there is no dispute about the threshold for an application for care being met but just a question about what should happen—is it safe enough for a child to go home or is permanence required—then I think the confidence in the social work opinion and the judging experience is what has made the difference. Bruce Clark: Can I just unpick your question a little bit? Baroness Morris of Bolton: Yes, certainly. 353

Cafcass—Oral evidence (QQ 234–274) Bruce Clark: By the way, it is Derby and not Derbyshire. Baroness Morris of Bolton: Sorry, Derby not Derbyshire—a very important difference. Bruce Clark: Just because an individual local authority achieves a high percentage figure of children adopted from care is not necessarily a good thing in isolation from considering what it is achieving by way of permanence for all of its looked-after children. The use of residence orders, usually for relatives, and special guardianship must be seen alongside adoption orders as being good results for children. The question is whether they are achieved in a timely way and whether they stick, which plays to the point about disruption. Simply achieving a high number is not of itself sufficient. Higher numbers are not a bad thing, but there are wider issues than the size of the numbers alone. Q252 Baroness Howarth of Breckland: I want to bring up a very quick question from when you were talking about the impact of the legal aid changes. Would you not say that because there will be impact in private law that is going to have an impact on public law because of the resources that will be diverted to dealing with those situations, and that could have an impact on adoption itself? I just wanted to bring out that one fact that had not become clear, that in fact it will have an impact. Anthony Douglas: It is a very important point for courts and for Cafcass because we have one resource crossing public and private law. For local authorities it is less significant. Bruce Clark: It is very much the knock-on issue. Parties in public law cases will continue to be eligible for public funding without the imposition of a means and merits test, but the funding for private parties in private law disputes following separation and divorce will reduce, estimated to be 55,000 further people dropping out of legal aid next April. That is the Government’s own estimate. The other thing that is changing sharply, and it is not quite clear whether it is all for the better yet, is that the new fee regime for experts is affecting the timeliness. It is now almost a decade to the day since you and I, my Lord Chairman, sat with Liam Donaldson planning that the NHS would in due course be the primary source of experts to assist the family courts in relation to children. Ten years on, the progress has been slower than we might have both hoped for. Until the provision of expert advice to the family courts is not a matter that is determined by a supply side paid on piecework rates, there will always be problems about supply and quality. Q253 The Chairman: We need to get on, but I cannot resist asking about the point you are making about the leadership of designated family judges. It does sound to me as though the judicial college perhaps ought to be concentrating a bit on the training of family judges, not the designated family judges but the other groups of family judges. Anthony Douglas: They are. The programme being driven through by the President and Mr Justice Ryder is certainly identifying the switch to active judicial case management as a crucial lever for delivering the shorter time limits. The Chairman: Splendid. That is what I was rather hoping. We must move on. Q254 Baroness Knight of Collingtree: Going back to what Mr Douglas said a little while ago about the views of the children, does he think that those views, even in perhaps quite a

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Cafcass—Oral evidence (QQ 234–274) young child—perhaps more important in a young child—are sufficiently taken into consideration? Only late morning yesterday I had two people who are neighbours of mine come to see me. They have adopted a little boy. He was about one, I think. Now he is about two. They notified the local authority that they would like to adopt another child. Some time after that the local authority came to them and said, “Look, the family of your little boy has eight children altogether. Could you adopt a little girl from that same family?” They were delighted and they said yes and they told the little boy he was going to have his little sister. That was nearly a year ago. The child goes to bed with his little sister’s picture, but he is beginning to feel that he does not trust his parents because the child never comes. I just wonder how much damage is being done to that little boy and why it seems to be necessary to go through the entire business of questioning and looking at adoptive parents when that has already been done. The family has also been assessed and one child has gone successfully. This is damaging this little boy. I wondered if you felt that more needed to be done to consider the views of that child, bearing in mind it may affect his whole life. Anthony Douglas: Yes, I do. I think, and so does the Government, that a fast-track procedure for second adoptions from the same family should be introduced. At the moment, both for children and for adopters who may be hanging on for a court process that goes on over a year, it is asking far too much of people to keep the faith for that length of time. While we need some protections—and second-children adoptions do need a different short assessment but they still need some assessment—it needs to be much shorter. I think that is the reason, the time limit is so important. People can live with six months. They understand that sort of timescale. It is still long, but when you get to a year, a year and a half or two years, that is just far too long. People’s lives change and they lose hope. Q255 Baroness Knight of Collingtree: Is it the case that to a small child even a month is a long time? Anthony Douglas: Yes, I agree. Bruce Clark: It is important to remember that the 2002 Act recast the adoption regime, the first serious time it had happened in 25 years. There was great tension between the three points of the adoption triangle: the interests and rights of children themselves, of birth parents and of prospective and actual adoptive parents. It was carefully crafted and cast with cross-party support throughout Parliament. Ten years on we have built an edifice that in some places is a little more complex than it should be, and repeat-applicant adoption is a perfect example of that over-complexity. Q256 Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top: There is some representation from the children’s rights group that for some children it happens too quickly and that they do not get the chance to make the argument about siblings and all of that. I just wondered how you responded to the representations that organisations like children’s rights make. Bruce Clark: It illustrates the point that I have just made, I think, in that just as you need a reasonable time for people who are thinking about becoming adopters to have the opportunity to receive information in a timely and accurate way and then to be taken through the process in a timely way—studies by adoption organisations show that maybe you do not need the gestation period of a naturally born child but you do need time to be taken through it—you do not want disconnects, periods of long silence, conflicting information, periods of waiting 355

Cafcass—Oral evidence (QQ 234–274) without communication, which all of you have given examples of today. The same is true for children, especially if they are of an age and level of understanding whereby they need to understand what might be happening to them and to consider the important connections that they have not only with their birth parents, but also with their siblings and half-siblings. Q257 Baroness Hamwee: I was going to ask about contact with the birth family. You might want to link this with your earlier comments about needing to put more money into support and make adoption support a duty. Is there too much or too little emphasis placed on facilitating contact? Perhaps you can distinguish, if you need to, between care proceedings, during care proceedings once there is a placement order, and then post adoption? Anthony Douglas: As the family justice review concluded, many very young children are subjected to far too much contact when they first come into care. It can be just bewildering because your attachment is to your primary carer and that is often quite quickly a foster carer. The responsibility to have reasonable contact with birth parents I think has gone too far. There are very few contact orders made for children post adoption, and I think generally the system of mailbox contact, keeping in touch, works as well as anything could because it is important that, however appalling the home circumstances have been, a child who is adopted grows up with possible links to resurrect later on in life. There are manyreconciliations of children in their 20s with their birth parents that you could never have predicted. East Sussex has done some quite good work on that. What is important is to strike the balance between not destabilising an adoption and keeping the links alive. My own mother used to on my birthday just bring out the little hairbrush she used when I was born, which was her only memory of me. Most birth parents, however appalling the circumstances, do still think of the children they have either relinquished or had taken from them. Those links are important. I think what has, of course, complicated it is the Facebook generation and the way, particularly for older children, that they will have contact whether anybody says they should or should not, so contact has become more complicated. Adoption support can make all the difference because, for example, it can facilitate meetings between the adopters and birth parents at a neutral venue, which can reassure the birth parents that the adopter is not someone who is condemning them and that their child is quite safe with them. It can reassure the adopters that the birth parents are important for their child. The enemy is isolation in an adoption and separation. Adoption, as Bruce has said, is very complicated in each case. It is quite a nuanced business keeping contact going. Generally it is an effort to keep contact alive. Most birth parents disappear. I think that is the biggest risk for children. Q258 Baroness Hamwee: Does there need to be any change in legislation in this area? Anthony Douglas: It is primarily a funding issue and a practice issue more than a legal issue. Bruce Clark: The difficulty for Government now and in the past is that creating a right to assessment is a relatively cheap thing to do. Creating a crystallisable right to a specific level or volume of service in the light of that assessment is a rather dearer thing to do, especially if a million people throughout their lifetimes might be able to benefit from it. Really quite modest sums of money put into the largely voluntary sector-based adoption support set of providers would probably give the assurance and support that is needed, because many adopters do not 356

Cafcass—Oral evidence (QQ 234–274) need very much, do not need it very often but do not know when it is they might need it. It would be possible with quite modest sums to support what are incredibly important and enriching placements for children. Q259 The Chairman: I think we had better move to the work of Cafcass itself. I wonder if I can ask a series of questions. Perhaps I could give them all to you and then you and Bruce can work out which of you answers. First of all, there has been, of course, criticism of Cafcass. I remember Cafcass’s gestation period, and you have come on a huge way, but there is criticism. We need to know whether the representation of children by guardians, both in the care and in the adoption proceedings, is working effectively and what improvements you think should be made, either for Cafcass or by Cafcass. To what extent is the criticism of Cafcass not being able to provide guardians in a timely way a fair one? If it is fair, what do you think should be done about it? What are the problems, really? Anthony Douglas: On the facts, 99.9% of cases are allocated and we only have four, as of last Friday, unallocated public law cases. We clearly need to do more about our relationship management and the perception of it, which lags behind the improvements in performance. I think, sometimes, because our practitioners have much more work than they have ever had— as have local authority social workers, because of the increases in care applications, the increase in children on child protection plans, the increase in referrals—they sometimes cannot do as much on each case as they would wish. Advocates or people around a particular case are just focused on their case even if the practitioner or the social worker has to go off and do other more important cases. So it is not a question of allocation. All of our cases are allocated. It is a question of time, and therefore we have to use the time we do have as wisely as we can. We have introduced some more streamlined procedures, as everyone has, to try to get to the heart of the case as quickly as possible and not to duplicate the work of local authority workers if that is good and to spend our time on the cases that really do have enormous gaps in them. We have also prioritised, in discussions with senior judges, our contribution to case management so that we can advise courts what needs to be done to narrow the issues to get work done more quickly and for the particular child, which child needs a very quick service. Children who are perhaps in a position of interim safety or have been placed with concurrent carers so that their carers will, if need be, adopt them or foster them in the longer term also need a quick service. But the children who really need the most rapid service are those who might be able to go back home—the longer it is left, the less likely it is—and those who are at risk of successive interim placements who need some degree of very quick security and stability. We will keep working at it. We think we still have to make improvements in the depth of our analyses, because certainly if we are going to have fewer experts the Cafcass case analysis needs to be of a requisite depth, and local authority assessments also need to improve. Q260 The Chairman: I was going to ask you about that. Do we really need experts in the cases if the social worker has been on the case for long enough—and not every case gets a social worker who carries on with it—and the Cafcass officer knows all about the case? Should judges be relying more on the guardian’s assessment of the case? Do you find they are not relying sufficiently on it? 357

Cafcass—Oral evidence (QQ 234–274) Anthony Douglas: I think they are under great pressure. One of the developments in the last 20 years has been everyone feeling a right to their expert. Yes, I think in the vast majority of cases between social workers in local authorities, children’s guardians, magistrates and judges, they know exactly what needs to be done, and if we enabled them to do that, I think cases could be completed much quicker on average. There is the exceptional case, of course, which will need two or three opinions, but the vast majority of expert reports I read do not add huge amounts to what is already before the court. The Chairman: That was my experience. Bruce Clark: The difficulty that developed over the last 20 years, the dominant discourse in care proceedings, is that the courts are willing to accept the parents’ contentions that local authorities are neither competent nor even-handed in any of the work that they have done prior to proceedings or that they might do themselves during the currency of the proceedings. That has caused local authorities to prepare less well than previously was the case. As we know from Judith Masson and other research, the trigger for care applications to be brought to court is a falling out, a lack of a confident relationship between families and the local authorities, so we now have well established as a norm that whatever work might have been done, independent experts who are not tainted by being part of the local authority must be required to assess parents further. Thus we see a doubling in 17 years of the duration of care proceedings. It will take legislation to change that by limiting, back to the original 1989 settlement, the division of duties between the courts and local authorities. Q261 The Chairman: Would you like to comment to us as to what sort of legislation you are looking at now? Bruce Clark: The legislation that the Government say that they are looking at, and I am pleased to hear that that is what they are looking at, is to limit in the care planning and disposal phase of the case to the permission in principle of the outline of the care plan. Q262 The Chairman: By the judge, you mean? Bruce Clark: That is what it had been throughout my practice career in the pre-1989 Act era, and I have no sense of huge injustices caused to children especially, or even to families, that that work was done after the court had made its decision. Indeed, from the Morag Owen and Judith Harwin research it is very clear that care plans are delivered by local authorities in practice after the end of proceedings unless there are unexpected unforeseen changes in the circumstances of the families, particularly caused by mental ill health and drug and alcohol misuse. If the plan is to return home, that is what happens unless it is inappropriate and unsafe for the child to do so. Although that research is now nearly 10 years old, I have no sense that families and children have changed. Q263 The Chairman: Did you want to say anything about your very interesting statistics you have given us here? Anthony Douglas: We have worked very hard to absorb 48% or so more work in the last four years. All I would add is that our study of performance on those cases by all concerned has shown that after the baby P case children are being brought to court much more quickly than local authorities were doing before. Therefore, they are drifting at home in situations of severe

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Cafcass—Oral evidence (QQ 234–274) neglect much less than they were. While that has given us resource dilemmas, I believe that has been very important for children. The Chairman: Okay I think we better move on. Lady Armstrong. Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top: You have asked that one so we do not need to go on with that. The Chairman: Yes, I think that is probably true. Q264 Lord Warner: Can I move us on to the issue of the training and skills and experience in adoption work of the social workforce? You have said a couple of times during these proceedings how much it is important that the judges and the social workers are up to the job, so to speak, and that implies a skills issue. There is an implication that there is a skills shortage. How widespread do you feel that there is a shortage of skilled social workers that is damaging the system? If that is your view, what needs to be done to make things better? Anthony Douglas: As a member of the Social Work Reform Board, it is a long-term agenda to give social work its continuing status as an attractive profession for young people. It has become more attractive. It is constantly difficult because of the headlines that do not make it seem the easiest profession to go into and because of the pressures there are on social workers, which are increasing all the time. The challenge I think we particularly face is to develop a model of family court social work in this area, because adoptions are always, or nearly always, apart from a few mothers who relinquish their children voluntarily—the challenge is to develop a model of social work that has less experts to advise the court. Therefore, the analysis of parenting shortfall does need to be quite clever in that it will have to incorporate elements of understanding of personality disorder, elements of child psychiatry, which hitherto have been the province of experts. It takes five years to train to be a psychologist and that does not mean the social worker can suddenly cover for that. But I would not underestimate the skills for the expertise in understanding which parents will be able to change their lifestyle quickly. It is certainly not coming out of college training. It all depends upon the training that local authorities and, for our children’s guardians, Cafcass can provide internally. I think most of our work in most cases does meet that standard but we have to do a lot more, in the next two to three years especially, in order to provide a deep enough analysis in cases to meet the proposed 26-week time limit. Q265 The Chairman: Do you think that there should be a greater emphasis on more senior social workers continuing to have a caseload as well as doing administration? The thing that worried me when I was a judge was the senior person was never dealing with the individual family. They made the decision but they did not see the family. I just wondered if there should be a caseload still for more senior people, including perhaps directors, to keep their hand in? Anthony Douglas: The expectations on all of us have gone up since the time that Lord Warner and I were directors of social services— Lord Warner: The department would have been really scared of me taking responsibility for the cases.

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Cafcass—Oral evidence (QQ 234–274) Anthony Douglas: I did have a couple of cases in my first year with Cafcass, held jointly with practitioners, and found the time just very difficult. The demands on managers are equally heavy because at the same time as we have talked about cases getting longer, so have the expectations to performance manage, to be accountable through systems, and those systems have to be robust. You do need managers as well as practitioners. In Cafcass 93% of our budget is with frontline staff. We do not really have anywhere else to go in terms of capacity. Q266 The Chairman: It was not the guardians I was thinking of. I would not criticise the guardians. I am concerned about the frontline social workers and whether you feel from your perspective of running Cafcass that the more senior social workers should continue to keep at least a caseload in order to make decisions that are frontline decisions rather than always at a second level. Anthony Douglas: I think, with respect, they are needed to give good supervision to often newly qualified social workers who are struggling with cases. I think Eileen Munro’s suggestion of principal social workers and developing a stronger career progression to keep people as practitioners rather than to become managers is very important to develop a parallel line for that. I do think the importance of supervision under pressure in difficult work is what we need to keep our supervisors for. I saw it in Australia where caseloads are capped for practitioners and where managers are handling huge numbers of cases and it is being done, in my view, at the expense of the supervision needed to ensure good judgments on cases. Q267 Baroness Howarth of Breckland: I want to go back to the question, because the question really is what needs to be done to ensure that people still have the skills. One of the things you said in your reply was that they are not coming out of the colleges with it. That is to re-quote you. Surely there must be something in terms of a recommendation back to the educationalists to look at the content of the training so that people come out of the courses fit for purpose? I am just re-quoting you back. Certainly my experience is that very often people do not feel competent, whereas I think hopefully there were times when people did come off courses pretty competent. I have a secondary question also. That is the first one: what do we do to make sure people are competent? The second one is: surely at the first level of management people need to keep up their professional skills in order to be able to supervise? That may require them to be involved more directly in a small amount of cases and that has been a model that has been proposed and has worked in some places. I think in Australia that bit of the model where at the first level there is a caseload, not a huge caseload but they are still in touch, has worked. It is when you get to the director level it is a little bit difficult. Anthony Douglas: We will both say something about that. Bruce? Bruce Clark: The strength and the weakness of social work training in this country is that it is generic and we do not have a separation between children and other types of service user. The consequence of that is that once people come off their courses they are not ready to do anything in great detail. That is why the newly qualified social worker scheme, now replaced by the assessed and supported first year in employment scheme, is so terribly important. That is why Cafcass, probably stripping it right to the bottom, requires three years’ relevant postqualification experience before we will appoint people to take on the work of a family court

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Cafcass—Oral evidence (QQ 234–274) adviser. You have to see that the completion of the training course is only the end of the beginning and it is not certainly the beginning of the end. Q268 Baroness Howarth of Breckland: No, I agree with that, but they surely have to be fit for purpose. They have to be able to come from the course able to do something. Bruce Clark: Yes, and they are a lot better than they were. We are well away from the point in 2004 where there were not even enough applicants to fill the available places, so unpopular had social work become. It is to the credit of this and the last Government that social work is talked up. The CWDC, of which I was a member, has been given the task of spending a great deal of money on ‘Step up to Social Work’ and developing social work. Now we are at the point where we have more applicants than we have places, but I still regret that it is the lowest vocational A-level points score of any vocational degree course. We need our brightest and best to want to deliver the public service of social work, not just people after a bursary. I welcome the DH consultation that is aimed at better targeting of that money. Q269 Baroness Eaton: I was just going to pass some comment about the degree of involvement in the baby Peter case, how inexperienced some of the social workers appeared to be from the outside, and some of the things that I hoped had developed out of that and Lord Laming and a lot of the work that went in. From what you have said, the focus on the profession is now much more positive and I am delighted to see that. The lack of supervision seemed to be a real issue. As you say, coming out of college and being thrown in at the deep end with not even a mobile phone and these kinds of practicalities was quite an eye-opener. Bruce Clark: But it took until 2002 for central Government to accept that it had a responsibility to ensure a steady and adequate supply of competent people into the profession of social work. Previously Governments had taken the approach that it was a matter for local authorities. Governments had never taken that approach to the supply and quality of teachers and I very much celebrate the fact that for the past decade Government is playing its part in ensuring that the most vulnerable in society have decent staff working with them. Anthony Douglas: There are some terrific courses, especially where students have good practice placements. Some of the pre-1992 courses are under some threat because of the funding profiles. It is the students who cannot get the good practice placements and whose assessed and supported first year leaves them exposed with inadequate supervision who are at risk. I think with good practice placements and a good mix of teaching and a good first year then those social workers will stay. In the universities’ defence, it has got much more difficult. If you take domestic violence as an area, we know so much more about it now and its impact on children than 20 years ago so what has to be taught is much more complicated. Social work has progressively become a much more difficult job. The Chairman: Lady Eaton, do you think you could go on to your main question? Q270 Baroness Eaton: Yes I will move on quickly, sorry. Anecdotally we hear a lot about tensions between local authorities and the courts and suggestions that this brings about delays. Do you consider that there is a mutual lack of trust between local authorities, social workers, Cafcass and the courts, and do you believe that this does create delays?

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Cafcass—Oral evidence (QQ 234–274) Anthony Douglas: It was a key finding of the family justice review. There is, of course, an independence principle at stake. Judges are independent of each other as well as the rest of us, and Cafcass and local authorities have slightly different statutory bases and a built-in independence. Nevertheless, there is a requirement on all of us to work together for the child very effectively. I see examples of very positive working together and examples of very poor working together in this area, just as I saw it in child protection and many other areas of public service when I managed those. We have been trying to get partnership working right for the best part of 30 years, and we have had some successes, but it has never become reliable, and that is a continuing challenge. Q271 Baroness Eaton: Do you think the creation of the Family Justice Board will address this problem in any way? Anthony Douglas: It is giving it a higher profile. As I say, the single biggest change so far is that for all of us, particularly I would say directors of children’s services, it is higher up the political radar. You used to get very junior managers coming to family court business committees and family court services were very much outside children’s trusts. They have become mainstream quite quickly. The services are still at some risk there, as you know, Lady Eaton, and heavily cross-subsidised within local authorities, but local authorities continue to give this service priority. We have all talked about a lot of programmes that are needed if the service is to get better. The next comprehensive spending review will be crucial, and the one after that, to see what degree of priority we can give these services. Bruce Clark: Children before the courts are receiving an increasing proportion of local authorities’ expenditure. That is one of the reasons why senior children’s services managers are more focused on what is going on in the family courts. I do think the noise surrounding the family justice review and the Government’s response to it has also helped. Just as an illustration, the first meeting of the London Family Justice Board will have 15 local authority representatives attending it. The final meeting of the not terribly active London Local Family Justice Council had one. The Chairman: Before we move to the last question, I just wanted to welcome the three witnesses who are going to be here. We are delighted that you are here and we will come to you shortly. Q272 Baroness King of Bow: I want to ask about independent reviewing officers. I wonder if you feel that they refer enough cases to Cafcass? Is the system working well or should changes be made? Bruce Clark: I think the answer is probably not enough referrals are being made. When the settlement between Government and the judiciary was made that resulted in the creation of the independent reviewing officer role, none of us knew how many court cases there might be. In fact, there have been none and we guessed 200, so we got that wrong by a considerable margin. What IROs would say is that their ability to make referrals to Cafcass and to bring matters before the court does, in most authorities, give them considerable leverage to improve children’s care plans that are going off track. The separate reporting lines that get them into the assistant director level rather than working all the way through the chain is also helpful. The

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Cafcass—Oral evidence (QQ 234–274) thing that struck us when I was in the Department for Education and we surveyed was the scale of the caseload that determined whether IROs could be successful. At the best there were around 40 per IRO; at worst there were more than 200. If you are swamped in work you cannot do a very good job on behalf of children. It is early days to see how the best-practice guidance and handbook that came out two years ago is bedding in. I do buy the notion that having the ability to refer to Cafcass does give you certain power to the elbow, but wherever one locates IROs there are compromises and locating them within the authority certainly creates compromises, especially to those from the outside. But I think they are bringing more for the statutory orphans that we used to worry about back in 2001, and recently Peter Jackson did in his freeing order case. They are still with us and they do require someone to keep an eye out for them. Anthony Douglas: What is not counted is the informal contact. There is quite a lot of informal contact between IROs and children’s guardians and our service, Cafcass Legal. That can often persuade local authorities to change course. Formal referrals are very few but informal contact is often quite strong. Q273 Baroness Howarth of Breckland: Can I just very quickly ask this one? The Chairman: Yes. We are running a bit out of time. Baroness Howarth of Breckland: It is just very quick, because you know I am quick. With the IROs being located in the local authority, we know that institutions tend to wish to consume their own smoke. Do you think there are difficulties for some IROs in taking the cases out of the local authority to Cafcass because of their wish to maintain their relationship with their local authority? Bruce Clark: Yes. Q274 The Chairman: Thank you both very much. We would very much like to go on but we cannot. We are extremely grateful to both of you. We would be grateful if you gave us some written evidence. Anthony Douglas: We would love to. The Chairman: In particular you have been telling us, for instance, about Derby, about East Sussex, about other local authorities where there has been very good work. It is always relatively easy to tell people about good work, and that would be extremely valuable. If you felt able to tell us about problems you have noticed in bad work, that also we need to know. Anthony Douglas: We will do that. The Chairman: Thank you both very much indeed.

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Cafcass—Written evidence

Cafcass—Written evidence 1. Cafcass provided oral evidence to the Committee on 17 July 2012. This written response provides data in support of the evidence we provided on 17 July, and reinforces the key points that were made in the oral evidence session. 2. In response to Q.257 Cafcass made reference to reconciliation work between older adopted children and their birth parents, being undertaken in East Sussex. We would like to take this opportunity to confirm that the work being done in East Sussex is to reconcile adopted children with their adoptive families, when an adoption breaks down and the child returns to care. This can be of particular importance during adolescence. Supporting a child to be safely and positively reunited with their parents at any stage of childhood remains in our view a crucial social work practice and policy imperative. 3. The Committee also requested written evidence concerning the information provided in response to Q.235 that in Derby over 30% of looked after children are adopted. In 2009/10, 34% of children who ceased to be looked after in Derby City were adopted; Derby has the highest three-year average in England (2008/09 – 2010/11), with 26% of children who cease to be look after being adopted (SSDA903 dataset). 4. In terms of key points already put forward to the Committee, it is expected that the planned Children and Families Bill, particularly the proposals relating to s31A, will, once approved by Parliament and implemented, simplify adoption, looked after children and court care planning processes. Currently there are a number of separate – but parallel – complex processes that have developed in the six years in which the Children Act 1989 and Adoption and Children Act 2002 have both been in force. 5. A significant and welcome development would be to simplify and align the permanence planning arrangements for looked after children with those surrounding the process of preparing children’s permanence reports and placement order applications, and the processes operated by the courts. This could create a synergy and transferability between them. 6. Cafcass’ oral submission to the Committee (Q.240) introduced the concern about current complex processes, identifying a ‘lack of connectedness and fit between the requirements placed on local authorities in relation to their placement order application requirements with the not fully integrated set of expectations placed on local authorities in relation to the review of looked after children and the further set of expectations imposed by the courts in relation to social work evidence to be provided to support care and placement order applications’. 7. In our view, a simplification process could take the form of a ‘Child Permanence Report-lite’ and ‘Placement Plan-lite’ format. Both still have their place, but the forms in question could be made more manageable for professionals, to support the desirable policy drive to shorten timescales. 364

Cafcass—Written evidence

8. The potential for duplication and overlap between the work of Children’s Guardians and the work of local authority social workers could be eased by greater precision within the Family Procedures 2010 and linked Practice Direction (particularly Practice Direction 16A) about what the Guardian’s role should comprise. 9. Cafcass is currently working with ADCS and ADASS to scope the possibility of a sectorwide model of family court social work. We are discussing whether certain areas of assessment and analysis might become standard in all reports. These could include:  A voice of the child analysis, ensuring children are seen and heard, and the impact on them of their situation is clearly established for the court  Analysis of the parenting capacity gap and whether it can be bridged in the child’s timescale  Identifying a viable care and placement plan in which the risks to a child are eliminated as far as they can be, and normal child development and well being is restored and ensured as far as that can be. The underlying aim of such a plan is to achieve early permanence for the child in question. 10. The relevance of this to adoption is that adoption is the early permanence option of choice for many children. So is special guardianship, clearly a solution growing in popularity if judged by the Government’s latest adoption figures, kinship care solutions and a return home when this has become substantially safer than at the time a child in question was removed. 11. The importance of maintaining the public profile of alternatives to adoption is crucial for children needing placements now, because there is a growing gap between the number of children subject to Placement Orders waiting for a match with an adopter, and the numbers of adopters waiting to be matched. Long-term foster care is the nearest placement option to adoption and Cafcass is aware of a growing number of children with care plans being based on long-term fostering, because local authorities are not confident of being able to find a suitable adopter for a specific child. 12. There are also, in our view, a significant number of children for whom potential matches are being missed. Cafcass hopes that the measures being taken by the Government to simplify the adoption process for prospective adopters and to make adoption services more customer focussed, will in time increase the popularity and credibility of adoption in the UK. In the short-term however, viable alternative solutions will continue to be needed in significant numbers. 13. We do not want to duplicate either what we have said already to the committee, or to duplicate what has been said or written already by others. For this reason, we will just make a small number of additional points. We are happy to discuss these with the committee further. a) We wish to highlight the importance of the proposed family justice reforms. These emphasise the importance of completing, as far as possible, assessments before care

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Cafcass—Written evidence proceedings are issued, and to use concurrent or parallel planning as a basic tool to support early permanence. We see early signs of these reforms having an impact. b) We wish to highlight the importance of creative approaches such as Child Appreciation Days and Placement Activity Days, both of which can support a positive transition for a child from care to adoption. c) Standard and often formulaic interim contact arrangements, especially for young children, should be scaled back. The main issue in care cases is usually whether a parent can get off and stay off drugs, or leave a violent partner/household, or another significant shift in adult/parental functioning or behaviour. This is the issue to urgently address during most care proceedings, not maintaining contact at the child’s expense, especially if the child is making use of the interim period by achieving a degree of stability, security growth or development in safer interim care. The exceptions to this framework are where safe and successful reunification is imminent. d) We would like to re-state the importance of adoption being a lifelong issue for those concerned, and to emphasise the need to make sure support services are accessible, not just in the immediate post-adoption period, but for years after. This means each of the 153 English local authorities having a ‘sufficient’ post-adoption service staffed by adoption social workers who understand the all-round and lifelong issues in adoption, in the event they are contacted. 1 October 2012

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Cambridgeshire County Council—Written evidence

Cambridgeshire County Council—Written evidence 1 Background a.

Do we have the right structure for adoption?

b. Should we be concerned about the falling number of adoptions? Why are the numbers falling? 1.1 The overall structure of LA Adoption Services, Voluntary adoption Agencies and Regional Consortiums of both Voluntary and LA Agencies is appropriate. 1.2 Cambridgeshire has invested in an adoption partnership with Coram, voluntary adoption agency benefitting from the knowledge and expertise that they bring in achieving early permanence and concurrency for young children. We are developing our own Concurrency Project and are recruiting concurrent carer’s 1.3 The LA is currently reconfiguring with Social Work Unit Model underpinned by Systemic Models of practice. Whilst the thrust of the Unit Model remains ensuring that all efforts to support families in remaining together, the early indications are that this method of practice is proving effective in the early identification of children where adoption needs to be the primary plan and better assessment of children’s needs 1.4 It has also established an Early Permanence Team to work primarily with children under 2 years relinquished or in proceedings where adoption is the plan and will fast track their journey through the system. 1.5 Adoption Orders should be considered within the context and spectrum of other legal orders such as SGO’s, RO’s rather than in isolation. Whilst there has been a overall decline in the number of Adoption Orders since 2005, there has been a similar and further increase in the use of other alternative Legal Orders including SGO’s. 1.6 As a LA we continue to achieved increases in the numbers of Adoption Orders and SGO’s, and will continue to explore the potential for children who’s situations may be more challenging / complex, older children who would otherwise remain in the care of the Local Authority until adulthood. 1.7 The Research base about early year’s development clearly shows the better outcomes can be achieved for children placed for Adoption especially when achieved at the earliest possible stage. Children with care backgrounds continue to be disproportionately represented in greater numbers than other adults in mental health systems, prison systems, unemployed and homeless. 1.8 As a LA we have at times experienced overall reluctance by the courts to consider adoption or searches for adoptive families even for a time limited period for children with any additional degree of complexity, such as sibling groups, older children, those with disability and is further compounded where these factors exist in multiples.

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Cambridgeshire County Council—Written evidence 2. Legislation a.

What impact did the 2002 Act have on the adoption process?

b. Have all aspects of the 2002 and 2006 Acts been implemented appropriately and successfully implemented? c.

Is further legislation required to improve any aspect of the adoption system?

d. Can you as a respondent identify a problem and tell us if, and if so where, the legislation (including regulations), needs to change? 2.1 Whilst 2002 Act was not implemented till the end of 2005 the national role out training and Guidance was undertaken very late. The Act is perceived as having a narrow focus and is still largely seen to be the responsibility of the specialist adoption social workers rather than child care social workers despite the wide range of statutory duties and responsibilities towards children and their birth parents / families. 2.2 Continues to be concern from professionals regarding the balance of rights being applied in favor of parent’s i.e. Article 8 right to family life and Article 6 right to a fair hearing, Convention on Human Rights, eclipsing the “paramountcy principle” in relation to the child, and the child’s human rights. Consideration needs to be given whether the courts have the balance right in practice and that it would be helpful to have further strengthening in this area. 2.3 We have experienced long delays in care proceedings, awaiting the appointment of the Official Solicitor to act on behalf of parent. We encounter considerable delays in them considering papers and starting to play a role in proceedings. This is of extreme concern when this involves babies and young children where timescales are urgent and where the court considers the child’s welfare requires the case to be decided swiftly. It is our experience that professionals involved in the court process question whether the OS provides benefit for their clients or the process. 2.4 Unlike the previous Freeing Order the Placement Order has 3 potential points of opportunity for parents to oppose the Local Authorities plans for adoption. Firstly during the original care proceedings stage when they have the opportunity to challenge the making of the Care and Placement Orders. Secondly via the right to seek the courts leave to apply to revoke a Placement Order prior to the child being placed in a pre adoptive placement and thirdly when the final Adoption Order is being made. Whilst it is natural to consider that the birth parents would wish to challenge the legal severance of their links with their children, this does add to the anxiety and uncertainty felt by adopters and delays for children as court time is required to initially hear the case. We are also concerned whether applications are always in the best interest of the parents, where the window for parental change is small and there is little likelihood of success. 2.5 Whilst we agree the need for commencement in early family finding for children, courts have been reluctant to sanction this as not wishing to pre-empt the outcome of the legal process. LA will need to be supported by the courts to fulfilling these requirements. 2.6 It is recognized that many adoptive parents and their respective Adoption Agencies are reluctant to pursue potential matches whilst proceedings remain ongoing. It would be helpful if

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Cambridgeshire County Council—Written evidence some consideration was given to early Judicial direction where there is a strong likelihood of Placement Orders being made. 3. Time taken in placing children a. Is excessive time taken in placing children? Do some groups of children take a disproportionate length of time? b. What aspects of the adoption process, including pre-process care proceedings, take most time? c. Do the various parts of the system – local authorities, adoption agencies, courts and others – work effectively together? d. Could the adoption process be speeded up, whilst ensuring that necessary safeguards are preserved? e. How widely used is concurrent planning? What are its advantages and disadvantages? f. What are the reasons for the variations in time taken to place children by different local authorities? 3.1 Children with complex needs or sibling groups inevitably take longer to place for adoption than others who may be more ‘straightforward’. However, we recognise that some children wait too long for adoptive families. In Cambridgeshire we are attempting to address this with measures to reduce delay:  Coram-Cambridgeshire Adoption Partnership was established in September 2011 with the purpose of improving practice to deliver better outcomes for children and families. Coram is a voluntary adoption agency of nationally recognised expertise and consistent excellent practice. Cambridgeshire is working closely with Coram on minimizing delays for children who need permanence planning.  Promoting early permanence planning and early involvement of adoption social workers in minimising delay for children. The adoption service work closely with the child care teams and the independent reviewing service to achieve this.  Developing ways of engaging with the local Judiciary to build improved partnership and consider ways to reduce delay for children. A meeting between members of the local Judiciary, Lead Members of the Council and the Coram-Cambridgeshire Adoption Partnership is taking place on 18 July. We hope this will be the first of regular meetings.  Development of an Adoption Advisory Group, including members of the Judiciary, to oversee and progress the work the partners can do together to reduce delay.  Monthly monitoring of permanence plans and timescales via the Permanence Monitoring Group, attended by senior managers.  Work with CAFCASS to establish positive partnership working  Establishing concurrent planning in Cambridgeshire (see further under e.)

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Cambridgeshire County Council—Written evidence 3.2 There is often too little regard by Court for the professional judgement of social workers and a reluctance to agree permanence plans put forward in care plans. Too great reliance of expert reports and directions for repeated parenting assessments, in particular in cases where previous care proceedings have taken place. 3.3. Adoption has lifelong implications for all involved and it is therefore essential to allow time and space for reflection by applicants as well as adoption practitioners during the assessment. Applicants are usually appreciative of this aspect of their assessment. Timescales currently as in Statutory Guidance 2011 are set to accommodate space for reflection. ‘Speeding up’ the assessment process is likely to reduce the quality of adoption assessments impacting on quality of placements for vulnerable children with very complex needs. 3.4 The initial pre-assessment period may benefit from tighter timescales to avoid unnecessary delay. 3.5 There is a real commitment in Cambridgeshire to establish concurrent planning as a means to reduce delay for children. This will be achieved working closely with Coram, drawing on their expertise and experience. 3.6 For concurrent planning to work well it is essential for the local authority to work closely with the Courts. Cambridgeshire are engaging with the local Judiciary from the outset in establishing this Programme, and have members of the judiciary on the concurrent working group as well as on the Adoption Partnership Advisory Group. 3.7 Cambridgeshire also recognises the importance to provide essential support for birth parents as well as carers throughout the process and in particular in relation to contact. 4. The number of potential adopters a. Are there enough potential adopters coming forward? Are there shortages in particular ethnic groups? b. How do we ensure the best “fit” for a child, and is trans-racial adoption relevant to this issue? c. Why do some potential adopters drop out during the adoption process? d. Have the changes to eligibility introduced by the 2002 Act impacted the number of potential adopters? e. What will be the likely effect of the measures proposed in the Department for Education’s ‘Action Plan for Adoption’? f. Does the number of agencies inhibit the number of potential adopters recruited? g. Does the recent increase in knowledge about early child development affect the balance between children’s rights and parental rights?

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Cambridgeshire County Council—Written evidence 4.1 We are fortunate in Cambridgeshire with consistently high numbers of prospective adopters coming forward. The challenge for any adoption agency is recruiting adopters who are able to meet the needs of the children waiting for adoptive families. 4.2 We strive to achieve the best placement for a child through a careful matching process, based on the child’s identified needs. Trans-racial placements should be considered with due care of all of the child’s needs now and in future, and not be used as a short-cut to achieve a quick placement. 4.3 We have very few applicants dropping out during the process. 4.4 The changes to eligibility criteria have increase the numbers of potential adopters, encouraging gay and lesbian couples as well as single people to come forward. 4.5 The focus in the Action Plan for Adoption to reduce delay for children is positive. However, the proposed new adoption assessment framework with emphasis on shorter timescales is concerning, as outlined above. This is particularly so with the recognition that we need more adopters who are able to meet the needs of older children, sibling groups and children with disabilities and complex needs. 4.6 The Regulations to remove the Panel function in relation to the decision that adoption should be the plan for the child for cases in care proceedings will come into force on 1 September. Local Authorities have only three months to establish alternative quality assurance mechanisms and procedures to ensure that the necessary preparatory work are completed in a timely way, including assessments and reports that are fit for purpose. The very short time allowed for implementation is of great concern in relation to such important decisions impacting on a children’s entire life and that of their families. The burden of responsibility and workload on the Agency Decision Maker will be considerable and likely to be too great for one person or certainly one at the current level of Director of Children’s Social Care as we have in Cambridgeshire. 5. Court proceedings a.

Do court proceedings take undue time in the adoption process?

b. Would the recommendations of the Family Justice Review substantially alter the position? c. How effective are provisions for the representation by guardians of children in court proceedings? d. How effective have placement orders been in facilitating the placement and adoption of children compared with “freeing orders”? e. How common is it for care proceedings and placement order proceedings to be heard together or consecutively? What are the advantages and disadvantages of this approach? f. How will changes to legal aid impact, if at all, on adoption proceedings? 371

Cambridgeshire County Council—Written evidence

5.1 Evidence is that the length of court proceedings are too long, whilst the difficulties are many and no single factor is responsible for overall delay the contribution of a few days here and there do incrementally result in significant delays for many children. Whilst the average length of proceedings is some 52 weeks this is a year in a child’s life and for many is the larger proportion of their life at a time when they need a secure permanent home whether this be via rehabilitation to parents care or via Adoption, some other legal order or permanent fostering remains uncertain. 5.2 It is fully understood that the deterioration over the years in the consistency and confidence in social work practice, insufficient assessment prior to initiating care proceedings and the consequential reliance on the use of expert assessments has contributed to this. As a Local Authority Cambridgeshire has taken responsibility for this and has taken steps to reconfiguration its children services to deliver a more holistic model of support. As indicated earlier this is showing early indications of its potential to deliver improvements in practice which is being recognized by partner agencies such as Adoption and Permanence Panels and CAFCASS. 5.3 In all instances in Cambridgeshire Care and Placement Orders applications are considered at the same Final Hearing. 5.4 We continue to have concerns about the over reliance on a decreasing pool of experts and reports of variable quality. These are often considerably delayed and received beyond the court deadlines with no sanction for the expert involved. This often impacts on the ability to maintain court timetables. 5.5 Cambridgeshire has for some years had regular liaison meetings between CAFCASS and the Adoption and IRO service. This includes feedback back on practice. We provide places on research and specific adoption / permanency related training for other partner agencies in the adoption community including Adopt Anglia and CAFCASS. 5.6 One significant area of delay remains family members coming forward late in the proceedings for Kinship or SGO Assessments despite not engaging at earlier stages. Whilst it is the practice in some courts to provide clear timescales for parents to explore family members, this practice does not appear to be replicated everywhere and may be an initiative that could be further explored. 5.7 It is not considered that legal aid has impacted at this stage adversely on the rights of parents to seek representation in care proceedings or revocation applications in this area. 6. Post-adoption support a. How, if at all, has the 2002 Act impacted upon the provision of post-adoption contacts and support? b. Are measures needed to enhance post-adoption financial and other support for (i) adopted children; (ii) adoptive parents, (iii) birth families? 6.1 Cambridgeshire recognises the need to provide ongoing support for our adopters not only at the point of assessment but beyond. Adopters are offered access to ongoing adoption training, post adoption support and adoption support groups we have an ever expanding 372

Cambridgeshire County Council—Written evidence adoption allowance budget and offer appropriate needs lead financial support via our Adoption Allowance Budget. We have within our Adoption Service a number of dedicated Adoption Support Social Workers, an Adoption Psychologist, Adoption Trainer, Birth Relative Counselor, Post Box Coordinator enabling us to deliver services that are relevant to the needs of adopted children and their adoptive families. 6.2 We continue to experience a steady rise in referrals for adoption support and these reflect the increasing complexity of children being placed. We have a number of adoptive families that have moved into this county and are in need of ongoing adoption support to avert disruption of the placement. We have often experienced delays in LA’s responding to our contacts and in agreeing access to support including financial support. 7. Inter-country adoption a. Have the inter-country adoption safeguards introduced by the 2002 and 2006 Acts proved successful? b. Would you recommend any change to the legislation to make inter-country adoption simpler? c. Are there any special challenges in adopting children from particular countries or regions? 7.1 Cambridgeshire has very few inter-country adoptions and as such does not feel in a position to respond to this section 8. Access to Information a. Has the 2002 Act made it easier for adopted adults and/or birth families to trace their relatives, should they wish to do so? 8.1 Cambridgeshire would agree that the act has supported easier contact for birth relative. We continue to experience increasing referrals for both birth record counseling and intermediary services within Cambridgeshire with the majority relating to pre commencement adoptions. 9. Other permanent placements a. What has been the effect of the introduction, in the 2002 Act, of ‘special guardianship’? b. Is special guardianship an effective alternative to adoption, especially for those of school age (ie 5 and older)? c. What is the best way to ensure permanent and consistent placements for children? d. Would earlier interventions in cases of children with difficulties have an effect on the number of children who need to be adopted or otherwise permanently separated from their birth family?

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Cambridgeshire County Council—Written evidence 9.1 In Cambridgeshire we have achieved in all 112 Special Guardianship Orders made since they commenced in 2002, we continue to experience increasing referrals for Kinship and SGO assessments from both Children’s Services and the Courts. 39 of the SGO’s were in respect of school age children including sibling groups of 2 and 3 children 9.2 We would entirely agree with the need for early and robust assessments of Family and Friends to provide alternative and permanent placements. In Cambridgeshire we have a Family Group Conference Service that facilitates timely Family Group Meetings to explore all potential family and connected persons before agreement can be sought for a child becoming looked after. The Family Group Meeting Service has a very close working relationship with the Kinship Service in order to minimize delays in the assessment of potential carers 9.3 We recognize the diversity of each family and that this informs the assessment process and the package of SGO or Kinship Placement support necessary to ensure stable placements for children until their maturity. We recognize the complexity of the relationships that children have with their birth families and the ongoing impact of these. 10. Monitoring a. Do ‘adoption scorecards’ provide an appropriate means for monitoring the performance of local authorities with regard to adoption? b. How robust are current systems for monitoring the i) number of adoptions made, ii) the number of children awaiting adoption, and iii) the amount of delay experienced by those awaiting adoption? 10.1 Overall it is considered that the Adoption Score Cards is a crude measure of the performance of a Local Authority, in that there is no differentiation of children’s varied and complex needs. 19 July 2012

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Jim Clifford—Written evidence

Jim Clifford—Written evidence “It’s All About Me”: Enhanced Family Finding Outline of the SIB-backed innovative solution for hard-to-place children co-developed by the Consortium of Voluntary Adoption Agencies and Baker Tilly Presented to the House of Lords Select Committee on Adoption Legislation Note: This is a review paper presented to the Select Committee at the request of its Clerk to summarise (for the purposes of its review of adoption legislation) research to date from the feasibility study produced by the Steering Group for IAAM and published in July 2012. It is not a document intended to elicit or encourage investment and should not be used for that purpose. By Jim Clifford28 1. The challenge  To find parents to adopt the high proportion of harder-to-place children who do not find homes even though adoption has been planned for them  To train and support those parents not just to handle the difficulties these challenging and traumatised children present, but to work with them therapeutically through their parenting style to turn their lives around  The target is to find successful permanent placements for 300 children a year, UK-wide, in a scalable model that could deliver more if required . 2. Background  There were, at September 2012, 2,53629 children on the National Adoption Register (“NAR”). During the preceding quarter 35030 were placed for adoption while 916 additional children joined the register. More children are being added to the NAR than are being adopted: over the last six years, on average, 1,800 children were on the NAR, while only 260 were placed from it per annum31. In particular, children who are Jim Clifford MSc FCA ATII CF MSI MABRP MEWI DChA is Head of Not-for-Profit Advisory at Baker Tilly, and a Visiting Research Fellow in Not-for-Profit finance, impact measurement, strategy and investment decision-making at Cass Business School, London. He is a Director and Independent Trustee of the Centre for Public Scrutiny. The lead author of a number of influential Social Impact studies, including the PACT study on the socio-economic effect of permanence in adoption and fostering, he led the project to develop “It’s All About Me”. He is an adoptive parent, whose family of nine children were the subject of the influential BBC Wales documentary by Jacci Parry, “A Home for Maisie”, screened in 2011. 29 Adoption Register Annual Report 2011/12, Adoption Register for England and Wales, 2012. 30 Adoption Register Annual Report 2011/12, Adoption Register for England and Wales, 2012. 31 Average estimate is based on data in Adoption Register Annual Reports 2006-2011. 28

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Jim Clifford—Written evidence BME, in sibling groups, older (aged 4-10) and who exhibit trauma or developmental issues are least likely to find a family, and represent over 80% of the children on the NAR awaiting famiies.  The barriers to these children finding families are: i.

Lack of families: The number of approved adopters is lower than the children who need to be placed. Against 2,536 children on the NAR, only 711 approved adopters were identified in 2011/201232. Furthermore, and perhaps more significantly, the current system chooses children for families, and not families for children: families are approved, and then choose children from those available, which appears naturally to favour those that are perceived as easier to place, leaving the over-threes, BME, sibling groups, amongst others struggling to find places.

ii.

Lack of support for families: There is a lack of appropriately trained and adequately supported families for hard to place children.

iii.

Lack of Training in Therapeutic Parenting, which may lead to breakdown of placement: excepting the minority of cases where a child is too traumatised to cope with life in any family home, placements break down if the families are not adequately matched, trained or supported during and after the adoption process. Most current adoption provisions do not have enough resources to provide the adequate level of service.

 Support in this context embodies the key elements of: i.

Practical support in embedding the training to turn it into behavioural change

ii.

Advocacy: support in getting services, and advocating for the child and family in other situations (e.g. getting schools to understand their needs)

iii.

Validation: the essential support of confirming that the parents are reasonable in what they are feeling, and developing those feelings with them

iv.

Supervision: in the professional sense, as seen within health and social care. The adopters are required to soak up the child’s trauma, and remain resilient in the face of huge physical and emotional pressure, so they need an outlet for those pressures.

 If these children do not find adoptive families they remain within a care system that lacks the permanence and therapeutic support they need. If left unresolved, these issues can lead to the high social and financial costs of academic underachievement, unemployment and crime. This was evaluated in the PACT study (by Baker Tilly and 32

Adoption Register Annual Report 2011/12, Adoption Register for England and Wales, 2012.

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Jim Clifford—Written evidence Cass Business School) on the social impact of permanence in adoption at over £800,000 per child.33 3. Solution  “It’s All About Me” is a service for finding adoptive families for children seeking them but considered hard to place because of their age or background. Supplied by a collaboration between well-known Voluntary Adoption Agencies (including Action for Children, Coram, PACT, After Adoption, Adoption Matters, St Francis’ and Faith in Families) it offers an all-round “find, train and support” service which will enable parents to succeed with these children.

 It offers an enhanced choice to LAs. They can decide (for any child or children) that the usual routes to finding, training and supporting adoptive parents will not work, or at least not within an acceptable timeframe. They can then approach a VAA from the provider list who will consider whether they can take on the child and provide IAAM for them. If so, the LA will contract with the VAA to do so, under a standard, UKwide Service Level Agreement.  Local Authorities will pay in four instalments (registration for the scheme, placement, one year, and two years post-placement) less than half of the savings they make from not having to pay for foster care, paying only when they have already made the savings.  Funding could come from a 10-year social impact bond: a debt instrument offering:  a 4% fixed yield, paid quarterly;  capital repaid by year ten;  a “with profits” premium yield if the VAAs achieve a lower than 10% rate of breakdowns in placements;  giving a targeted internal rate of return of 6% to 8.5%.  Based on prior research, for every £100,000 invested in the 10-year bond, a social value of at least £22m is achieved in children’s lives. 4. The IAAM service and support  IAAM offers a significantly enhanced package as against the standard IAF-funded alternative. This includes: i.

Pre-take-on (by the scheme) assessment of the child’s needs and how those can be met in adoption: what type of parent is needed

Clifford, J. (2011). PACT Domestic Adoption and Fostering: SROI Evaluation. London and Reading. Baker Tilly/Cass and PACT. 33

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Jim Clifford—Written evidence ii. iii.

iv. v. vi.

vii. viii. ix.

Post take-on assessment by the Maudesley Training tailored to the needs of the child, and developing the skills to parent him or her:  In a developmental reparenting model  To deal with developmental traumas  To deal with or manage specific difficulties (e.g. bereavement, or a medical condition such as cystic fibrosis) Support (telephone and meeting) in embedding the training into the parenting style, part of which must be delivered as the child is placed and thereafter Support (telephone and meeting) as issues arise, supplying suggestions and guidance for dealing with them Up to £5,000 of specific intervention for the child, whether delivered by the VAA or a third-party provider. Higher levels of support (e.g. high needs sexual abuse therapy) would continue to be funded by the LA, and approved through the normal channels Advocacy in obtaining services and dealing with schools and others who need to understand the child’s needs Supervision to help with secondary trauma, self-doubt and the general pressure of parenting challenging children Validation: the key support of validating the parent’s feelings and sharing and developing them.

 This further underpins the value of the service, which lies in part in the fact that it is seeking a family for a child, so inverting the usual “market” approach of approving parents who can then pick the child they want, and in part in the enhanced service offering designed to support the parents for a significant period post-placement.  From the LA’s point of view the model can either be compared to: i. The cost of keeping the child in foster care, with the added elements of some of the therapeutic intervention that is included within IAAM ii. The cost of the IAF-funded placement alternative, which the LA would have decided would not achieve success (at all, or in the required timescale), and which would not include in the £27,000 price:  The Maudesley assessment (costing £4,000, but worth rather more)  The £5,000 of specific interventions with the child  The support, advocacy and training packages  Hence the LA will compare to the IAF-costed placement (which they have decided would not work for the child, and which would lead to further costs on top for the extra support elements included in the £52,000 IAAM service, or to the costs of keeping the child in foster care.

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Jim Clifford—Written evidence 5. Socio-economic gain and its measurement  The gain was evaluated in the PACT study at at least £800,000 per child: the present value of lifetime gains in enhanced employment and reduced burden of State support in child- and adult-hood. Of this, £435,000 is the monetised (cashable) gain to the placing Local Authority over the child’s minority. 6. Funding requirements  The work to date indicates that up to £5.7m (for 300 children p.a.; £2.1m for 100 p.a.) is needed to fund the working capital for the service. Note that this is not a pilot, but the full UK-wide service offering. If the service attracts lower than the targeted number of 300 children a year at maturity (hoped to be achieved between twelve and eighteen months from commencement) then less funding will be required. For that reason the funding should be raised: i. With an initial tranche of £500,000 minimum during early 2013 ii. With further quarterly tranches as the market builds up, through to an eighteen month maturity point. At 100 children, around £2.7m is needed. The model is scalable, restricted only by LAs’ keenness to buy, the funds available, and VAAs’ capacity to deliver (in itself scalable).  The VAA contracts with the Local Authority to find and support a family for a given child: effectively a spot-purchase by the LA. At each of four stages the VAA draws down funds from the bond fund, which is repaid, with interest and costs, when the funds are recovered from the LA. The bond funds all such placements, and so, when it carries risk of placement breakdowns leading to under-recoveries, these are averaged across the full UK-wide portfolio. The funding is budgeted to cover breakdowns (or occasions where a VAA can’t find a family for a child) up to 10% of total registrations (as against the sub-5% currently achieved by VAAs), and can, at that level, still cover its basic 4% yield and costs, with a small margin.  If, despite the best efforts of the VAA’s, the average breakdown rate exceeds 10%, the excess is recovered from the VAA’s in the form of reduced latter-stage payments on all placements. The VAAs are in a position to manage this through a combination of improved service and better selection of cases to take on. Hence the bond fund’s risk share is capped.  To the extent that average breakdown rates lower than 10% are achieved by the VAAs an additional surplus will arise in the bond fund. This is shared equally between the fund and the VAAs to incentivise the latter to deliver the upside. VAAs will draw down funds from the Bond fund at the same four key milestones in the adoption process. Local Authorities will make co-terminous payments to the fund at these milestones, with a final payment that includes a ‘success’ fee at the point the placement is deemed

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Jim Clifford—Written evidence to be successful. These are all natural statutory review points in the placement cycle. The payments and timings are set out below for a single registration:

Milestone Registration Placement with a family One year post-placement Two years post-placement Total

VAA drawdowns £ 19,000 16,000 5,500 6,000 46,500

Local Authority payments £ 8,000 23,000 6,000 15,000 52,000

 The structure and timing of payments ensures that VAAs are able to cover the costs of delivering the programme. Local Authorities make payments when they have received demonstrable value from the service.  The registration stage includes £4,000 per child specifically allocated to South London & Maudesley NHS FT for a medical/psychological assessment as a foundation for informing parent selection, training and the child’s future care. In itself this is a valuable resource for the LA (and the parents). 7. Innovative Risk Model  The risk model used is one of several key innovations which have emerged into SIBs for the first time in “IAAM”. It involves analysing the key deliverables under the proposed service model, and then assessing the risks to those. Each risk is then sub-analysed to consider which parties in the arrangements can best carry, and manage, that risk, and it is allocated to that party. This is described as “risk arbitrage”. In some cases (such as the breakdown rate) the risk is tiered, with different parties taking different slices, or bands, of risk. 8. Who will fund this ?  The funding profile is for a debt-type facility that naturally uses and repays capital with enough to cover interest and risk. This means that capital is relatively secure: apparently more debt-like than the capital-at-risk models of Peterborough Prisons et al. The yields that can be serviced match this risk profile.  This defines who might be interested, which has been based on the assumption that this project must compete for capital in the general investment markets, and not in soft markets where an investor may accept a lower yield and higher risk because of the significant social gains achieved.  Investors are expected to come from: i.

Charitable foundations, investing out of their endowment, rather than from grant monies

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Jim Clifford—Written evidence ii. iii. iv. v. vi. vii. viii.

Government and other publicly-funded agencies such as Big Society Capital Operating Charities as part of the portfolio management of their investments Family Offices and private trust funds Overseas charitable foundations Corporates, looking for the opportunity to invest surplus funds for good, perhaps claiming the gain as an indicator of CSR Local Authorities investing through normal Treasury functions (although this may require a secure trading facility to allow for liquidity) High Net Worth, or Ultra-High Net Worth individuals, as part of their investment portfolio

9. Challenges and hurdles  Challenges to the development of the model and its roll-out have been: i.

Getting an eighteen-way collaboration of VAAs, with representative Local Authorities and the ADCS34, working together to a single goal

ii.

Designing the service to suit the needs of the child, the requirements of the market, and the ability of the VAAs to deliver

iii.

Getting past a minority of parties’ misgivings about using private capital amid perceptions of its being expensive and usurious

iv.

Finding a low-cost but compliant way through the Financial Services and other legislation that regulates the promotion and marketing of financial instruments

v.

The commissioning and procurement environment, although this has turned out to be less of an issue since IAAM works to a spot-purchase model below procurement thresholds in a market where the service provides market choice (with many providers) but where non-IAAM providers would be unlikely to be able to compete on Value for Money.

14 November 2012

Association of Directors of Children’s Services, whose 2011/12 President, Matt Dunkley has supported the development of IAAM. 34

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College of Social Work Faculty for Children and Families and British Association of Social Workers (BASW)—Oral evidence (QQ 589-621)

College of Social Work Faculty for Children and Families and British Association of Social Workers (BASW)—Oral evidence (QQ 589-621) Transcript to be found under British Association of Social Workers (BASW)

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Consortium of Voluntary Adoption Agencies (CVAA)—Written evidence

Consortium of Voluntary Adoption Agencies (CVAA)—Written evidence CVAA is a membership organisation which represents and serves all 32 voluntary adoption agencies across England, Wales, Scotland, N. Ireland and the Isle of Man. In 2011 CVAA submitted proposals for adoption reform in response to requests from HM Treasury, thence participated in the Expert Working Group, and is now, at the request of the Children’s Minister, a participant in the DfE Implementation Group. CVAA has for several years maintained a rich archive of data relating to adoption placement and adoption support activity across the sector. Background a)

Do we have the right structure for adoption?

The current structure in itself should achieve the intended outcomes if each part of the system operates efficiently. The placement plan for adoption must remain with the Local Authority which has solely or shares Parental Responsibility; and then the LA which knows the child should retain responsibility for matching with a family. Having both Local Authorities and Voluntary Adoption Agencies recruiting and preparing adopters offers choice to prospective adopters. However there needs to be a totally ‘level playing field’ between those two sectors, so that the placement choice for the child is founded solely on the best interest of the child. Independent research by Julie Selwyn has shown that the costs of an adoption placement are virtually identical in VAAs and LAs, yet LAs continue to charge each other significantly less for these placements (£13K vs £27K) thereby reducing the choice of placements available for children and often resulting in lengthy delays in children achieving a placement. b)

Should we be concerned about the falling numbers of adoptions? Why are the numbers falling?

There has obviously been a significant decrease in the number of birth parents ‘voluntarily’ relinquishing a child for adoption and this relates primarily to the wider range of options and resources available to those birth parents. We applaud this fact, whilst at the same time wishing to express some concern that adoption is not always promoted as a real option to those birth parents contemplating future plans. The Voluntary Adoption sector has a long tradition in counselling ‘relinquishing’ birth parents; this is a highly skilled area of work demanding expertise, experience and resources. VAAs are rarely now able to obtain funding to undertake such work, and yet the relevant skills are rarely available within LAs where this area of work is not always the responsibility of specialist teams. Funding to VAAs could address this. In respect of adoption of children from care; the plans for some children change from adoption because of the failure of the LA to find appropriate adopters. Current measures to address 383

Consortium of Voluntary Adoption Agencies (CVAA)—Written evidence adopter recruitment, the adoption market, and through amendments to court proceedings, should begin to deal with this issue. Legislation a) What impact did the 2002 Act have on the adoption process? In many respects the Act brought legislation up to date with practice and in line with the needs of the profile of children being placed, and the challenges posed therefore to their adoptive families. This particularly applies to the development of adoption support, to the provision of a framework for counselling birth parents and adult adoptees, and to the requirements placed on VAAs and LAs alike in terms of agency structure and functioning of Adoption Panels. b)

Have all aspects of the 2002 and 2006 Acts been implemented appropriately and successfully?

There needs to be greater consistency in respect of access to adoption support and especially financial support across LAs. c)

Is further legislation required to improve any aspect of the adoption system?

The current changes being proposed should address the issues of delay for children and adopters, although will require adequate resourcing. d)

Can you identify a problem and tell us if and, if so, where the legislation (including regulations) need to change?

The Regulations give LAs a duty to assess an adoptive family’s adoption support needs, but there is no duty to provide appropriate services to meet these needs. The Regulations should be changed to place a duty on LAs to provide the relevant support and services which they have assessed that an adopted child and adoptive family require. Time taken in placing children a)

Is excessive time taken in placing children? Do some groups of children take a disproportionate length of time?

Yes undoubtedly. Care planning by LAs does not always reach timely decisions though this is improving in many areas; seeking an adoptive family is frequently undertaken sequentially, initially in house and only then externally; court proceedings create further delays. In some cases delay may be caused by seeking ‘the perfect’ match. It is more difficult to place children with additional needs, but increased and guaranteed support for adopters would significantly address this challenge; similarly in respect of sibling groups. Further joined up recruitment emphasis to seek adopters from BME communities is needed Overall, ensuring more children are referred earlier before being damaged further by delay, would enhance children’s chances of being successfully adopted overall.

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Consortium of Voluntary Adoption Agencies (CVAA)—Written evidence

b)

What aspects of the adoption process take most time?

Currently care proceedings, then family finding. c)

Do the various parts of the system work effectively together?

From the perspective of CVAA we would emphasise the need for LAs to work more in partnership with VAAs; highlighting early children coming through the system, supporting targeted recruitment; referring children to VAAs at an early stage. The challenges for VAAs are that they are too often treated as a last resort - when LAs are seeking adopters for a particular child, VAAs are seen as being too expensive even though their costs have been independently shown to be well below full cost recovery. VAAs are also expected to invest ‘up front’ in recruiting adopters and achieving a match for them before any of their costs are recovered through payments from LAs, so they have historically been subsidised by charitable means given which to a large extent this has now diminished. d)

Could the adoption process be speeded up whilst ensuring the necessary safeguards are preserved?

Yes, especially if earlier care planning embraced adoption and concurrent, rather than sequential, family finding was effected. Additionally, limiting the timescale within which ‘connected people’ could seek to be assessed to care for a child would further reduce delay. e)

How widely used is concurrent planning? Advantages and disadvantages.

It is appropriate for a limited but increased number of young children. Several VAAs would be keen to establish concurrent planning services and are well placed as independent agencies to do so, if funding were available; if LAs referred children and courts supported use of this option. This is resource intensive work but with undeniable benefits to children and to birth families. f)

What are the reasons for the variations in time taken to place children by different LAs?

Poor care planning structures; lack of involvement of adoption staff in formulating plans for children; unwillingness to refer children to VAAs and the Adoption Register to facilitate speedy matching; lack of recognition that spend on external adoption placements equates to savings in fostering budgets, as well as providing a longer term significant return on investment, and of course a better outcome for many children. The number of potential adopters a)

Are there enough potential adopters coming forward? Are there shortages in particular ethnic groups?

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Consortium of Voluntary Adoption Agencies (CVAA)—Written evidence There is a shortage of adopters able to meet the needs of children waiting; we need more targeted recruitment and better support packages for adopters. Adopters from BME backgrounds are under-represented; targeted recruitment and better financial support is required. b)

How do we ensure the ‘best fit’ for a child, and is trans-racial adoption relevant to this issue?

A child’s need for a family must be paramount in matching; whilst seeking a complete match in terms of ethnicity should not be supported if this creates undue delay in a child achieving permanence, it is nevertheless crucial that adopters can appreciate and embrace fully a child’s ethnic and cultural background. c)

Why do some potential adopters drop out during the adoption process?

Adoption is a very challenging and life long commitment and one would expect some applicants to drop out at each stage in the process as they come to realise that adoption is not right for them, or not at this particular time. This may be about recognising they cannot meet the needs of children awaiting adoption because of their own parenting experiences, their current relationship or family structure, the needs of their own or other adopted children, or practical issues such as finances and housing. d)

Have the changes to eligibility in the 2002 Act impacted the number of potential adopters?

Yes there has been some increase in the number of gay and lesbian carers and some extremely successful placements made. There is still more work to undertake to challenge the myth that age, sexual orientation, and status may be a bar to adoption however. e)

What will be the likely impact of the measures proposed in the DfE’s Action Plan for Adoption?

The increased media profile of adoption is leading to increased numbers of enquiries across many VAAs; ongoing, this needs to be informed by accurate promotion so that enquiries are appropriate to the needs of the children waiting, or potentially so. The Gateway should support this, as should the work of the National Recruitment Forum. However, increased enquiries and applicants requires increased resourcing in adoption agencies or will otherwise lead to huge frustration amongst enquirers. Shorter assessment timescales for adopters should increase the number of adopters coming through, but increased speed does not equate with savings in staff time; even though the process may be shorter, staffing levels will need to be maintained to enable processing within timescales; engagement by enquirers in preparation materials may empower adopters but their self learning cannot be a replacement for the place of an established relationship with a skilled adoption social worker.

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Consortium of Voluntary Adoption Agencies (CVAA)—Written evidence Proposals to delay the point at which applicants have recourse to the IRM should enable adoption agencies to work at least in stage one of the process, with a wider range of applicants, taking on more risks at that initial stage. The implementation of changes to the function of Adoption Panels who will no longer consider whether a child should be placed for adoption, will decrease LA panel workloads, but LAs will need to implement a rigorous and potentially resource intensive structure at a senior level for quality assuring children’s plans and documentation prior to final care proceedings. Proposals to improve adoption support are likely to have the biggest impact on increasing adoption placement numbers, but only if the resources are invested in making the proposals a reality. f)

Does the number of agencies inhibit the number of adopters recruited?

It is important to offer choice to adopters who are likely to have a long term relationship with the agency through which they adopt. That said, the key issues are about quality of service and accessibility. Currently it is our view that increasing the number of adoption agencies would not be the most effective way of increasing the number of adopters; indeed the Voluntary Adoption Agencies have recently demonstrated that there can be increased growth within the sector as it is now, building on the expertise and the high success rate; the sector is committed to more growth, and with greater guarantees that LAs will utilise adopters assessed by VAAs, then there is likely to be much more reinvestment and continued expansion of a sector which already provides excellent outcomes for children. g)

Does the recent increase in knowledge about early child development affect the balance between children’s rights and parental rights?

It affirms the need for the child’s rights to be paramount and strengthens the arguments that delay is damaging and placements must be effected as soon as possible. However it also underlines the need for LAs to provide effective services which enable LAs and courts to determine without delay whether a parent is likely or not to be able to parent that child safely. Court proceedings Generally CVAA supports the changes embodied within the Family Justice Review which focus on reducing delay for children to be adopted. (Other parts of this question not responded to by CVAA) Post adoption support a)

How, if at all, has the 2002 Act impacted on the provision of post adoption contacts and support?

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Consortium of Voluntary Adoption Agencies (CVAA)—Written evidence Requirements to support complex contact arrangements have increased; this is a skilled area of work and many agencies are struggling to manage increased numbers of letterbox and direct contact arrangements. Some VAAs are well placed to deliver this area of work, if LA funding can facilitate this. b)

Are measures needed to enhance post adoption financial and other support to all parties?

YES, and to ensure consistency when children are placed across geographical boundaries or adopters move area. Inter country adoption 'A contribution from one of CVAA members, Norwood, which undertakes inter country as well as domestic adoption' a)

Have the inter-country adoption safeguards introduced by the 2002 and 2006 Acts proved successful?

Yes – this brought inter country in line with the same standards as domestic adoption, ensuring that the focus is on the best interests of the child. b.)

Would you recommend any change to the legislation to make inter-country adoption simpler?

The particular challenges relate to the significant variations in country specific requirements as well as complex systems/regulations to be met in the UK departments affecting inter country adopters. We have experienced a lack of consistent advice/practice from solicitors regarding the individual requirements of the relevant departments, eg DfE, Immigration, UK Border Agency etc. It would therefore be most helpful for the systems and requirements to be clarified and more easily understood by all involved. In addition, those adopters who have followed the correct process and had a child placed with them are experiencing significant delays in obtaining the necessary visa documents to enter the UK. This can impact on quality of attachment process and in some cases parents are separated for periods of time as they wait for entry clearance/visas etc. c)

Are there any special challenges in adopting children from particular countries or regions?

We have experienced prospective adopters being advised by British Embassy officials that they can proceed to adopt a child in an overseas country with a view to bring them to the UK, but NOT that they are required to have a home study in the first instance to determine suitability. Adoption practices in some countries, eg Pakistan, lacks a central authority to regulate practice and concerns have been raised about the accuracy of information about children identified for adoption as well as standards of care of the children in some institutions.

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Consortium of Voluntary Adoption Agencies (CVAA)—Written evidence We have experienced a recent increase in the number of requests to carry out home studies for adopters who have already adopted a relative child in their country of birth and, as indicated above, the advice available to date about how to proceed with these referrals has lacked clarity and consistency. It would be helpful if inter country adopted children now living in the UK could have priority for school admission in a similar way to domestically adopted children. Many of the children adopted from overseas experience varying standards of institutional care and/or poor nutritional standards as well as the experience of multiple care givers. These factors result in children presenting with delayed and uncertain development and sometimes poor health. They therefore can have similar additional needs to those of adopted children from the UK. Access to Information a)

Has the 2002 Act made it easier to adopted adults and / or birth relatives to trace their relatives should they wish to do so?

It has been helpful to provide access to services for birth relatives as well as adopted adults but these require significant resourcing. Developments in social networking have obviously had a profound effect on this area of work. Other permanent placements Whilst welcoming the introduction of Special Guardianship, particularly for older children who had been in the same foster placement for substantial periods, and whilst awaiting the outcome of current research on this issue, CVAA would express concern that there are a number of cases where SGOs have been used when adoption outside of the family would have been more appropriate. Generally CVAA supports early and focussed work with birth families to determine whether children can be safely parented within the birth or extended family, followed by swift decision making, and swift permanency planning which recognises the positive outcomes for adoption, and utilises all possible routes available to finding an adoptive family and supporting an adoption placement. CVAA  appreciates and values the current focus on delay for children for whom permanency, particularly through adoption, is sought  believes that the voluntary adoption sector can and should play a key role in providing a solution to the issue of delay CVAA data demonstrates that VAAs  provide quality services to those who want to adopt, services which are welcoming, informative and professional  provide families for some of the more challenging children, and support those families, often many years into the future. 389

Consortium of Voluntary Adoption Agencies (CVAA)—Written evidence 

have a success rate of over 94 % in terms of placements being sustained 5 years after placement.

The voluntary adoption sector  is committed to increasing significantly its share of the adoption market from the current 20%  can demonstrate that during 2011/12 one third of member agencies increased the number of children placed by over 50%  has recently invested in a strategic lead, supported by members, to facilitate significant growth in adopter recruitment and placement capacity  will enable CVAA to establish a role in performance management across the sector. 18 July 2012

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Office of the Children’s Commissioner—Oral evidence (QQ 536–547)

Office of the Children’s Commissioner—Oral evidence (QQ 536–547) Evidence Session No. 9.

Heard in Public.

Questions 536-547

TUESDAY 30 OCTOBER 2012 Members present Baroness Butler-Sloss (Chairman) Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top Baroness Eaton Viscount Eccles Baroness Hamwee Baroness King of Bow Baroness Knight of Collingtree Baroness Morris of Bolton Lord Morris of Handsworth Baroness Walmsley Lord Warner ________________ Examination of Witnesses Sue Berelowitz, Deputy Children’s Commissioner, and Jenny Clifton, Principal Policy Advisor (Safeguarding).

Q536 The Chairman: We are all delighted to see you. You are extremely welcome, and I perhaps ought to just say that I gave the Deputy Children’s Commissioner lunch yesterday, but that will have no effect on the questions that we ask. I think you wanted to give us a few words before we started on questioning you. Sue Berelowitz: Thank you. I would welcome that. Thank you very much indeed. Good morning to you all. Thank you so much for inviting us here today. The evidence we are going to be providing this morning draws on our work with children and young people. Both of us are social workers by profession, and have done many years of work within local authorities through to senior levels. Of course, it also draws on the Children Act 1989, particularly focusing on the paramountcy principle; on the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, particularly articles 3, 12 and article 19, which is the child’s right to protection; and then finally on the Council of Europe’s guidelines on child-friendly justice. Child-friendly justice refers not only to children who are facing courts in the context of being in trouble with the law, but also

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Office of the Children’s Commissioner—Oral evidence (QQ 536–547) children who come into contact with the law in the context of family law, so we will be saying a little bit more about that. In relation to our work, we will be drawing on our work with children, all of which is article 12compliant, so we involve and work closely with children in absolutely everything that we do. That will be drawing on the inquiry into child sexual exploitation, to our work when we have listened to children’s experiences with child protection systems, to children’s experiences of the family justice system and our submissions to the Munro review. I should say that largely our work has been in the context of family law, rather than private law proceedings. Finally, I would just like to say that we see adoption as part of a process and, again, that is the context in which we will be talking. Children for whom adoption may be an option have come through child protection proceedings, generally, and then there are wider issues of care planning and planning for post-adoption services as well, so we will be talking in the context of the whole process. Q537 The Chairman: Thank you very much. Perhaps I could start with the first question. Basically you, of course, are totally child-orientated, and what we would like to know is whether the child’s perspective is sufficiently taken into account in the way that care planning and permanency planning is currently managed in England and Wales, although Wales is moving slightly away. Sue Berelowitz: Yes. My colleague, Jenny Clifton, will be answering that question. Jenny Clifton: Yes, I would like to. Children tell us that they do not feel well-heard. I think there is a difference between someone spending time listening to a child and then acting on it, and that is the distinction that is made in article 12 of the United Nations Convention. Children need to feel that some notice is taken of what they say if they are to feel heard. Practice, in terms of care planning has got better. I think there has been much greater attention on listening to children: there is the Independent Reviewing Officer role; there are the reviews that are certainly intended to listen to children. But their practice is inconsistent, and many children say that they still do not feel that they are taken seriously. There are additional issues around younger children, very small children, and children with communication difficulties, where it is often about observation or engaging in different ways with children. It takes time and it takes trouble and it takes effort, if they are to feel that they really have been listened to. Viscount Eccles: A slightly wicked question. I am in my second childhood, and I am definitely not taken sufficiently seriously. What is it about the children that is not taken seriously enough? I possess 12 grandchildren, and of course they are not listened to seriously enough. Half of the time they may deserve to be listened to. The other half of the time, I am not so sure that their contribution is quite so valuable. Jenny Clifton: It is really important to be aware that this changes with age, that children mature and develop and need to have more influence, perhaps, on the decisions that are made about them as they increase in maturity and competence, but even— Viscount Eccles: What age are we talking about, then? Jenny Clifton: I am not sure I would like to pin it down to age. I think it is about competence and maturity, but very young children have been able to express their experiences, so that

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Office of the Children’s Commissioner—Oral evidence (QQ 536–547) adults can take that into account. It is not about children making decisions about their lives, necessarily, but about contributing to professionals’ understandings of the child’s experience. I do think that the work that we have done with children demonstrates that they are able to say what affects them, what is going wrong in their families, how they experience that. They have views on contact, which we will come on to, I know, but they have views about feeling safe, what makes them feel safe, what makes them not feel safe, that can be used to draw a picture, really, of that child’s life and that child’s experience. I believe the views of the child, the experience of the child, firmly link in to making them safe and making a safe and long-term plan for them. I do not think you can understand a child without really getting in touch with what they are saying and what they are experiencing. Baroness Morris of Bolton: I very much agree with what you have said about children feeling that they need to be taken notice of. I remember a few years ago talking to some care leavers who said, “Every year we come and we talk to a group of politicians. You listen to what we have to say and then nothing happens”. I wonder if sometimes we raise their expectations higher than we should—that they think that they come and they speak to a group of decisionmakers and that we are then going to be able to immediately take on board what they say, and do something. Actually, we are quite useless half the time. There are things we would love to do but we just cannot. I wonder if sometimes in that dialogue we also have to explain that what they have to say is very valid; that we may have a lot of sympathy but we might not always be able to do something. Sue Berelowitz: That is a terribly important point. In a sense it links back to the question you were asking and Jenny’s response to that, which is that listening and attending, and taking what children say seriously, is not the same as making a promise that you can then act on that. As adults, particularly those of us working in the children’s world—whether it is as judges or social workers, or indeed other professions—we have a duty to listen and take seriously. Then, if we cannot act upon what the child has asked us to do, we have a duty and responsibility to explain that to the child. What is worse for children, and we know that from our experience of working with them, is that they are left not knowing. Firstly, they feel that they are not listened to; and then secondly, that what they have said is not taken seriously. Children will accept quite difficult decisions that are not what they asked for, as long as they are given an explanation. That is terribly important. I will come to that later, I think, with some of the subsequent questions that are coming up today. Also I would just add that of course in this context we are talking about very, very important, life-changing decisions for children. Clearly there are times when a child’s perspective on something might not be hugely important in the grand scheme of things, in terms of what is happening in their lives, but for something like removal from home, and then placement and the right placement, there is almost nothing that could be more important in a child’s life. Baroness Walmsley: My question has been answered. The Chairman: But I think you are going to deal with another one. Q538 Baroness Walmsley: Yes, I am—that is, how are the rights of the child balanced with those of the birth parents in current social work practice, and do we have the balance right?

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Office of the Children’s Commissioner—Oral evidence (QQ 536–547) Sue Berelowitz: I need to preface what I say by saying, firstly, that of course we are talking in generalities and there will be examples where the balance is perfect, as well as examples where the balance is not. Given our statutory responsibilities to focus on children who are marginalised and vulnerable, of course we hear more from children and work more with children where the balance has not been right, so I think that caveat is quite important. We are concerned that the rights of children and rights of parents are counterposed. It is quite clear that the paramountcy principle must prevail. It is stronger than article 3 in the Convention, so we are clearly very thrilled about that. We do think it is unhelpful to see the rights of parents and children as somehow potentially being in opposition, and the guiding principle must be that the rights of the children prevail. There is an interesting question, indeed, about whether parents have rights. Parents clearly have responsibilities towards their children but the child’s rights must be the one that prevails at all times. We are concerned sometimes that there is an overidentification with the mother when decisions are being made. Certainly, I have come across that in my practice on many, many occasions. What is critical is that the decisions that are made are based on a thorough assessment that is sound and comprehensive, that good analysis follows on from that assessment and that removal of a child is not seen as a failure—of course, removal is a prelude to whatever happens next—and that people should not be committed to keeping the child in the family, because that is not always the right thing for every child. We recognise that these are very, very difficult decisions to make. In our experience most children want to remain at home or want to remain with their parents. As I have already said, that is not always the right decision. It is important that decisions are made in a timely manner for the child. Assessments should not be rushed through such that they cannot be done effectively. On the other hand, the child’s timeframe is critically important. If you leave a child in a home that is unsafe for too long a period, that has a very significant impact on the success of any future placement, whether it is adoption or not, or certainly can do. Children experience shame, stigma, lack of respect, trust and fear, in terms of describing their experiences, so it is very important that people act rapidly. I am just checking to see whether there is anything else I need to add to that statement. We are keen that there should not be repeat assessments or delays in the court process, in terms of parents continually trying to have more and more experts brought forward. The moves in terms of the Family Justice Review are in the right direction but we should not be so ideological about that that, if something is required, it is not done. Again—and I go back to your question—it is about balance, and striking the right balance, but always erring on the side of the welfare of the child being held as paramount at all times. The Chairman: As a result of what you are saying, I think that perhaps Lady Morris ought to go ahead of Lady Knight, because we started to talk about the court procedures and we might just pursue that. Lady Knight, you could then take the question after that. Q539 Baroness Morris of Bolton: In your introduction you talked about child-friendly justice in the context of family law, so I wonder if you could tell us how children and young people experience court processes, and—again, going back to what we were talking about earlier—could their perspective be better taken into account?

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Office of the Children’s Commissioner—Oral evidence (QQ 536–547) Sue Berelowitz: Yes. Also, I will be coming at this from the position of sitting as a member of the Family Justice Council. Until recently, there was a rather wonderful subcommittee of the council called the Voice of the Child subcommittee, of which I was a member. Sadly it has been disbanded now. We did a lot of work on the Voice of the Child subcommittee, which was chaired by District Judge Nick Crichton—I understand you will be hearing from him in a few weeks’ time—into, in a sense, child-friendly justice and how children’s voices need to be heard within the court arena. We also did a submission for the Family Justice Review. That drew extensively, of course, on children’s perspectives. What we know is that children do want to be heard. They want their views to be heard. They want a menu of options. They do not want it always to be assumed that that means the child coming before a judge, whether in chambers or in court. For some children that is right, it is what they want to do, but for others they want to speak with a judge through an intermediary, so a menu of options is required. On the Family Justice Voice of the Child subcommittee we drew up a set of guidelines for judges about how to speak with children. I am pleased to say that those guidelines were accepted by the President and have been issued to all the Family Courts. They are very practical guidelines on speaking with children. There is a CD that accompanies that, which is just the voices of children talking about their experiences. Again, drawing from that and our own work, we know that when children understand the process and are able to input into it, they are much more likely to accept the outcomes. I would add that sometimes those outcomes are not what children ask for. You will hear from Nick, but it is wonderful sitting in his court and watching him work with children. I am aware of an instance in which a child had asked him to be able to go back and live with Mummy afterwards but, having heard all the evidence, he was very clear that that was not the right decision. After he had made his decision, he took the time to speak personally to the child and explain exactly why he had reached that decision. It is that kind of good practice that enables children to feel that they have been heard, not discounted, and that enables them to move on. It is very important that children do not feel pulled apart by their parents in this process. In the course of the work we were doing for the Family Justice Review, one child said to us—this is an eight-year-old—that she felt like a gummy bear being pulled apart limb by limb because of the battles her parents were having over her, and that her voice was not being heard in that process. Again, putting the child at the centre and having a menu of options is very important. At the same time, I would add that it is critical that the child is not burdened with the notion that it is their responsibility to make the decision. That is a very important bit of differential to hold on to, that it is the adults’ responsibility to make the decision and it is part of that process to listen to the child. Q540 Baroness Knight of Collingtree: Some of the things you have said are very reassuring, and the difference between being burdened with a decision—which was your word a moment ago—and having their wishes listened to, I think you have made very clear. My question follows on. I want to know how effective the IROs are at monitoring progress in individual cases and challenging local authorities on behalf of children. I was very concerned to read some of the things you put before us, in particular the barriers that exist in regard to this

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Office of the Children’s Commissioner—Oral evidence (QQ 536–547) question, IROs not receiving key information reports in a timely manner, and you felt that there was a lack of robust and thorough assessment. That also leads me to ask: you seem to have had rather less than perfect answers from the local authorities when you have put your questions to them. Apparently 32 local authorities did not answer at all, and I wonder about the quality of the ones that did answer, because they seemed to either not listen and answer, or perhaps respond very briefly. A comment on that would be extremely helpful, and I have another small point in a moment. The Chairman: Could I just say that I do not think it is the Children’s Commissioner paper, so the Deputy Children’s Commissioner may not have seen this particular paper. Baroness Knight of Collingtree: This was from the national IROs’ manager. The Chairman: Yes, but it came to us. It did not go to the Children’s Commissioner. Baroness Knight of Collingtree: I did see you nodding at some of that. Sue Berelowitz: We can respond to the first part. My colleague, Jenny, is particularly knowledgeable about this, so I may hand over to her to respond. There may be some aspects of the second part to which she can respond as well. Jenny Clifton: I will try. I do have some experience with this. I did manage an independent reviewing service in the past, and in fact set one up in a local authority. The Independent Reviewing Officers are a very significant development as a way of giving a voice to the child, as a way of scrutinising care plans, and provide extra independent scrutiny. I regret very much—but I think I must say it—that I think in many respects they have not been able to do the job they were intended to do, and that has to do with a number of factors. One is the size of caseloads that Independent Reviewing Officers have. You will know from the case of A and S, the case in Lancashire, that the IRO there had up to 200 cases at one point and was expected to know those children, know their care plan, know the legal situation and become familiar enough to pursue the progress of their care plans. That is an impossible situation. I know that the handbook for IROs, which was revised and produced relatively recently, only a couple of years ago, suggests that caseloads should be a maximum of between 50 and 70. Even that is quite a tall order. They are now expected to keep in touch with the child, to pursue progress in the care plan, to check that the care plan is the right care plan for children, and also, at a broader level, to monitor the corporate parenting of the local authority. It is a tall order. I have seen the National Association of IRO papers. They have sent them to me, and I do know that they have made additional points about the difficulty of being sufficiently independent, sufficiently unfettered by the local authority. They have found difficulties in challenging local authority care plans, which they need to be able to do. I imagine there are problem resolution processes in place, certainly, in all local authorities now, but the opportunity to pursue that and to go outside, to Cafcass if necessary, has not been used very much. Our view is that they need to reconsider whether IROs should be in the local authority or whether they should be outside. We are on record as having said that. The Chairman: There is provision in the legislation for them to be outside. Jenny Clifton: Yes, there is provision. The Chairman: It has not been taken up at all, has it?

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Office of the Children’s Commissioner—Oral evidence (QQ 536–547) Jenny Clifton: No, but it has to be acknowledged that there are different views on this. Among IROs there are different views on it. Some people argue very strongly that they have a very important part to play in the local authority, and I certainly have seen evidence of them improving care planning in day-to-day practice. I think that that could be said. That said we are waiting for evaluations. There are two ongoing evaluations of Independent Reviewing Officer services actually in process now and the National Children’s Bureau are doing one and the University of East Anglia another, so I think we will know a lot more about their ability to be effective in the fairly near future. Impressionistically, and having managed them, I think it is fair to say that they have had a good impact on day-to-day practice but that they have not been able to really operate, in terms of the rights of the child, in the way that was intended in their role— to pursue progress in an adequate and timely manner to ensure that cases like A and S do not happen. Baroness Knight of Collingtree: I just want to make it absolutely clear. First of all, the burden of caseload is too heavy for you to manage, and yet you do exist to challenge, do you not? That is what you are for, really, to be able to challenge where you think a challenge is necessary. Sue Berelowitz: I had better make it clear that we are not Independent Reviewing Officers. We are from the Office of the Children’s Commissioner. Baroness Knight of Collingtree: Yes. Sue Berelowitz: We do not carry a caseload at all. What we are saying is that the Independent Reviewing Officers tend to have caseloads that are too large, and it is their job to challenge. What I would add also is that they need to be properly valued in that role by the local authority, whether they are independent or whether they are employed by the local authority, so that their challenges are taken seriously at a very senior level. That is an extremely important point. Baroness Knight of Collingtree: So you do have concerns. Thank you. Q541 Baroness Hamwee: We heard some very powerful evidence from Eileen Munro about social workers—she did not generalise completely—being very focused on individual targets, rather than the overall best interests of the child. In your view, is this a culture that is affecting IROs as well, because they are looking at targets and the overall output? Sue Berelowitz: Jenny may need to comment on this. I would go back to the issue about how the IROs are valued by the local authority. It should be that they are simply focusing on the best interests of the child. Whether what they say is always given sufficient weight will vary around the country, but Jenny may want to comment on that. Jenny Clifton: A case in point about targets is the timeliness of reviews. It is very important that reviews happen in time, regularly—that they enable the local authority and the Independent Reviewing Officer to monitor the progress of the care plan. However, keeping within certain timescales can rule out flexibility, which enables a child to contribute properly to their review. It might result in a child not being able to go to their review because it is the wrong timing. As with all timescales, it is really important to be conscious of the needs of the child first, so I think there are examples of where that may be happening.

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Office of the Children’s Commissioner—Oral evidence (QQ 536–547) Q542 Viscount Eccles: I wonder, in this unevenness, how much philosophical approach applies. The philosophical approach to rights is very different to the philosophical approach to best interests, and to welfare even more so. In the first case, the approach to rights is, “I have rights”. In the second case, other people are making judgments about, “Well, I think we had better have a discussion and see if we can work out what your best interests are”. In the mind of the recipient, best interests can be quite in conflict with rights. It happens very frequently with adults, even if it does not happen with children. I wonder, in the whole process of how IROs relate to authorities, whether there is some sort of philosophical tangle that needs to be thought about and, if possible, sorted out. It is all right being independent. The trouble is that may mean that nobody listens to you at all. Sue Berelowitz: Obviously, I hope they do, and we do get very good outcomes. It is an interesting question. We are charged under the Children Act 2004 to work in accordance with the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which is of course ratified here in the UK. Personally, I would not see rights somehow being at odds with best interests. For example, if we just take the right to be free from violence—article 19—every child has the right to be free from violence and to be afforded the protection of the state. We have wonderful laws in this country and, by and large, I think we do not badly. Although, of course, there are always exceptions and we could do better. I do not think that that in any way conflicts with best interests. I would see the two as being entirely complementary. How one then ensures that the child’s right to protection is carried out brings in best interests—or indeed paramountcy, which trumps best interests—because one has to think about the best way to do that for that individual child. In a sense, that comes to the nub of what we are saying today. Whether it is adoption or indeed anything else, when you are looking at permanency planning for a child, or long-term plans for a child for whom there have been child protection concerns, and they cannot give it a home with their first family, it is very important to start with what is right for that individual child and to base everything—all the decisions—on the needs of that individual child. That needs to be within the context of their siblings, their family, and their extended family and so on. Those things need to come into play. There is not one correct model that needs to be pursued by anybody, really, but there are indeed some core principles, and getting those principles right for each individual child is the task of the agencies involved. Lord Warner: Can I be clear about how you are pursuing discharging your responsibility about the rights of the child? Are you waiting for bad cases, so to speak, to appear before you, or are you monitoring the performance of local authorities around the country on a regular basis, in the way they discharge their responsibilities, on permanence and perhaps adoption specifically? There are two approaches you can adopt, and I am unclear which of those approaches you are adopting because, clearly, continuing poor performance by a local authority does damage the rights of the child living in that particular area. Sue Berelowitz: This gets to the heart of our statutory duties, which are laid down in the Children Act 2004 and of course are up for change at the moment. Under the new Children and Families Bill, when it begins to go through Parliament, there will be a section on us with some changes. That is under pre-legislative scrutiny at the moment, being led by the Joint Committee on Human Rights. At the moment, our statutory duty is to promote awareness of

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Office of the Children’s Commissioner—Oral evidence (QQ 536–547) the views and wishes of children. It is not fully paramountcy principle-compliant, and hopefully we will have a new statutory duty to promote and protect children’s rights. We are not an inspectorate, and indeed we are proscribed under the 2004 Act from taking up individual cases. We may not do that. What we do not attempt to do is replicate the work of Ofsted, or, for example, in relation to the youth justice system, Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Prisons. We do not take up individual cases or monitor what local authorities do. What we do do—because we have a duty to focus on children who are marginalised and vulnerable—is undertake a great deal of work, looking at key issues that we think are affecting children. Jenny is leading on work at the moment on issues about the barriers that children face in terms of disclosing whether they are at risk, in any shape or form, of significant harm for example, and what stops them from being able to tell somebody. Teenagers particularly can find it very, very difficult, and then of course people do not often listen to them and that may be one of the barriers. We are running inquiries and so on and so forth. We identify, sometimes in conversations with marginalised groups of children, what the key issues are that are impacting upon them. We then undertake very detailed work into those areas and bring forward recommendations. As part of that, we often have surfaced to us the cases of individual children. We cannot deal with cases of individual children on an ongoing basis, but they come to our notice pretty much every day, where people write to us about individual cases. That gives us quite a strong insight into what is happening across local authorities. In the course of our other work we are delving down into local practice and then raising those issues. I am happy to say that the legislation requires that when we make recommendations to Government and statutory bodies, they have to respond to those recommendations, which means that we do see very, very real change arising from our recommendations. Perhaps I need to stop it there, but I would be very happy to take you through that in much more detail another time. Q543 Lord Morris of Handsworth: Does the Commissioner’s office have any concerns about the caseload of guardians impacting on the service that they provide to individual children? Jenny Clifton: Yes, I would like to say something about that. I believe very firmly in the model of a guardian working with a solicitor. The tandem model is a very significant feature of the system we have in this country, a very important system. It does ensure proper representation of the child to the court. I am concerned that they themselves are saying that they are not able to have enough time to spend with children, to get to know children a bit, to understand—as we were saying earlier—their experience and how they are living their lives, and to spend time observing younger children within the family to understand the dynamics, to understand the attachment patterns and so on. The national association of guardians and reporting officers have recently said that they fear that there has been a reduction in time in the way that they are able to do their job. The model that Cafcass uses of proportionality—which is the word they use— guardians feel does not enable them to do that, so yes, we are concerned. Secondly, I would say that with the proposed changes, following the Family Justice Review, it is assumed that the Independent Reviewing Officer will take more of a leading role, in terms of being called the guardian of the care plan. It is being addressed in those terms. Because the court will have less scrutiny, the guardian will have less time and less scrutiny, so the IRO will need to fill that up. We have already said that the IRO’s role is one that is extremely challenging

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Office of the Children’s Commissioner—Oral evidence (QQ 536–547) and busy. All in all, I am very concerned that there is not enough time to do justice to the job of representing the child’s voice before the court. The Chairman: Could you help us with this? Almost every guardian nowadays is within Cafcass. Why is it that they do not have sufficient time? Is it that they are overloaded with their cases, or is it there is a central view as to how much time they should spend with a child? What is happening, because they are the voice of the child among other things? What is happening in Cafcass? Jenny Clifton: I am not sure how much information I have to offer but, certainly, from what I have heard from them, I think it is true to say that there is a process by which they are managed. They have had a very heavy increase in workload. The number of children coming before the courts has gone up. I am not sure how many guardians have been appointed as a result of the increase. I think they are not able themselves to make an individual, professional judgment as to how much they should see a child. It is a managed system. Beyond that, I am not sure that I have enough information about the organisation and how it works. Would you like to add anything? Sue Berelowitz: My understanding is that various different methodologies have been tried. It is since the death of baby Peter Connelly that the numbers have gone up so substantially, so I do appreciate that it has been difficult to manage. They have tried a number of different systems. For example, children have been allocated to managers or there have been paper screenings and assessments done of what they ought to be saying in their submissions to the court. I do not think we can adequately answer your question, but our position remains that the guardian’s role is an absolutely critical one, and no child should have the guardian represent them without the guardian having taken the time to speak to the child and do a thorough assessment. A paper assessment is not sufficient. Face-to-face contact of an enduring nature needs to be a core part of their task. Without that I do not see how you could make a proper evidence-based submission to the court on what is in the best interests of the child. Q544 Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top: I know you may feel you do not have direct responsibility, but you have talked about the importance of permanency and permanency placements. Do you get the feeling that there is a hierarchy of permanency emerging because of the emphasis on adoption? Sue Berelowitz: We are concerned about that and I come back to the point we have both been making, which is that the individual needs of each child must be properly assessed and the right decision made for that child. Pendulums swing, do they not, so we are concerned that there seems to be a swing at the moment to a view that adoption is the gold standard. There is only one gold standard, which is the right decision for that child, and that is why there must be a menu. For some children, adoption really is not the answer. We both have more years than I would like to add up in terms of working directly with children, including children who have come through very, very traumatic life experiences through the care proceeding processes. I have met children who prefer to be in residential care. They say, “I have a family already. I don’t want another one”, and they want to maintain contact with the family. It is just important to go back to basic principles, which are, “What does this child need? Do we have a good set of options, and how do we go about choosing the right option for this child?” and making sure that the courts have all the information at their disposal in order to make the right decision.

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Office of the Children’s Commissioner—Oral evidence (QQ 536–547) Q545 Baroness Eaton: Could you tell us, please, what you see has been the change in the adoption panel’s role since the removal of its involvement in September, and what concerns, if any, do you have about the quality of decision-making following from that change? Sue Berelowitz: Our understanding is that the main change, really, is that the decision about whether a child should be adopted has been removed from the panel and given only to the agency decision-maker, and I should say I have occupied that role in a previous job. We are concerned about this, and indeed have been approached about this by many worried professionals. It is such an important decision to make about a child. To leave it in the hands of one person is a very onerous task for that person, in terms of the weight of the decision. The social worker’s recommendation is obviously fundamental, but the opportunity to have their recommendation scrutinised and discussed by a group of people, who include people who have their own experiences of being adopted, as well as other experts who are medical and legal advisors and so on, we feel makes for a sound basis for decision-making. Removing this responsibility means that the full weight of the decision-making falls on the agency decisionmaker, and I can tell you the piles of paper one has to work through are enormous. If you are doing that, without the benefit of having anybody else having gone through that as well, and being able to further scrutinise their recommendations, it is quite a task. Indeed, we think that it may not be good value for money because it would still be necessary for the legal and medical advisors to come in and make their assessments. Potentially then you have three people doing this in isolation, which would take three times the amount of time, so we think it does not provide value for money. We also know that the Ofsted evaluation of this says that there is no evidence of the process being responsible for avoidable delay, so we are concerned about this. Q546 Baroness Hamwee: I would like to ask you about the decision-making in marginal cases. Clearly, there are cases where the best interests of the child, because there has been violence or abuse, are fairly clear cases that some kind of care is going to be more appropriate for the child’s rights. But there are some cases of neglect of some sort of level where I can imagine the decision-making is quite difficult. I think what would affect my judgment, if I had to make it—which I am glad I do not—would be: what is the quality of what we are providing for the child after this decision has been made to take them away from their family? That offer has been improving, but it needs to improve a great deal more because we know that, on the whole, outcomes for children in care are not as good as for children in good families. To what extent is the offer, which the local authority is making to the child when they are put into some form of care afterwards, taken in the balance, when the decision is being made about those very marginal cases where there is some neglect but perhaps it is not going to be any better if they are put into care? It is those very marginal cases that I think are very difficult. Sue Berelowitz: That is a very, very interesting question. If the evidence is that a child remaining in their home is presenting such a risk to that child that the recommendation to the court must be removal, I think one has to see that separately from what then is provided for the child afterwards, because you have to decide: is this child safe at home? Every local authority has a duty to ensure that there is a sufficiency of placements and that those placements are good enough. Clearly, there is quite a lot to be done to make sure that where children are placed is of excellent quality—never mind “good enough”; we want it to be of excellent quality—and some is and some quite clearly is not.

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Office of the Children’s Commissioner—Oral evidence (QQ 536–547) I would be worried about a situation—and I am giving my personal experience here; Jenny may feel differently—if somebody said, “Given what we have is so poor, we are going to leave this child living in a very risky set of circumstances”. They have to get both right. I have in mind a young woman I was talking to fairly recently, in the context of the inquiry I am leading into sexual exploitation, who now has all her social-work records. I think she is now 23. She is absolutely furious because she was not removed from home at birth. Her story in fact is that she had an older brother and he had had several broken bones as a result of what was done to him at home. On that basis alone, she feels she should have been removed at birth. She continued to live at home as an infant and was very severely neglected. Her mother was a prostitute and had lots of males coming into her house. When she was a child this young woman was then sexually abused in the home. She ended up being put on the streets by her mother. She was then sexually exploited, eventually removed, with multiple placement breakdowns and so on. Her position is, “They should have taken me away at the beginning”. Baroness Hamwee: That is not a marginal case, is it? Sue Berelowitz: No, it is not, but many are, yes. But at some point people consider them to be marginal. The Chairman: The important point surely is you are not going to get a care order unless the high threshold of section 31 of the Children Act 1989 is reached. But if you are somewhere in that region that it can be reached, then it should be tested in the court. Sue Berelowitz: Absolutely, yes. The Chairman: Could I pick up what Lady Walmsley was asking you? Where does the IRO come in on this? You have this sort of case, you have the medical advisor, the legal advisor, and you have the decision-maker having a real task. Ought the IRO be coming in to say, “This is a child who should be adopted. This is a child for whom really that is the best thing”? Or that this child actually would be better not to be adopted but placed with support in the family, or whatever it may be? Sue Berelowitz: Yes. Absolutely. The Chairman: We have this IRO, this so-called independent figure. Ought not he or she to be crucial to that decision-making? Jenny Clifton: We would like them to be crucial. I certainly think they need to be from the earliest stage because, as soon as a child becomes looked after, whether accommodated or in care through the court, there is an IRO appointed and he or she is responsible for scrutinising the plan, as it develops, where the quality of the assessment is monitored properly and so on. So, yes, they should be involved in those decisions all the way through, and if they do not agree with the plan that the local authority is putting forward, then they should be able to challenge that. At the later stage of the decision-making—we were talking about the panel—I do not think it is for them to be there, but certainly it would be important for their view to be heard and understood, if there was a different one. Q547 Baroness King of Bow: We are hearing about how things often are not as clear-cut in adoption as you would like, and that is what social workers battle with. I wondered what you

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Office of the Children’s Commissioner—Oral evidence (QQ 536–547) feel are the relevant criteria for maintaining contact with birth families. Do you have any clearcut criteria for us, post-adoption? Sue Berelowitz: Again, it would go back to paramountcy, what is in the best interests of the child, and for many children maintaining contact with parents and indeed with siblings is the right thing. The assessment needs to be based on what is right for this individual child, rather than blanket decisions being made that this is always the right thing to do. There are some children who would rather not have contact. It gets in the way of them getting on with their lives. It is about different decisions for different children. I do not know if you want to add to that. Jenny Clifton: Yes, I would like to say a little more. There has been some very sound, extensive research done by the University of East Anglia, which has informed my thinking on this very clearly. A number of points come to mind. Certainly, it has to be individually based on that child, that child’s needs and that child’s situation; secondly, the purpose of contact must be very, very clear in all situations; third, it is very important to take into account if a child has been harmed by their birth family, that they may have very, very strong feelings of fear about seeing them. That is where the child’s experience really needs to be taken very, very seriously. If they are afraid, and if that is a traumatic experience, then surely direct contact should not be planned. Usually, post-adoption, it is indirect contact. It is letterbox contact, over maybe a couple of times a year and so on, rather than direct contact. As I said, when there is direct contact it needs to be planned carefully. What children and young people have often said is that contact with their siblings is really, really important to them. Obviously that is complex when you have siblings, some of whom may be in the birth family still or may be in other placements. It is challenging, but part of listening to children is really hearing that message of how significant their siblings are in terms of post-adoption contact. There is still research going on into the long-term impacts of contact. It has been a changing field, so it is not entirely clear how direct contact impacts on children post-adoption. Baroness King of Bow: Are you aware of any criteria that you would give for children removed at birth from their birth parents? I have three adopted children, but I have never been given any guidance whatsoever about them seeing their birth parents, which I would very much like them to do, and there is just nothing there. Nobody seems to have an opinion, really, and I wonder if you had come across any opinions. Jenny Clifton: There is just one more thing to say, I think. What matters hugely to children— because this whole agenda of openness is about them being able to understand their past, being able to accept their past and have other people accept it, so this sense of identity is securely rooted—is that both the adoptive family and the birth family, if there is to be contact, are really accepting that the child is now in the adoptive family. That both families can accept that and that both families can help the child to understand the major transition that has taken place. If they can, and if they can work together, then it can be the basis of contact over a period of time, which may change, may develop and may change when the child is older and so on. I think that is fundamental, really understanding that the child has now moved. But it can be talked about because children actually want to be able to talk about it, and if they feel it is shameful or difficult, or it is not something they should tell their adoptive parents about, that is really

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Office of the Children’s Commissioner—Oral evidence (QQ 536–547) difficult for them. They may need other people to talk to about it, but that is the context within which I would comment. The Chairman: It is with regret that we have to bring this to an end, because we have our next evidence about to be called. It did cross my mind that there have been one or two rather interesting and rather deeper questions. If either or both of you want to provide us with some written answers to those questions, we would be extremely grateful. There is no need to, but if you felt like it. On behalf of the Committee, may I say we are very, very grateful to you, as the Deputy Commissioner, and you, as the lead on your area, for your very, very helpful answers. Thank you very, very much.

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Coram—Written evidence

Coram—Written evidence In responding to the Select Committee’s questions, Coram has sought to incorporate its response to the specific questions it was asked by the Committee to address in its evidence into the framework of questions set out below (the specific questions are in italics). SUMMARY  Overall it is Coram’s view that the legislative framework is sufficient but that leadership is required to ensure timeliness and that the welfare of the child is put first.  Coram welcomes proposed new regulations to limit timescales for care proceedings, except in exceptional circumstances.  Concurrent Planning and existing practice indicate that a further legal duty is not necessary in relation to early placement, but Coram supports the strengthening of early permanency planning.  It is practice and not law which determines placement decisions in relation to ethnic background since the present law states that it should be taken into account (not that it is an over-riding consideration). Coram’s view is that the law as it stands correctly reflects the weight that should be given to this consideration.  Coram proposes a statement and judicial leadership from the President of the Family Division setting standards/guidelines in relation to the learning from research on the impact of frequent contact for infants subject to proceedings.  We welcome the reinforcement of the legal obligation on local authorities in relation to the reviewing of situations for children who have remained on placement orders for a long time without a placement being identified.  There is a disincentive built into the system to seeking adoptive families from Voluntary Adoption Agencies (VAAs) because the fee VAAs charge is higher than that charged by other LAs, although the actual cost of recruiting adopters is the same. If LAs were required to charge the same price as VAAs, the ‘market’ would operate better in the interests of children. Also included in this evidence are sections on:  The potential contribution of voluntary adoption agencies  Post adoption support issues  The role of Panel in the ‘plan for adoption’ decision (already submitted, appended as an end note). Documents attached:  Coram Practice Note on contact for infants subject to proceedings  KPMG report on Coram’s Harrow project.  Coram’s interim report on its concurrent planning research BACKGROUND a) Do we have the right structure for adoption? 405

Coram—Written evidence Is it appropriate to have such a strong policy focus on adoption as the preferred route to permanency for looked after children?  Yes it is. Adoption is the only form of permanency which is designed to last all through life. It should be actively considered for every young child (and some older children) who cannot remain with their birth family.  The policy focus on early permanency planning for all children in the care system does not presume that adoption should be the care plan of choice, but that a realistic view of long term solutions should be taken from the earliest possible point in a child’s life, when their vulnerability is apparent. b) Should we be concerned about the falling number of adoptions? Why are the numbers falling? Should we be concerned about the falling number of adoptions when considered within the context of the full range of permanency options available (SGOs)?  Yes we should. The number of children coming into care is increasing and there is a backlog of children waiting for decisions or placements.  LAs have very different percentages of their care populations accessing adoption and this does not appear to correlate with the profile of their children.  In addition, the outcomes for highly vulnerable children who go home are poor and the judiciary should be aware of the Ward et al (2010) research on infants suffering, or likely to suffer, significant harm. It points to the need for early risk assessments that consider the longer term needs of the child and not just immediate safety. LEGISLATION a) What impact did the 2002 Act have on the adoption process? b) Have all aspects of the 2002 and 2006 Acts been implemented appropriately and successfully? c) Is further legislation required to improve any aspect of the adoption system? d) Can you as a respondent identify a problem and tell us if, and if so where, the legislation (including regulations), needs to change? Coram’s overall view on legislation  Overall it is Coram’s view that the legislative framework is sufficient but that leadership is required to ensure timeliness and that the welfare of the child is put first.  Coram welcomes proposed new regulations to limit timescales for care proceedings, except in exceptional circumstances.  Concurrent Planning and existing practice indicate that a further legal duty is not necessary in relation to early placement, but Coram supports the strengthening of early permanency planning.  It is practice and not law which determines placement decisions in relation to ethnic background since the present law states that it should be taken into account (not that it is an over-riding consideration). Coram’s view is that the law as it stands correctly reflects the weight that should be given to this consideration.  Coram proposes a statement and judicial leadership from the President of the Family Division setting standards/guidelines in relation to the learning from research on the impact of frequent contact for infants subject to proceedings.

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We welcome the reinforcement of the legal obligation on local authorities in relation to the reviewing of situations for children who have remained on placement orders for a long time without a placement being identified. There is a disincentive built into the system to seeking adoptive families from Voluntary Adoption Agencies (VAAs) because the fee VAAs charge is higher than that charged by other LAs, although the actual cost of recruiting adopters is the same. If LAs were required to charge the same price as VAAs, the ‘market’ would operate better in the interests of children. What is your view on the Regulations due to take effect in September which will limit the role of adoption panels and in particular their role in advising decisionmakers as to whether adoption is, or is not, in the best interests of the child? Coram was invited to submit specific comment on this issue – appended to this paper35.

House of Lords Select Committee on Adoption Legislation: Comment from Coram on the role of Adoption Panels We write in response to a specific request for our views on whether it is in children’s interests to remove the process of referral to Panel in relation to the ‘should be placed for adoption’ recommendation. Coram is very concerned about delay for children, but we think this proposal is likely in practice to have a negative effect. We have consulted with local authority representatives on this issue, as we happened to be holding a seminar on Thursday 12 July which was discussing this matter, attended by adoption managers from 15 local authorities. BAAF’s legal advisor presented to the group, and real concern was expressed about how best to manage this area of work in light of this change. Key concerns Panels do not actually duplicate court decision-making, as the decision to take the case to court has to be made by the local authority – ie whether or not to seek a placement order with a plan for adoption. This is a decision of the greatest possible importance for the child Scrutiny and quality assurance of this decision need to be of a high standard for several reasons: This is a life-changing decision for the child, their birth family and potential adopters Risk of legal challenge, and hence increased delay The written analysis on which the decision is based forms a key document for the child in future. Because local authorities are aware of the onerous nature of this process, they are likely to create diverse, less transparent, processes across the country to deal with the challenges. Tasks involved in proposed role of decision maker: Reading all the reports without the support of Panel minutes to focus their thinking Analysis of all the material as a newcomer Writing an analysis of the reasons for their decision that is capable of both standing scrutiny in court and being a document for the child’s use in future Quality assurance and challenge in relation to the thoroughness of work done by all concerned. Unintended consequences of current proposal: In large local authorities, there could be 100 such decisions to be made annually, and in medium-sized authorities 40-50. The amount of work for the Adoption Decision Maker (ADM) will be significantly increased, without others having scrutinized the reports and giving them minutes of the discussion, and this may lead to: The ADM role being delegated to less senior staff A dedicated role being created, which would not have the same integration in management structures, thus potentially becoming isolated from the rest of the running of services Quality could slip without the current multi-disciplinary scrutiny with an independent element. Removal of independent Panel Chairs, who have in our experience made a very positive contribution professionally in addition to bringing in rigorous scrutiny, and an element of independence Timescales could slip because social workers would not have the framework provided by Panel deadlines Issues of role confusion, as ADMs as part of senior management may have been involved with cases, but are being required not to have been so – thus some local authorities are trying to arrange for different ADMs to share the role. ADMs will have to demonstrate that they have arrived at their decision solely on the basis of the reports detailed in regulations, not on the basis of prior knowledge of the case or discussion with staff other than panel advisors. There is much scope for decisions to be challenged in court on the basis of process weaknesses, causing further cost and delay. The seven day timescale for decisions to be made does not allow the option of deferring if additional information is required. For example if additional medical information is required, and the medical advisor is not available in that week, there is 35

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Coram—Written evidence

TIME TAKEN IN PLACING CHILDREN a) Is excessive time taken in placing children? Do some groups of children take a disproportionate length of time? Where in the system do you perceive the worst ‘delays’ to be occurring?  Ofsted’s Annual Report (2010/11) focusing on children and families services identified that, in its view, the worst delays occur because of court processes and the use of too many expert witnesses; additional repeat assessments; and not enough case management by courts. The Ofsted report also identified section 20 cases as being prone to drift. Coram recognises this finding. If pre-proceedings processes are not robustly completed and assessments weakly presented, then LAs also compound or contribute to delay.  Coram’s DfE programme with 16 local authorities to promote permanence shows that there are small delays at every stage of the system which can be reduced. However, delay is not found everywhere and not inevitable.  Delay occurs if LAs do not promptly seek adopters beyond their area through VAAs and other LAs (as they do in Bristol, for example).  Siblingship contributes to delay, as does BME background. If children are older or in sibling groups it becomes very hard to family find and a wider group of potential adopters can be helpful.  The Family Drug and Alcohol Court provides a model for time limited and integrated assessments which incorporate the necessary multi-professional advice on some cases without sequential expert reports being required.  Better training on court skills for social workers could also help prevent delays caused by poor quality assessments/statements. Do you consider adoption panels to be contributing to delays?  Not generally. In some LAs, there has been poor scheduling but this is a management issue and not a structural issue and change may have significant consequences36. b) What aspects of the adoption process, including pre-process care proceedings, take most time? c) Do the various parts of the system – local authorities, adoption agencies, courts and others – work effectively together? Is the most effective use being made of voluntary adoption agencies? If not, what financial/institutional barriers currently exist to achieving more effective working partnerships?  Further and consistent use of VAAs by all LAs would certainly widen options and increase timeliness for children. Where LAs have made use of their local consortium and VAAs they immediately a problem to comply. Equally more information might be needed in relation the birth family’s understanding of the issues. Proposal Keep Panels as they are but ensure that Panels are well managed, meet frequently enough, and cases are scheduled appropriately. The creation of a central list of Panel members has allowed flexibility and reduced the chances of inquoracy - this process should be allowed to become embedded before further change is considered. In order to ensure maximum efficiency the quorum could be reduced to three, including the independent Chair and a social worker. The Panel Advisor would also be present. Medical and Legal Advisors could submit written reports. 36 See previous footnote.

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are definitely faster in placing children. The Coram DfE project also shows that VAAs place proportionally more harder-to-place children. In some LAs, family finding is done in-house for younger children and family finding for others is referred out. There is an uneven playing field in relation to inter-agency fees. Coram and CVAA charge the VAA fee, which is in keeping with the real cost, unlike LAs which ‘sell’ each other families at a lower rate. This should be changed and would immediately remove the perverse incentive to delay/undertake sequential family finding. Coram supports the proposal for automatic referral of children to the register at three months to ensure that all children in the UK have access to the greatest supply of adopters, nationally. We also support the creation of the National Adoption Gateway, promoting customer service standards and ensuring that potential adopters are aware that they can choose their agency and are not obliged to go to their LA. VAAs can be supported to take the risk to grow, and change can be achieved rapidly, as demonstrated by the Coram partnerships with several local authorities. For example: o Coram’s partnership with LB Harrow offers a way of working with VAAs by providing a manager located in Harrow. Coram finds families for Harrow’s children. This has increased placement choice and the use of concurrent planning. o Further, Coram provides Cambridgeshire with a county adoption manager, Leadership within an in-house team and a strategic group for development of concurrent planning. o Kent LA is embracing this at even greater scale and, with Coram, is addressing the full early permanency needs including a focused study of the performance of the legal system in this respect. o Two further authorities are in advanced discussion. Coram has launched an Early Permanency subscription programme to enable LAs to develop their capacity for concurrent planning by deploying/designating specific staff who are national leaders and receiving programme guidance from Coram. Coram, as a centre for early permanency, is developing a toolkit for management on these approaches, publishing further research and providing access to expertise through training, coaching and case consultation.

d) Could the adoption process be speeded up, whilst ensuring that necessary safeguards are preserved? What can be done to speed up the process?  Permanence tracking meetings (including for all children subject to pre-court PLO process where threshold is met), senior management oversight of cases and robust management of cases in the court.  Coram’s experience shows that permanence tracking processes, underpinned by strong practice management (i.e. social work managers are experienced and available), and personal/visible leadership at a very senior level make the difference where these are in place in LAs.  Tracking systems should have a specific focus on young children coming into care, to reduce the numbers of children who become older while ‘drifting’ in the system. Tracking has played a key role in improving the timeliness of placements in the Coram-Harrow partnership, for

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Coram—Written evidence example, and Cambridgeshire has combined this with implementation of the ‘Hackney model’ of social work in its field teams. e) How widely used is concurrent planning? What are its advantages and disadvantages? What are the advantages and disadvantages of concurrent planning, twin-track planning and parallel planning? Advantages of Concurrent Planning:  Parents have one last chance (this is explicit) and this creates sense of urgency for parents which is supportive to change.  Children experience no/fewer moves or broken attachments.  Adopters/carers have satisfaction of caring from close-to-birth and of developing a structured process within which there can be a respectful relationship with the birth family.Where the child is adopted, this lays the groundworkmuch better discussion with their child in future.  Local authorities achieve permanent placement earlier and achieve reduction in infants and therefore in future of all children waiting for placement. Limits to its effectiveness:  It is best matched to younger children in acute circumstances where chances of return to birth family are very low and can only practically be used where the risk is fully demonstrated Advantage for parallel/twin-track planning:  If a child is already in a foster placement or there is no concurrent planning placement available, parallel planning ensures that whilst court proceedings are underway, the local authority is actively pursuing plan B as well as plan A, thus avoiding further delays once the court makes a decision to return the child to the family or to make a Placement Order. Can concurrent planning be successfully extended beyond a small group of children who fit a particular profile (i.e. under 2 years of age; high risk of non-rehabilitation with the birth family from the outset)?  Absolutely it can be extended and it must be – initially to the large numbers of children under two years who are currently not benefiting from this approach. The Harrow experience shows that up to 30% of those adopted could potentially benefit. Nationally, 61% of children adopted in 2007-2011 were under one year old when starting their final period of care (DfE, 2011).Nationally, over the last five years, the average age at adoption is three years and 11 months. The average age of children adopted by Coram concurrent planning carers was 17 months (2002-2012). This is a large imperative. Concurrent planning should be made available to all the children who could clearly benefit from it. Application/piloting with older children could be considered thereafter. Where concurrent planning has been tried (for example in Brighton and Hove) what have been the main difficulties and challenges encountered and how can they be overcome?  Concurrent planning relies on experienced social workers who can identify children who are appropriate for the scheme.  Brighton and Hove reports that a ‘hostile’ local court made the team’s work impossible but Manchester Goodman project had excellent relationship with the court; there is certainly a

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Coram—Written evidence continuing training issue for family lawyers as well as judiciary and provision of research evidence. B&H continue to make some limited CP placements.  Manchester Adoption Society failed because of financial challenges to its mainstream adoption work in fact – the interagency fee not being high enough and not making enough placements to bear the cash burden. There has been an increase in the fee and this should be continued to full cost recovery and the same fee applied between local authorities as well as with VAAs.  Coram’s Concurrent Planning centre shows that it remains a challenge to secure all elements working in consort – although the service is well-established, and can demonstrate positive outcomes, ensuring that suitable cases are referred by LA partners in a timely way and that this is supported by the courts requires ongoing effort.  Coram has launched a wider subscription scheme to enable capacity building in concurrent planning across England. f)

What are the reasons for the variations in time taken to place children by different local authorities?

THE NUMBER OF POTENTIAL ADOPTERS a) Are there enough potential adopters coming forward? Are there shortages in particular ethnic groups? Why does it generally take longer to place children from black and minority ethnic (BME) backgrounds for adoption?  Coram commends to the committee Julie Selwyn’s research on this issue. Most importantly, there is an overall shortage of adopters of all/any background and this should be the national focus. It is important that adopters are recruited from all communities (as highlighted in the DfE’s Adopters’ Charter 2012) and there need to be incentives to agencies to take positive action on this.  Coram supports the creation of a national recruitment forum and National Gateway as part of the Adoption Action Plan, and urges the government to review the resourcing of this area of work in the context of the significant increase in the number of care proceedings and of children needing placements nationally. b) How do we ensure the best “fit” for a child, and is trans-racial adoption relevant to this issue? What is the solution? In particular, does the ACA 2002 (s 1(5)) need to be amended and, if so, how?  It is Black and Asian children who wait longest or fail to be adopted Mixed race children do not wait as long, but still wait longer than White children (Julie Selwyn and Coram DfE work).  It is adopters who decide who/whether they seek to adopt specific children. Adopters must consider if their new child will be welcomed and integrated by their wider family to protect their child from compounded stigma.  We should encourage and welcome as many adopters as possible, and of greatest possible diversity, into the system, therefore enabling optimum placement options for children. c) Why do some potential adopters drop out during the adoption process? 411

Coram—Written evidence d) Have the changes to eligibility introduced by the 2002 Act impacted the number of potential adopters? e) What will be the likely effect of the measures proposed in the Department for Education’s ‘Action Plan for Adoption’? f) Does the number of agencies inhibit the number of potential adopters recruited? g) Does the recent increase in knowledge about early child development affect the balance between children’s rights and parental rights? Are we currently striking the correct balance between the rights and interests of looked after children and the rights and interests of the birth family?  Evidently not since the welfare of the child is paramount but the system is not delivering decisions in the timescale of the child. This should be our focus and Coram welcomes proposed new regulations to limit timescales for care proceedings, except in exceptional circumstances. We would welcome better implementation of pre-proceedings work, and more consistent use of Family Group Conferencing to ensure birth family members and connected people are supported to come forwards in a timely way. If not, is this a problem with the statutory framework or with social work practice and what needs to change?  Social work practice can and must be improved, particularly in relation to Family Group Conferences and early consideration of birth family members. Good quality assessments lead to fewer assessments.  A more consistent level of training and supervision is required for social workers in analysis, report writing and in giving evidence to court. There is an issue in relation to the timescale for additional members of birth families to come forward. This is not aligned with the timescale of the child despite the over-riding principle for the welfare of the child. Coram also agreed with FJR recommendations for provision of performance data on judges and experts – we should all learn from our experiences and we should know what happened to children.  We commend the committee to consider evidence from Professor Judith Masson of Bristol University in relation to court process and statutory framework. COURT PROCEEDINGS a) Do court proceedings take undue time in the adoption process? See comments above. Ofsted’s Annual Report (2010/11) identified in its view the worst delays occur in court processes and in using too many expert witnesses; additional repeat assessments; not enough case management by courts. b) Would the recommendations of the Family Justice Review substantially alter the position? c) How effective are provisions for the representation by guardians of children in court proceedings? d) How effective have placement orders been in facilitating the placement and adoption of children compared with “freezing orders”?

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Coram—Written evidence e) How common is it for care proceedings and placement order proceedings to be heard together or consecutively? What are the advantages and disadvantages of this approach? f) How will changes to legal aid impact, if at all, on adoption proceedings? POST-ADOPTION SUPPORT a) How, if at all, has the 2002 Act impacted upon the provision of post-adoption contacts and support? b) Are measures needed to enhance post-adoption financial and other support for (i) adopted children; (ii) adoptive parents, (iii) birth families? It is generally acknowledged that adopted children are likely to have additional needs at intervals throughout their childhood and into adulthood. This is a result of a combination of factors which affect different children more or less strongly. These factors include:  The children’s different heritage and separation from the family into which they were born. Issues of identity pre-occupy many adopted children, adolescents and adults, and in recognition of the needs of adopted adults (and of those of their birth relatives) the A&C Act 2002 made provision for access to information, counselling and intermediary services. Adopted children need to understand their background and why they have not been able to remain with their birth families. Accordingly, they need assistance to make sense of their past. Common tools to assist the adopters in this task are lifestory books – regulations require that these are provided within 3 weeks of the adoption order. However as children grow up, their understanding increases and it is often necessary to update the books, and in cases where the information is particularly distressing, adopters may need support to share the story with their children. Late adolescents/ young adults need a later life letter which gives a fuller explanation about the young person’s past, in language that is clear but not pejorative nor unduly alarming. Therapeutic support may also be needed. Thus assistance with writing/updating and dealing with therapeutic needs must be available via the adoption agency (LA or VAA) and potentially therapeutic support via CAHMS or independently sourced.  Adoption frequently involves letterbox or sometimes direct contact with birth parents/siblings /grandparents. This does need to be arranged on an individual basis to meet children’s needs. Whether or not contact is arranged at the time of the adoption order, some children request contact later – either face to face or via news about the wellbeing of member/s of their birth family. Additionally with the widespread use of social networking sites, unplanned contact is taking place in a number of instances, and it can be assumed that this is likely to increase with the increasing availability of computers and increasing sophistication of search facilities. Supervised contact/support in arranging contact/support in arranging letterbox contact/support in reviewing and altering contact arrangements is needed.  Children who have suffered adversity such as neglect/abuse/exposure to substances in utero are likely to display a range of complex emotional and psychological symptoms what are not easily classifiable under the categories commonly used and understood by mental health professionals in CAHMS. Thus the needs of these children are often overlooked or misdiagnosed. There are specialist community mental health services for children and

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Coram—Written evidence adolescents which have teams accustomed to this population, including the Tavistock Clinic, the Maudsley Hospital and Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children. There are fewer specialist resources in the north of England. There are also a significant number of CAHMS clinics which do offer appropriate services, but this is something of a lottery at present. The three teams mentioned above contributed towards DCSF Practice Guidance on Assessing Support Needs of Adoptive Families in 2008. Access to community mental health services is of crucial importance, and a training programme for mental health professionals to enable them to provide more appropriate diagnosis and intervention to this population of children is essential.  The population of children we are concerned with have difficulty accessing education. Because of the emotional and psychological trauma they have suffered, they find it hard to function in large groups, having the emotional needs of much younger children for individual adult attention to support them and provide scaffolding whilst they learn. They are often hyper vigilant (an understandable consequence of earlier abuse and trauma, to be constantly alert to the possibility of danger). This interferes with concentration and again requires oneto-one attention in the classroom to manage. They may also suffer from post traumatic stress disorder, and apparently neutral interventions or remarks can provoke an angry/aggressive/out of control reaction which is disruptive and difficult to manage in the classroom. It is important that such behaviour is understood as a symptom of emotional fragility and fear, and not as a deliberate provocation or as misbehaviour. Supporting such children in the classroom requires some level of one to one support (variable) – sometimes in the classroom, sometimes during the unstructured time in the playground, sometimes both. Teachers and support staff also need consultation from a professional who understands that the challenging behaviour is based on earlier adverse experience and who can support the staff in finding ways of providing support and boundaries for the child which are constructive and support the child appropriately.  Children may have disabilities including learning difficulties that require specific support to enable them to make maximum use of their capabilities, to integrate and enjoy relationships with their peers, and to reach their potential. These children may need to access similar specialist services as other children with disabilities. Resources for post adoption support are rarely sufficiently provided by local authorities, and are a constant struggle for Coram, drawing heavily on our charitable income.  We would also highlight in particular the importance of support to families in relation to education. The new priority for children adopted from care in school choice is very welcome, but the issues often go far beyond this and significant support to families is needed to get children’s needs met. Is too much or too little emphasis currently placed on facilitating contact between the child and the birth family: (i) during care proceedings; (ii) once a placement order is made; and (iii) post-adoption? Is too much or too little emphasis placed on contact? What are the advantages to the child of contact and what, if any, changes would you recommend to primary or secondary legislation on this issue? Contact in care proceedings –

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Coram—Written evidence  Clearly contact must be determined by the circumstances of the case and the need to protect any positive relationships/attachments which are important to a child but it needs to be reflect the child’s need and be sensitive to the child’s vulnerability in its delivery – see Coram’s practice note37.  The Jenny Kenrick research debated by the Family Justice Council (Dec 2010) and supporting the wider Australian study shows that its impact on young children can be counter to their welfare. Lord Justice Munby personally supported the wider dissemination of these and other findings to the judiciary. (See Coram Practice Note 2 for further information.)  Developmental needs of babies for early attachment must be understood and underpin contact arrangements. This includes establishing a routine in placement to facilitate a sense of security and time for unhurried playful interaction between the main carer (i.e. the foster carer) and the baby. If the baby has high frequency contact, the recovery time between contact sessions can be significantly limited. Any ruling or requirement must surely aim to minimise stress known to harm  Very frequent contact, especially when combined with the impacts of transport and changes in escort or supervisor is not supportive of these principles.  Case law is causing the impediment not the primary legislation and Coram calls upon the President of the Family Division to issue guidance on contact in the light of Kenrick research and the Australian research (summarised in Simmonds and Schofield article in Adoption and Fostering 2011). Post-placement order  There is a practice issue as ongoing contact can get in the way of preparing a child for meeting prospective adopters. On the other hand, if there is a delay in achieving a match, the LA may be concerned that the child may have not contact with a parental figure. Resolving this requires judgement on a case-bycase basis, but the focus should always be on the child’s experience. Post-adoption  In Coram’s survey of adopters issues of managing post-adoption contact were prominent amongst the issues adopters raised with us as causing them and their children ongoing difficulty. Multiple siblings, both older and younger, in multiple placements, could be involved Coram has produced the following good practice recommendations to guide courts and practitioners when deciding and arranging contact sessions with birth parents. Settling in time – the courts to allow a settling in period of no more than 14 days with the foster carers before contact begins to allow the baby to settle and develop positive attachments without diminishing the established child/birth parent relationship. Consistency of escort – the same person to bring the baby to and from the contact venue Short travel time – the distance between foster placement and contact venue to be no greater than 20 miles Regularity of contact – ideally no more than three times a week, to reduce disruption to the infant’s routine while maintaining close and consistent contact with birth parents. Length of contact – sessions should be no longer than two hours and should be purposeful in developing the child/birth parent relationship. Consistency of timetabling – sessions to be at the same time each day wherever possible. Continuity of care – the foster carers to remain on site during contact so they are available to support the birth parent in meeting the needs of the child. Transition time – a ten minute transition period at the start and end of contact so the foster carer(s) and birth parents can communicate regarding the baby’s needs, preferences and progress, and build a positive, supportive relationship which facilitates the needs of the child being placed at the centre of the contact process. 37

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Coram—Written evidence as well as birth parents. Arrangements for managing and reviewing contact need to be clear. If the adoptive parents feel that contact arrangements undermine their child’s sense of security – or that their child needs further information about or contact with one or other member of their birth family, there should be a clear duty on the LA to assist in resolving difficulties. INTER-COUNTRY ADOPTION a) Have the inter-country adoption safeguards introduced by the 2002 and 2006 Acts proved successful? b) Would you recommend any change to the legislation to make inter-country adoption simpler? c) Are there any special challenges in adopting children from particular countries or regions? ACCESS TO INFORMATION a) Has the 2002 Act made it easier for adopted adults and/or birth families to trace their relatives, should they wish to do so? OTHER PERMANENT PLACEMENTS a) What has been the effect of the introduction, in the 2002 Act, of ‘special guardianship’? b) Is special guardianship an effective alternative to adoption, especially for those of school age (ie 5 and older)? c) What is the best way to ensure permanent and consistent placements for children? d) Would earlier interventions with difficulties have an effect on the number of children who need to be adopted or otherwise permanently separated from their birth family? MONITORING a) Do ‘adoption scorecards’ provide an appropriate means for monitoring the performance of local authorities with regard to adoption? b) How robust are current systems for monitoring the i) number of adoptions made, ii) the number of children awaiting adoption, and iii) the amount of delay experienced by those awaiting adoption? Are appropriate mechanisms in place to monitor the position of children for whom a placement order is in force but who are awaiting a suitable match?  Children should not be on a placement order indefinitely; if a match cannot be found, the preference for adoption should be reviewed. Anticipating an increase in adopters is not sufficient reason for staying on PO if this is not in the child’s best interest. If current mechanisms for monitoring children in this position are not sufficiently robust, what needs to be done?

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Coram—Written evidence  This is done well in some areas, but there should be consistency of practice in LAs in reviewing these, and changing plans if necessary. A legal obligation on LAs to ensure regular review should be considered. July 2012

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Coram—Oral evidence (QQ 156–186)

Coram—Oral evidence (QQ 156–186) Evidence Session No. 3.

Heard in Public.

Questions 156–186

TUESDAY 10 JULY 2012 Members present Baroness Butler-Sloss (Chairman) Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top Baroness Eaton Viscount Eccles Baroness Hamwee Baroness Howarth of Breckland Baroness King of Bow Baroness Knight of Collingtree Baroness Morris of Bolton Lord Morris of Handsworth Baroness Walmsley ________________ Examination of Witnesses Dr Carol Homden, Chief Executive, and Jeanne Kaniuk, Head of Adoption, Coram.

Q156 The Chairman: Thank you for coming. We are particularly grateful to you for two things: first, for having come earlier to teach us and, secondly, for today having come to give evidence, which we will find extremely helpful. Thank you both very much for coming back. We are going to ask you some questions. We would be particularly grateful if, when issues arise as we are asking you questions, you would give us some written evidence, which would perhaps give us a fuller picture of some of the points that we do not have time to explore in detail. Dr Carol Homden: We would be delighted. The Chairman: Thank you. Lady King, would you like to start? Q157 Baroness King of Bow: Thank you. Would you say that it is right to have such a strong policy focus on adoption as the preferred route for permanency for looked-after children? If so, should we be concerned about the falling number of adoptions when we consider them in the context of the full range of permanency options, including SGOs and ROs,

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Coram—Oral evidence (QQ 156–186) which I have learnt only this morning are special guardianship orders and residency orders, with which you will be very familiar? Dr Carol Homden: Yes, we do think that it is appropriate. Adoption is the only form of permanency that is designed to last all through life. Therefore, it is the gold standard and we should worry if it decreases. It should be actively considered for every young child and some older children who cannot remain with their birth family. Some communities prefer special guardianship orders, but adoption remains the option demonstrated over time and by research to have the most positive outcomes where appropriate when children cannot remain safely with their birth family. The focus on adoption is also a focus on the requirement for early permanency planning for all children in the care system, which includes other options prior to decision. Therefore, the policy focus does not in itself presume that adoption should be the care plan of choice. In terms of the numbers, we should be concerned about the falling numbers of adoptions, even considering the full range of permanency options and the welcome use of special guardianship orders. We should be concerned because the number of children presenting to the system is increasing and there is a backlog of children waiting for whom adoption is their care plan. Local authorities have wildly different percentages of their care populations accessing adoption and this does not appear to correlate with the demographic profile of their children. In addition, the outcomes for highly vulnerable children who go home are poor. The judiciary should be aware of the Ward et al research and other research published recently by BAAF in relation to this. Q158 Baroness Morris of Bolton: At the weekend, I was speaking to some people very involved in family law and was struck that a number of them were quite vehemently against adoption. It really quite shocked me. Is this quite normal? Do you come across this a lot—that there are people who believe that, at all odds, you should keep a family together? Jeanne Kaniuk: There is a body of opinion that is terribly pro the family at all costs. Plainly that is not the position that we would take, but there is almost an ideological view among some people that breaking up families is to be avoided. Certainly on the continent adoption as we know it is not practised. Either babies are relinquished by young mothers or there is intercountry adoption—they apparently do not have quite the same views about bringing babies from other countries to be adopted. Our system of looking at the needs of the child as the primary concern and considering whether a child can grow up securely in its family and, if not, what ways there are to secure a permanent, legally secure future for that child is quite unusual. I think that it is a very child-centred approach. Q159 Baroness Knight of Collingtree: Dr Homden touched on the point that worries me when she referred to children who, as she said, cannot return to their families. I get the impression that families often want to have the children back and are not allowed to have them back. That worries me. Is this a needless worry? I do not know whether it is true or not, but a number of cases have been reported and I am anxious that the parent of the child should always have the right to ask to have their own child and not to have the child adopted. Dr Carol Homden: First, we have to remember quite how high the threshold is for care proceedings to be brought. I really think that we have to pay attention to the experiences of children in very acute circumstances and the compounded neglect and damage that some children experience in utero, let alone post birth. The threshold is very high indeed and I think 419

Coram—Oral evidence (QQ 156–186) that in the mind of the general public it may be astonishingly high. The focus is on the needs of the child, which need to be weighed very heavily. The law makes it clear that the welfare of the child is paramount. Repeated attempts at reunification and repeated assessments do not in effect and in practice promote the welfare of the child. Jeanne Kaniuk: The kind of families that we have been talking about would be those where there is chronic substance abuse over a period of years and where the parents are not able to turn their lives round and not able to provide a safe level of care for their children. These are families where there may be serious mental health problems, where they may well wish that they were in a position to care for their child but actually they are simply not capable. These are children who are abused and chronically neglected. Baroness Knight of Collingtree: Yes, but I think it would be quite wrong to say that it is always the case that the children are saying, “Please save me from these terrible parents,” because there are many, many children who want to stay with their parents. The Chairman: I wonder if I could make this point, having been an adoption judge. No child is ever taken away from the parents without a judge’s order and no child is ever taken away from the parents without the parents having the opportunity to put their case to the judge. Those are the two points that have to be made. Forgive me for making them rather than Dr Homden, but I am making them as the lawyer. Dr Carol Homden: We would be the first to say that active assessment of a parent’s capacity to change must be undertaken at the earliest possible moment, with due support and proper assessment put into place to enable that. But the child does not get their time back and, therefore, the chance to change must be structured within the timescale of the child. That is one of the reasons why I believe we are here to give evidence to you. Concurrent planning is a methodology that balances those interests and ensures that due support is given and that the judge is fully able to make a decision in the interests and timescale of the child. Q160 Baroness Eaton: We hear an awful lot about delay. Where do you perceive the delays in the systems to be and what can we do to improve the process of delays? Dr Carol Homden: The fact of delay is incontrovertible. Ofsted reported on children’s services in 2010-11 and identified that, in its view, the worst delays are occurring in the court processes in relation to expert witnesses, additional repeat assessments and insufficient case management by the courts. We recognise that in Coram. We also recognise that, if the assessments are not robustly completed or are weakly presented, local authorities compound or contribute to this delay. This is before we get to placement delays. The working analysis of the data provided to Coram by 16 local authorities in the DfE strategic grant programme shows that it is the (public law outline) PLO stage where most delay happens within local authorities. Further work is being undertaken to interrogate this with a set of local authorities precisely to try to indentify where the delays are occurring. There is certainly an impact around Section 20s, which is when a child is initially voluntarily relinquished into care. The Chairman: You are talking about the Children Act 1989 and the part where the child is considered as being in need. Dr Carol Homden: Yes, but even within that context I want to say that this delay is not inevitable. It does not occur everywhere. It can be addressed and it can be prevented.

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Coram—Oral evidence (QQ 156–186) Sequential family finding—not starting on family finding until after the end of the previous processes—inevitably stretches out the timescale, especially for priority groups. The sibling issue is very important. Certainly, if young children, particularly those from BME backgrounds, are not placed quickly, they drift and, the older they get and the more they are involved in a sibling group, the harder it becomes. We feel very strongly that a team dedicated to planning for and shifting, if I may put it that way, the very young very quickly within our system is extremely important. We commend to you the work in Bristol, for example, where defined senior practitioners hand-hold social workers for the child who have not had experience of the process before, where there is an excellent permanency tracking system and where senior leadership pays attention to these matters. Pre-birth assessments are very important. The family drug and alcohol court, of which Coram is also the host, is an example of time-limited and integrated assessments that incorporate multi-professional help where necessary but not repeatedly. So there are models of practice that work. Action can be taken and it must be taken to apply best case management processes consistently both in courts and in effective early permanency planning in local authorities. Q161 Baroness Walmsley: Having said that, do you think that adoption panels contribute in any way to the delay, and what is your view on the regulations due to take effect in September that will limit the role of adoption panels in certain types of cases, particularly their role in advising on whether adoption is the best option? Jeanne Kaniuk: It is our view that it is not generally the case that panels are the cause of delay, although there can be management and scheduling problems with them, which need to be addressed. However, we do not regard the panels themselves as the cause of delay per se. On the regulations due to take effect in September, we think it is important to recognise that the panels play a significant positive role within local authorities by quality assuring the work done by social workers through ensuring that completed assessments and reports are of a high standard and considering those reports before they go up to the decision-maker who will be responsible on behalf of the local authority for deciding whether to apply for a placement order. If that process is to be removed, which plainly it is, the burden on the decision-maker becomes extremely onerous and the local authority will be bound to have to create some other internal system to ensure that there is a way of quality assuring the work. We do not want cases to go to court that have not been properly prepared. We will find that cases are delayed because courts throw them out. ADMs will be required to come and give evidence as to how they came to the decision. There is the potential for quite a lot of delay unintentionally being added to the system. The Chairman: If the adoption panels go, there will be something in place instead of them, so we will have the same period before we get to court. Jeanne Kaniuk: I think you will have to. The adoption panels can be streamlined. There is a way of neatening them and making them slicker. In my view, they are quite cumbersome bodies. However, one of the things people value is that there is an independent element. One could have an independent chair because there is a requirement for the number of independent members we currently have, so that would be a different way of structuring them. Actually, I think that this is essential. There is a huge variation in practice within local authorities, and sadly the quality of the reports being prepared is sometimes quite poor. Panels provide a point at

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Coram—Oral evidence (QQ 156–186) which, first, social workers know that they have to produce their reports and, secondly, the reports are often sent back for further work. If that does not happen, it will just shove the problem on to a different part of the system. Q162 Baroness Walmsley: Would you please write to us with more detail about how you think the panels could be streamlined? That might be helpful. Dr Carol Homden: The new form being introduced, the prospective adopters’ report, looks promising in terms of simplifying complexity, improving the presentation of material and increasing their analytical value. We will give you further indications on that pilot as well. Q163 Lord Morris of Handsworth: “Rights” and “interests” are words that are regularly used in the adoption debate. Are we currently striking the correct balance between the rights and interests of looked-after children and the rights and interests of the birth family? If not, is this a problem with the statutory framework or with social work practice, and what if any changes are needed? Dr Carol Homden: Well, we would put it to you that the welfare of the child is paramount, but the system is not delivering decisions in the timescale of the child. Therefore the answer would appear to be that the balance is not yet appropriately struck. Timeliness of decision should be our focus and Coram welcomes the new regulations to limit the timescales for care proceedings except in exceptional circumstances and would very much welcome the more systematic and consistent use of family group conferencing to ensure that birth family members and connected people are supported to come forward in a timely way. There is no doubt that social work practice can and must be improved, particularly in relation to this practice. Good quality assessments lead to a need for less in the way of assessment. There is also a need for better training, which is an eternal need. But we also suggest that it may be helpful to have clearer protocols on residential assessments. Why and when do we need them, and do they in fact really test an ability to cope over the longer term? Jeanne Kaniuk: I want to explain that residential assessments are made where the mother and baby are sent together to a residential home. Q164 Lord Morris of Handsworth: Just for my benefit, is this a structural or a procedural problem? Dr Carol Homden: I think that there is a practice problem, but also that there is a statutory framework issue to be addressed. I do not think there is a particular issue in relation to the timescales for additional members of birth families to come forward for consideration, often at the final hour and after prolonged proceedings. Q165 Lord Morris of Handsworth: What do we need to do about this? What changes are necessary? Dr Carol Homden: Concurrent planning is an example of better management of process to enable the genuine balancing of these rights, but in a way that ensures that the child does not experience discontinuity of care or have their ability to form positive attachments compromised. It is certainly possible for greater use of these methods and principles to be applied. We also suggest that you might wish to consider there being a limit to the window of

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Coram—Oral evidence (QQ 156–186) opportunity for consideration for assessment, especially in cases where it involves an additional child to others previously removed. Coram also agrees with the family justice review recommendations for the provision of performance data on judges and experts. We should all be willing to learn from our mistakes and know what happens to the children who pass in various ways through our processes and are in our care. We would also point out that in our DfE study, we have seen children with a plan for adoption which continued for years, despite a lack of placements. This is not a right to family life; this is permanent uncertainty. The duty of the system is to make a decision for children. Q166 Baroness Hamwee: I wonder if you have any comments about the statutory guidance on concurrent planning. I only saw it this morning so I do not have a context for the rest of the guidance. In explaining what it is it states, “This enables a relationship to develop which is supportive to the parents”. That strikes me as imbalanced—I must not put words into your mouth—and later it states that, “Local authorities should actively consider the advantages of concurrent planning and integrate the approach into their permanency planning arrangements.” Do you think that the statutory guidance has got the balance right and is it forceful enough on local authority action? Jeanne Kaniuk: Because in a concurrent plan the parents know from the outset that the family fostering the child have also been approved as potential adopters, and that in the end, depending on the outcome of the court proceedings, their child may be adopted by those carers, it has the benefit for parents of complete transparency and openness. It also injects a sense of urgency. Those parents who are capable of making changes to their lifestyle know that this is a window of opportunity for them. Concurrent planning, certainly in the way we practise it, also depends very much on having carefully constructed contact arrangements so that parents who are having contact with their child at our premises see the same contact supervisor on a regular basis. The supervisor coaches and helps the parents to manage the child. It is not a question of just sitting in the room and observing them. At the beginning and end of the contact there is a handover from the foster carers to the parents, so a relationship develops between both sides that is usually respectful and positive. By the end of the process there is usually quite a good feeling between the two sides. I think that this is supportive to parents, who are often suspicious at the outset because it does not sound to them like a very positive prognosis. But in our view the experience of parents is generally that it is positive. It is also positive for the baby because it is not going to have the broken attachments that other systems lead to. I do not know what else the guidance could say. Baroness Hamwee: I wonder whether it might have referred to the child in the same sentence. Jeanne Kaniuk: That is a fair point. Carol Homden: That is true, although the legal framework is based upon the principle of paramountcy of the welfare of the child, and concurrent planning and existing practice indicate that it can be done. There is therefore a question of whether defining further duties in relation to early placement is necessary, but Coram does support measures which promote and

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Coram—Oral evidence (QQ 156–186) strengthen early permanency planning. That is because the fact of it being clear does not seem to be sufficient to lead to actual action. Q167 Baroness Howarth of Breckland: Going back to the question about social work that we considered at the start of this session, it is clear that concurrent planning has been very successful. Your statistics show that most children end up being permanently placed and, indeed, adopted by the people who take them on. When children come before the court—we should remember that CAFCASS has carried out a piece of research which shows that they are not coming before the court unnecessarily, even though large numbers are doing so—the needs of all those children must be paramount. But what are we doing to support the families of children who are defined as being children in need before they reach the court stage? When you get to the high-powered assessment, permanency planning and concurrent placement, you are actually at the end of the line for the family. Somewhere along the way we seem to have lost the capacity for good family casework to ensure that families who are capable of being kept together are able to stay together. Would you agree that that is where there is a great lack in local authorities—in terms of both social work and social work training? Jeanne Kaniuk: I think that it is patchy. Dr Carol Homden: Yes, it is very patchy. However, there are some examples of good practice. We would commend the family drug and alcohol court, of which we are a part, and the substantial outreach work being done in Ealing. The Chairman: That court is under District Judge Nicholas Crichton and it is at Wells Street. He is a family district judge. Dr Carol Homden: Yes, he is a family judge who exercises direct and personal supervision of cases through a 48-week programme of support that is triangulated between social work, complex assessments in terms of psychological and psychiatric capacity, drug and alcohol support and, indeed, the tackling of other systemic issues that face the family such as housing and location. It is showing some promising findings and we are positive about the fact that there might be a 15% improvement. But we are focused on the fact that some 44% of those children who go on to be adopted are identified before they reach one year of age, and therefore concurrent planning offers a particular opportunity to ensure the welfare that the children need in terms of experiencing fewer moves and subsequent reduced attachments; the positive advantage to parents of transparency and practical support to see if they can effect change; support for adopters, who are therefore able to provide at the earliest point in the child’s life; and benefit for local authorities by achieving permanent placement—let us not forget the substantial cost benefit to them. Q168 Viscount Eccles: Can I try a very general question arising out of everything you have said? I think that the Committee needs to see evidence which makes a clear distinction between changes to the statutory framework and changes to behaviour within it. Is your position essentially the second one—changes to behaviour within it? That is much more significant than changes to the statutory framework. Dr Carol Homden: Yes, it is, and we would look to the judiciary for leadership.

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Coram—Oral evidence (QQ 156–186) Q169 Viscount Eccles: I understand the point, but perhaps I may follow it up. To what extent is it the judiciary’s problem that evidence is put before it which cannot be accepted because it is inadequately presented and does not really make the case? Members of the judiciary have to go back to the statutory framework and decide whether they are being presented with something that is adequate. I think your evidence also shows that often they are not presented with something which is adequate. Dr Carol Homden: There can be poor practice in any system, and that is always unacceptable. We must identify and tackle it. We do see poor case management in court and sometimes very poor presentation of evidence from local authorities. But it is not everywhere and it is not inevitable, and therefore we feel that the most important elements within local authorities are around the establishment of very strong permanency tracking processes with very senior eyes upon them. That alone will not tackle a shortfall in practice, but it is the quickest way to ensuring action to tackle poor practice if it occurs. Similarly, within the legal system and the court processes the same things apply; namely, that there are different patterns in different courts. Jeanne Kaniuk: There can be very long delays in getting a case listed. They take on average 52 weeks to be heard. These are factors which are not in a child’s interest. Something has to be shifted in this area. Dr Carol Homden: However, you are correct to say that this is not to do with the statutory framework itself. Q170 Viscount Eccles: So Norgrove was right when he uses, I think, the words “mistrust” and “lack of confidence” between local authorities and the judiciary. This is a central feature of why the behaviour in the system is not as it should be. Dr Carol Homden: Yes, and change is difficult. Q171 The Chairman: Perhaps I can move on to the next question which relates very much to concurrent planning. I want to ask about the phraseology, and then move on to ask whether we should not be broadening concurrent planning considerably beyond it being used only for babies. The term “concurrent planning” is clear. It is the Coram model which has now been transposed to other parts of the country. I am delighted that that is happening, and I should say that I am a governor of Coram. However, I am by no means certain that the term “twin planning” or “parallel planning” is standard. After that I shall ask a second question. Jeanne Kaniuk: I think that twin track and parallel planning must be the same thing. They require a local authority to have a plan B as well as a plan A, so that when you get to the end of care proceedings, you do not have to begin to think about plan B, depending on the outcome in court. I do not think there is any difference between them. Q172 The Chairman: On parallel planning, there will be many children who are not babies and for whom it is absolutely clear that sooner or later they are going to have to leave their parents permanently. Ought we not to be looking at a pool of people prepared to care for children who are interchangeably foster parents and adopters? That would provide a form of training for them. Children would go to a family who could be adopters at the end of the road. At the moment we seem to have two groups—aside from concurrent planning, which is seen as

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Coram—Oral evidence (QQ 156–186) unusual and specialised—comprising foster parents and adopters. As a judge I can remember local authorities objecting to foster parents becoming adopters because they were then lost from the foster parent pool. That seemed appalling to me. Dr Carol Homden: It is true. We should recognise that the motivations and the circumstances of operation for foster carers are different from those for adopters. The financial structures are different. Many foster carers are extraordinarily child centred, but they may foster multiple children, and we need those people in the system. For adopters the motivations are different, and the balance of risk that we are asking adopters to bear in doing some form of fostering first will be a principal factor in their decision about whether they can take the emotional risk of so doing. They commit for life, which is a very sincere and different thing that, for a human being, is extremely hard to do. There may be some magical human beings who are capable of managing that level of uncertainty, and indeed our experience in concurrent planning shows that. We commend those heroes. But the expectation that it will become normal is misplaced and there is little evidence to suggest that it could. Some work has been undertaken in the United States under something known as the New Orleans model, which has extended principles of concurrent planning for children aged under five, but thereafter you are looking at a whole range of issues that affect a child’s own perceptions and perspectives which add complexity and uncertainty to the process. We believe that concurrent planning can be extended and that it must be. Our experience of working in the London borough of Harrow shows that up to 30% of the children adopted there have benefited, which gives us an untested indication of the number of children for whom this could be appropriate. If concurrent planning is available and is applied, it indicates a much greater resilience and effectiveness in the early permanence process itself, which benefits all the children in an area. Thereafter, and concurrently, we could seek to pilot its use with older children on a wider footprint. Q173 The Chairman: Does that mean you would consider it reasonable to use concurrent planning as you understand it for children up to the age of five rather than just for those aged under two, or is the New Orleans experiment still too new? Jeanne Kaniuk: There are so many under twos who we are not helping yet that I would like to see it extended to all of them. The other thing we have shown in Harrow is that, if you catch the very young children coming into care who cannot return home and ensure that they are given the best option, you substantially reduce the number of older children. I would prefer to make a start at the bottom. Once we have cracked that, we can try to expand it. Perhaps I may come back on what Carol Homden was saying. I agree that the motivations for people to foster are rather different from those for adoption. Once people have been caring for a child, it is only human nature for them sometimes to become very attached. Following up on the point that local authorities may discourage that, it should be made very clear that where an attachment has been formed, there has to be a good reason for breaking it since that would cause further damage to the child. I would like to see something that would encourage people, or put a duty on them, to give serious consideration to attachment before moving a child on. Quite often one of the difficulties for local authorities—it is a real difficulty—is that some foster carers from the independent fostering agencies are paid virtually a salary for their fostering responsibilities. If the children are adopted by those families, that poses quite a complicated

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Coram—Oral evidence (QQ 156–186) economic conundrum for local authorities. Even so, the business of children’s attachment needs to be taken seriously. Q174 Baroness King of Bow: I think that the motivation you mentioned is very important for people who want to adopt and to undergo concurrent planning, as I did. You imagine that you have a 95% chance that you will keep the child and you are willing to balance that against a 5% risk. Foster carers know that there is a 95% chance that they will not keep the child. Those motivations are so different that it is difficult to see how to meld them. However, it would be great if we could find more of those magical people. I want to ask about the cost. When I asked for concurrent planning—along with many adoptive parents, I was desperate to get younger babies—I was told that my adoption agency could not do it because of the cost. It is more resource intensive because of the counselling that needs to be undertaken. You might lose the child, and how would you deal with that? What happens to the siblings? A child comes and they think it is the new brother or sister, and then it disappears. What is your view about the cost, given that in times of austerity we have less money going into these services every day? Dr Carol Homden: There is nothing more costly either in human terms or in financial terms than a child in permanent care. The evidence is clear that concurrent planning is cost-neutral, in that contact activities need to be supported in any case, as well as family finding, court process support and the assessment work that needs to be done. Concurrent planning concentrates this work into the timescale of the child, and the placement either for reunification—if that is possible, which in most cases it has not been—or for the adoption order, is speedier. At that point there is an immediate cost benefit to the local authority for having done it. So cost is a very important consideration, but it has less to do with the realities of cost than with its perceptions and structures. The models that Coram has developed have been evidenced and verified, and we intend to undertake further work in this arena to make the case for change more evident. The Chairman: We are going to run out of time so I think that this will have to be the last question. Q175 Baroness Knight of Collingtree: I want to go back to something Dr Homden said a while ago. She said that the problem is increasing. I have been struggling to get the numbers because I want to have at least a vague idea of how big the problem is. The Prime Minister has himself said that there are 65,000 children in care, but that turns out to be the figure for England. I understand that the true figure for the whole of the UK is around 90,000. Can you confirm that that is correct? Dr Carol Homden: The last figure I had was 85,000, but I suspect that you are correct and I do not wish to give you the wrong figure. We will most certainly provide a written note on that for you. However, presentation to care has gone up enormously. Jeanne Kaniuk: Not all of them need to be adopted. Dr Carol Homden: No, of course not, nor would it be appropriate for that to happen. But, of course, the proportionalities are unlikely to change, and therefore an increase in presentation to care pretty much inevitably means an increase in the number of children for whom adoption would be the appropriate decision. 427

Coram—Oral evidence (QQ 156–186) Q176 Baroness Morris of Bolton: Thank you very much. Where concurrent planning has been tried, in Brighton and Hove and Manchester, for example, what have been the main difficulties and challenges, and how can they be overcome? Dr Carol Homden: Brighton and Hove reports experiencing a hostile local court, which made the team’s work more difficult, but the Goodman project in Manchester has enjoyed excellent relationships with the court. There is certainly a continuing training need for family lawyers as well as the judiciary, and certainly a need for the active provision of research evidence to support the court. I am pleased to say that Brighton and Hove has in fact continued to make some limited concurrent planning placements. The Manchester Adoption Society failed because of financial challenges to mainstream adoption. The interagency fee is not high enough and it was not able to make enough placements to bear the cash burden. There has been an increase in the fee, but it remains structurally at odds with the actual price and we need to move to full cost recovery. We also need to move to a situation where the same fee is applied between local authorities as it is between local authorities and voluntary adoption agencies; that is, we need a level playing field that would remove any perception of disincentive to undertake the most active family finding at the earliest point across boundaries. What Coram’s concurrent planning centre shows is that it remains a challenge to secure all the elements working in concert: referral in the face of changes in local authority social work teams and actually knowing what it is; the experience of social workers, who are often young and inexperienced, when facing these life-changing decisions; presentational capacity and capability in legal teams; and volatility of income. But it also demonstrates that it can be done and that it can be sustained over time, massively to the benefit of children. With 13 years of experience, there have been no disruptions and the decision time has been halved. What the Harrow model shows is that embedded partnership is the most successful model of all, where the early permanency process incorporates concurrent planning where appropriate but the tracking process is rigorous, with leadership ensuring that all parts of the process are working to the benefit of children. We are delighted that this is being replicated and embedded by Cambridgeshire, and I am sure that Judge Plumstead would be honoured and delighted if any of you were able to join her for the launch on 18 July in Cambridgeshire. We are now launching from the Coram centre a wider subscription scheme to enable capacity building by smaller local authorities that cannot afford to dedicate a specific team, or take the risk of having such a team, by creating a distributed team of accredited professionals in local authorities across England, with Coram providing national programme efficacy to ensure its sufficiency. Q177 The Chairman: Dr Homden, it would be terribly helpful if, having given us that short resume, you could set out for us two aspects in written evidence. One is the work that you are doing in Cambridgeshire and with the smaller local authorities, and the other is the cost implications. I think that a lot of us would be quite shaken to know that there is more of a problem between local authorities on cost than there is between local authorities and voluntary agencies. Please expand on that, because the cost implications are clearly one of the factors that we are going to have to take into account. We shall be extremely grateful for all the evidence you can give us on those aspects. Lady Morris, I am sorry that I interrupted you.

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Coram—Oral evidence (QQ 156–186) Q178 Baroness Morris of Bolton: I wanted only to thank Carol Homden for the last part of that answer. I was about to ask what Coram is doing with all its wonderful expertise. However, am I right in thinking that Manchester is not doing concurrent planning? Dr Carol Homden: Manchester Adoption Society went into administration. The Chairman: I heard about that. It is too sad. Q179 Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top: Are there any other examples of concurrent planning in the north? Dr Carol Homden: Not in this technical sense. Jonathan is here and in our Coram/Barnardo’s DfE project we have been providing training and support to Barnardo’s to try to develop and accelerate the interest of local authorities in the north, and there are some encouraging signs. There is a set of local authorities around where the Manchester Adoption Society was—Wigan and Bury, I believe—with a long history of making those placements. Moreover, the court was highly experienced. So we have two potential hubs in the north that could be accelerated if the other training and perceptual barriers can be overcome. The Chairman: You have some good judges up there who are interested in adoption. Dr Carol Homden: Absolutely. There is extensive experience with Coram in London, and some now in East Anglia and the south-east. We are also working with the Midlands authorities to develop a concurrent planning centre with them. Perhaps we have not quite got to the south-west yet, although we commend Bristol as having excellent outcomes for children despite not yet having concurrent planning. The Chairman: As I say, we would be very grateful for some additional evidence on that. We need to move now to transracial adoption. Viscount Eccles. Q180 Viscount Eccles: The evidence shows that it takes longer to place black and minority ethnic children than others. Would changes to legislation help with this, and are there any other positive changes that could be made? Jeanne Kaniuk: Our view is that legislation would not really help in this regard. There are differences in the rates at which children from different groups are placed. Dr Julie Selwyn has published some very good research, and it not so much the children from mixed backgrounds as the black African and Asian children who appear to be waiting longer. There are specific reasons for this. Black African children generally come into care at age four plus, so they are already at an age when the process is going to be more complicated. There is also an issue around religion. Asian children come from a lot of different religious groups. That is quite important to the parents of the children who are going to be adopted because a lot of those babies are relinquished by mothers who may have had their child out of wedlock in a culture where that is still completely unacceptable. Moreover, religion is very important to a lot of receiving families, so finding matches can be complicated. I think that the law already makes it clear that race and ethnicity should be a consideration rather than the overriding consideration. In our view, it remains a consideration alongside a lot of other factors in a child’s life. For instance, if a child comes from a background where the mother has a history of serious mental illness, finding a family who can accept a child with a genetic predisposition to

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Coram—Oral evidence (QQ 156–186) mental illness may be a more important factor than considering race and ethnicity alone. It is one factor among many and the present legislation allows for that, so I do not think that it is necessary to strengthen the law. I think that that would be Coram’s position. Dr Carol Homden: We think it is important to recall that it is adopters who ultimately decide whether they adopt. The question of family welcome and family integration is a key concern for them, as is the concern that children should not experience any compounded stigma. These factors are important and alive in adopters’ minds. Of course, we are in a system where there is an overall shortage of adopters. The solution—if there is a solution, which we need to find— is to welcome as many adopters and to put the greatest diversity into the system as we possibly can, thus enabling placement options for children and encouraging adopters to consider the widest range of children who they may be able to offer a home to. We welcome the proposal for a national gateway for adoption and support the national customer service standards to ensure that adopters receive a warm welcome. It is clear to them that they can choose to go to a range of agencies and that children have maximum placement choice. Q181 Baroness King of Bow: In terms of religion, you say that adopters decide this, and to an extent they do. However, I was asked to bring my son up as a Muslim. I agreed to do so because I wanted to adopt him, even though I am Jewish and my husband is Catholic. We agreed to bring him up as a Muslim, but how are they going to test whether we do or we do not? It was not mentioned again, but it was the birth mother’s request, even though it transpired that she was not a Muslim. I wonder whether perhaps too much attention is given to the wishes of the families. Would you say that attention to that should be reduced and to the other factors it should be increased? Jeanne Kaniuk: I recognise what you are talking about. We live in such a cosmopolitan and multicultural world, particularly in London and some of the other metropolitan areas, so one has to use a degree of common sense. There are children who come from backgrounds where the families are embedded in a culture and a religion where if in the future that child wants to make contact with his family, he will have been done a disservice if he has been in a religion where there is a lot of hostility. Quite frankly, a degree of judgment has to be brought to these matters. Is that a sufficient response? The Chairman: On that note, we will move on to the issue of contact. Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top: In a sense this issue has already come up. Do you feel that the right balance has been struck on contact with the birth family? I wonder if you could tell us a little more about what the research shows about the effect of contact or lack of contact on children all the way through. Is there any evidence that would help us in what we should be thinking about in terms of contact? Again, do you think there should be any legislative change? Jeanne Kaniuk: I shall touch quickly on the contact that takes place during care proceedings. Coram has been involved in an important piece of research that looked at the impact on babies going through care proceedings. High levels of contact are very stressful and babies do not get into a routine. That is a piece of research which indicates that we need to be more sensitive to the needs of babies when setting up these arrangements. I think you have had the references in previous sessions, but we can let you have them.

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Coram—Oral evidence (QQ 156–186) Post adoption, there is quite a lot of mythology around contact. Different pieces of research have looked at different populations and used different measures. I do not think that there is any clear research evidence that would give a general picture of when contact is appropriate and when it is not. I think that it is a matter of judgment according to the needs of individual children. Moreover, the context of their families needs to be understood. The world has changed. We do not have such a thing as closed adoption these days. Children need to understand their story. Most families with adopted children will have what is called letterbox contact, which is an exchange of information through an anonymous system. Face-to-face contact is much more uncommon; it occurs more with siblings than with parents. But in a world of social media, the internet and so on, you cannot guarantee families’ confidentiality in the way you used to. There is a range of things that adopters have to understand and think about in relation to what will be manageable for them and what is right for their child. It must be remembered that once children have been adopted, they have parents with parental responsibility for deciding what is in their interests. Broadly, one needs to be cautious about what is initially set up, and that opportunities for review need to be built in. Sometimes children who do not have contact at an early stage have quite a burning need to find out more as they grow up, and possibly to have a meeting with someone from their family. That needs to be facilitated. Sometimes the contact which is set up at the start, even letterbox contact, is not actually wanted by the children. They feel that it is an intrusion. Certainly I know that children who have been abused have been quite shocked to find out that their adopters were sending an annual letter to families that they had negative feelings about. There are no simple answers and I do not think you can legislate for these things. Much of what we are talking about is terribly complicated and needs careful thought and judgment. Dr Carol Homden: There is new research into the impact on infants and we believe that it needs to be weighed heavily in the minds of judges. Stress is damaging. Very frequent, poorly managed contact causes stress, and therefore it really does need to be taken seriously when decisions are taken. Coram proposes that a further statement or judicial leadership from the President of the Family Division may be helpful in setting standards and guidelines so that what has been learnt from the research into the impact of frequent contact on infants is taken more into consideration. It appears to be a matter of case law rather than of primary legislation. When the Jenny Kendrick research was debated by the Family Justice Council in December 2010, which supports the wider Australian study showing that the impact on young children could be counter to their welfare, Lord Justice Munby personally supported the wider dissemination of these and other findings to the judiciary. In the Coram survey of adopters’ concerns, the issue of managing contact is very prominent among those matters that cause them and their children ongoing difficulty. If that is the perception, it could be a disincentive for potential adopters to come forward. But irrespective of that, we need to give considerable attention to the quality of support needed to manage these complex issues, if it is appropriate for contact to take place. Coram’s practice note is available to the committee on the principles and practice for contact. The Chairman: Perhaps you could send it to us. I am getting concerned about time. We have two more questions we want to ask. Perhaps both the questions and the oral answers could be kept short.

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Coram—Oral evidence (QQ 156–186) Q182 Baroness Knight of Collingtree: When a child has a placement order in force but is waiting for a suitable match, what monitoring goes on? Does it happen universally in all local authorities or only in a few? Where it does happen, do you consider the monitoring to be adequate or should there be more? Jeanne Kaniuk: This will be considered at the regular looked-after children’s reviews which are chaired by independent reviewing officers. An order should be a serious consideration and these children should be placed for adoption. I think that there is anecdotal evidence that children drift. There are children in the system who have had placement orders for a number of years, but who have not been placed for adoption. We would suggest that there should be guidance to strengthen the role of independent reviewing officers to ensure that, if children have not been adopted after 12 months, careful thought is given as to whether the status is still appropriate or whether other plans for permanence should be sought. Q183 Baroness Knight of Collingtree: Are the reviews regular? Jeanne Kaniuk: Yes. They take place every six months. Q184 Baroness Howarth of Breckland: I think that the Chairman has already asked you to write to us about adoption agencies and what is interfering with the costings, so I am not going to repeat that question. Instead, I shall ask a brief question with regard to what you have said about research. Some years ago the Messages from Research had a big impact, but some of that research has been overtaken by other evidence. Would it be useful if Dartington or someone else did another big impact piece of work across the whole sector on messages from research? Would it be something that we might usefully recommend? Jeanne Kaniuk: I think that would be a really excellent article because a lot of interesting research has been done over the past five to 10 years. To pull it all together in one document would be very helpful to us all. Q185 The Chairman: Could I just add to the point that Lady Howarth decided not to ask because she thought that I had asked it? I do not think that I put a question about the cost of voluntary agencies and the extent to which they are being used. Are they being used sufficiently effectively? Could we perhaps have that in writing as well? Dr Carol Homden: Yes, indeed. Jeanne Kaniuk: Yes. Q186 The Chairman: Thank you very much indeed. We are extremely grateful to both of you for having come to us twice. We have gained a great deal from your contributions and we look forward to receiving your written evidence. However, because you are from one of the centres of excellence, it would be very helpful if we could come back to you in the autumn with further questions if other evidence comes up. Perhaps I may say both to you and to Mr Ewen from Barnardo’s that we are likely to come back to you and ask, “What do you think about this?” Dr Carol Homden: We would be delighted.

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Coram—Supplementary written evidence

Coram—Supplementary written evidence Draft Legislation on Adoption: Early Permanence through Fostering for Adoption and Matching for Adoption 1. Placement of looked after children with prospective adopters. 1.i Coram entirely supports the aim of this proposed amendment, which is to ensure that children are placed in what is likely to become their permanent (adoptive) family as early as possible. In the context of other recently introduced reforms and emerging data, however, it appears that that the point between the local authority reaching the decision (made by the Agency Decision Maker), that adoption is the plan for this child, and the Placement Order being made may no longer be the most significant point for reform aimed at reducing delay. 1.ii Coram has evidence from a number of local authorities with whom we are currently working which suggests that the mean time between ADM decision and Placement Order is now 2 months. Anecdotal evidence from LAs across England also shows that the 26 week timescale for proceedings is now being achieved in a significant number of areas. If this proves to be a widespread improvement, it would seem that there would be relatively few cases where it would be appropriate to subject the child to a move before the final hearing. 1.iii There will be considerable concern about the implications for birth parents of moving children who are in proceedings prior to the granting of a Placement Order. This could be seen to reduce/remove the opportunity for parents to make their case in court without the hurdle of a child already being in a potentially permanent placement where s/he is forming an attachment which it might be damaging to break if the decision were to go in the parents’ favour. There are likely to be a significant number of challenges in court which might in fact cause of further delay for those children if this legislation goes ahead in this form. 1.iv Coram supports the dual assessment of foster carers/adopters and is active in pursuit of wider application of its use and exploration of “fostering for adoption” approaches which encourage more foster carers to adopt or potential adopters to foster first. Moving children in proceedings is however likely only to be suitable for very young (preverbal) children. It is unlikely to be appropriate to move a child who is aware that the ‘wise judge’ has yet to decide whether or not s/he can go home, from an established foster carer to a potential adoptive family.? 1.v Given the importance of ensuring that we reduce drift and delay for children in proceedings, Coram suggests that rather than concentrate on the period between ADM decision and Placement Order, further consideration is given to ensuring that appropriate action is taken at the earliest opportunity when children are born to parents who are known to the authorities to be high risk and to the promotion of foster first schemes to promote the route to permanence for older children (as in the early pilot by PACT).

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Coram—Supplementary written evidence 1.vi Where possible pre-birth conferences should be arranged and actions put in train at the earliest opportunity for appropriate action to be taken, in case of known risk and repeat proceedings including if necessary, applications for Emergency Protection Orders so that these children can be brought into the care system and under the court’s scrutiny, and plans for their future (whether return home, adoption or other order), be put in train without delay. 1.vii Certainly more children would benefit from concurrent planning placements, which the government is already promoting as a means to ensure early permanence. It is a transparent process for all parties and we can and should remove any bureaucratic impediments and promote dual assessment to a larger number of prospective adopters to enable and maximise placements for children. It would be appropriate to include in the adopter assessments a section on their capacity to undertake “risk adoption placements” alongside their capacity to consider special needs. In this way, we will identify at an early stage a pool of adopters who could be considered for concurrent-light placements. 1.viii Even where concurrent planning is not be possible, early court decisions that adoption should be the outcome (where appropriate) should still result in babies being placed well before 12 months of age if courts adhere to the 26 week timescale. 2. Adoption agencies: repeal of requirement to give due consideration to ethnicity (England) 2.i The government’s concern to reduce delay in achieving adoption placements for children is warmly welcomed. In efforts to ensure this is effected, it is essential to ensure that there are no further impediments – whether actual or perceptual – to its achievement. 2.ii In the past too much weight has arguably been given to factors of racial matching by a number of Local Authorities and social workers, and this has certainly contributed to unacceptable delay for a number of children. This situation is changing rapidly. 2.iii As a voluntary adoption agency, all Coram’s placements are interagency, and we work with a wide range of Local Authorities across the country. Each year we place in excess of 60 children. Our experience which is echoed by colleagues in other agencies is that the climate has shifted significantly over the past couple of years. Whilst there is occasional poor practice, the majority of Local Authorities are now flexible and realistic in seeking families for their BME children, and we make a number of successful trans-racial placements each year. 2.iv The reality remains that not all families will feel that this is what they wish to do, and many of the children who do wait have additional needs which will continue to militate against them being matched regardless of their race or ethnicity. 2.v Coram is concerned that a proposal to remove the duty to give due consideration to a child’s religious persuasion, racial origin, and cultural and linguistic background is potentially tackling an issue which is in any case changing with society’s attitudes and the result may be contrary to the intention sought.

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Coram—Supplementary written evidence

2.vi It is possible and even likely that the change will be mistakenly interpreted by some social workers as meaning that no consideration can/should be given to any of these matters. This could lead to “first in the queue” matching, failing to consider the issues which could face the child from some religious backgrounds if/when they seek out their birth family from another. It could certainly lead to selective choices so that some children are not put forward for adoption. A difference between England and Wales can only reduce placement choice for children. 2.vii It would be appropriate to place consideration of religious persuasion, racial origin and cultural and linguistic background in the “welfare checklist” in section 1 (4) of the current ACA 2002. Coram considers however that a more straightforward and powerful way to address the possibility of delay might rather to leave the current due consideration clause unaffected but strengthen clause 3 to state explicitly that matters of race and religion must not be causes of undue delay. Such a redrafting would promote reform to the benefit of children. 16 November 2012

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Martha Cover, Nicola Jones-King and Ian Bugg—Oral evidence (QQ 622–667)

Martha Cover, Nicola Jones-King and Ian Bugg—Oral evidence (QQ 622–667) Evidence Session No. 11

Heard in Public

Questions 622–667

TUESDAY 13 NOVEMBER 2012 Members present Baroness Butler-Sloss (The Chairman) Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top Baroness Eaton Baroness Hamwee Baroness Knight of Collingtree Baroness Morris of Bolton Lord Morris of Handsworth Baroness Walmsley Lord Warner ________________ Examination of Witnesses Martha Cover, Co-Chair, Association of Lawyers for Children, Nicola Jones-King, ViceChair, Association of Lawyers for Children, and Ian Bugg, National Committee Member, Family Law Bar Association, gave evidence.

Q622 Lord Warner: Good morning and welcome. Thank you very much for coming today. You will observe that I am not the Baroness Butler-Sloss but she will be here in about 20 or 30 minutes, something like that, and she will take over the chair when she arrives. I am merely sitting in to get the proceedings going. Many of this Committee will probably be known to you, but if not you will see who we are. We are being webcast, which is now becoming quite common practice, so we will be live from now on. If there are any opening statements that you would like to make, do feel free to make them. In the meantime, could you introduce yourself for the record? Say who you are and where you are from. Martha Cover: Yes. I am Martha Cover. I am a barrister and I specialise in child protection law and adoption, and I am the co-chair of the Association of Lawyers for Children. Ian Bugg: I am Ian Bugg. I am a barrister with the Family Law Bar Association. 436

Martha Cover, Nicola Jones-King and Ian Bugg—Oral evidence (QQ 622–667) Nicola Jones-King: I am Nicola Jones-King. I am a solicitor. I am vice-chair of the Association of Lawyers for Children. I also practise in child protection and adoption matters, day-to-day. Q623 Lord Warner: Are there any points you want to make before we start or shall we begin with the questions that we were thinking of asking you? Martha Cover: I think we should begin with the questions. They are very broad and comprehensive questions. Q624 Lord Warner: All right. Thank you very much. The first question is about the time taken in placing children for adoption. To what extent do you consider it to be, first, desirable and, secondly, feasible, for the majority of care proceedings to be completed within a period of six months? Martha Cover: It would be desirable for care proceedings to be able to be completed properly within six months, because any delay to settling the arrangements for children—these children in particular—is very inimical to their welfare, but it is not feasible at the moment. From the enormous amount of research that has been done over the last few years, we know that about 40% of cases are still being brought to the courts for applications for care orders with no upto-date core assessment of the child and his family. Therefore, a great deal of the work has to be done within the proceedings. A court cannot make these very serious decisions about a child’s welfare without having the necessary information and assessments, and that includes, in the appropriate case, expert assessments. We also know that of all the applications for care orders that are made nationally, only 50% of those end up with a care order being made, so that in 50% of cases the court finds another route that it considers to be in the best interests of the child: either a return home or a return to relatives under a special guardianship order or residence order, or some other form of permanent arrangement that does not involve the child remaining a looked-after child. That is quite a high indication of how valuable the intervention of the court experts, guardians and lawyers is in making these decisions. The trouble at the moment is that only 30% of cases nationally are capable of being decided within 26 weeks. That is the initial data that we are getting back from the case management system that Mr Justice Ryder has put in place since April of this year: only about 30% are capable of being decided in 26 weeks. Q625 Lord Warner: If it is desirable, what are the things that, in your view, have to take place before it becomes feasible? Martha Cover: What has to take place is effectively a revolution in social work. You may or may not have heard already from Professor Eileen Munro, who led a very lengthy survey of social work practice. Her recommendations are very clear and they are enthusiastically supported by the social work profession. We are not blaming the social workers for this. They are overwhelmed. They come into social work to do their very best for the child. They want to help people. They are tremendously overburdened and they are also overburdened with bureaucracy and managerial cultures, which put enormous demands on them and prevent them from spending the time with the family and the children that they need to spend. They know that. Often social workers will use care proceedings to share the responsibility for decision-making with the court and also to access

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Martha Cover, Nicola Jones-King and Ian Bugg—Oral evidence (QQ 622–667) the kind of resources, through court orders, to assess the family properly that they have not been able to get beforehand. That is how they use court proceedings. If you talk to social workers on the ground, rather than to senior managers who have different perspectives and different needs for their organisation as a whole, that is what they will tell you about how they use court proceedings. Q626 Lord Warner: Are there any other points your colleagues would like to make? Ian Bugg: Only this. Obviously there are cases where it would be entirely desirable to have the proceedings concluded within that period of time, but there is another type of case in which a period of purposeful delay during the course of proceedings is of assistance to the birth family. For example, it gives the birth mother an opportunity to make the changes that have been identified at the beginning. It enables the family to address those difficulties to see whether rehabilitation has any prospect of success. If you lose that opportunity then, undoubtedly, there will be orders that are made that are then challenged later or there will be attempts to overturn the decision later. Q627 Baroness Morris of Bolton: My question moves on from that and the question is looking at some of the practicalities. It is quite a long question but it has three very distinct parts. First of all, from your experience, are applications for placement orders typically heard together with or immediately after care proceedings, and how, if at all, do you think placing a six-month time limit on the completion of care proceedings will impact on current practice? Then finally, do you have any concerns about how the proposed reforms to care proceedings will impact on subsequent adoption proceedings? Ian Bugg: We all agree that, from our experience, placement orders are typically bolted on to care proceedings, often at the same time on the same day, so that there is no opportunity for a birth family to reflect on the different approach that ought to be taken with placement orders in comparison to care orders. We acknowledge that care orders, according to the jurisprudence, should be temporary orders. It should be permission for the state to intervene in a family’s life, which should come to an end as soon as the family no longer requires that assistance or that intervention. Q628 Baroness Morris of Bolton: What sort of period of reflection do you think would be desirable? Ian Bugg: If a decision is made that a child is not going to return to a birth family for a period of time or for the duration of the child’s childhood, then a birth family really ought to have the opportunity of considering whether there is the prospect that they could give their permission to that permanent placement elsewhere. There is a strong argument for permitting the birth family to try to develop a relationship with the family that are going to be caring for their children, so that, for example, there will not be the difficulties with ongoing contact that can happen. So a short period, not years or months but certainly a few weeks in which it is possible for the family to consider what is going to happen. However, I know that there are funding issues that arise if the placement order application and the care order application are uncoupled.

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Martha Cover, Nicola Jones-King and Ian Bugg—Oral evidence (QQ 622–667) Q629 Baroness Walmsley: I am going to be the devil’s advocate here. It may sound a little harsh on birth families, but is there any evidence as to how long families, whose children may be the subject of a care order, have been in contact with the social services with regard to concern about the children’s wellbeing? Surely the imminence of a care order, or even a placement order, is not the first intimation that the parents have had that they are not doing the right thing for their children? Ian Bugg: No, it is not, but of course it may be the first time they have objective, independent advice about the local authority’s concerns when they get the letter through the post saying, “Come to a meeting and you have the opportunity to consult a solicitor”. If you have a family where one or both partners have a learning disability—English may not be their first language, they may not be literate—there may have been a succession of social workers dealing with their case. There may have been long periods of time when their case was not allocated to a single worker. Care proceedings crystallises all of those issues. It provides them with independent advice and it provides the child with independent representation. The guardian often intervenes between the local authority and the parent to try to see whether some change can be rendered. So, although there may have been a significant bow wave to the proceedings, actually getting work done often begins only when the proceedings commence. Q630 Baroness Walmsley: It sounds to me as if you are saying that it is desirable then to have a time lag between the two? Ian Bugg: It is desirable to have some. I go back to what Martha said a moment ago. If we are going to have short hearings generally, if the modernisation of family justice requires there to be a 26-week hearing of the entire duration of care proceedings, then there will have to be a significant amount of pre-proceedings work done, with a resource-led opportunity for the parents to have access to representation, to be able to discuss their concerns, and for assessments to be undertaken. Martha Cover: I would say that we do know that the great majority of children who come into care proceedings have been “known” to the local authority for a very long time. The majority of them have been known for a year. A lot of them have been known for a lot longer. But that does not mean that there has ever been a concerted, well-resourced, intensive plan to effect change within that family. One often sees—this is absolutely classic—repeated short-term interventions, repeated section 47 inquiries by the local authority or by the police, which end in the sad refrain, “case closed”. Again, that is not a criticism of social workers on the ground but a reflection of the enormous pressure that they are under. We know that the threshold of “harm” or “risk” for taking care proceedings is very high, but it does not mean that there has been a concerted, intelligent, sustained attempt to effect change and, therefore, the court is presented with a situation that is often in chaos, on both sides, both within the family and within the local authority. Q631 Baroness Hamwee: I do not want to take us too far off the road, but the mention of access to representation prompts me to ask whether there are problems in finding representation. Do families find it easy to get representation? Martha Cover: We know that the number of specialist family law firms—solicitors firms on the high street which have a contract with the Legal Services Commission to do this very

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Martha Cover, Nicola Jones-King and Ian Bugg—Oral evidence (QQ 622–667) special work—has declined by about 40% since 2001. It might be a little higher than that. That is the number of firms. There are areas of the country––in fairly large towns––where there may be only one firm that holds a legal aid contract to do this work. That is very difficult because if you have mum being represented by one firm, that firm cannot represent grandmother if grandmother’s case is different, so they may have to go some distance to find another solicitor. Q632 Baroness Morris of Bolton: The third part of my question was about how you think the reforms will impact on adoption. Do you think they will have a direct impact on it? Ian Bugg: Yes, almost certainly. If you have shorter hearings then it is likely that the assessment of the birth family and wider kin is going to be less thorough, unless it is all done in advance. Inevitably you are going to have people who come along at the very last moment and say, “I am an uncle or an aunt. I have not been assessed. I would gladly look after my nephew or niece and nobody has ever spoken to me”. They will probably pop up at the very last moment and, in those circumstances, it is extremely likely that the court will permit them the opportunity to make an application and will permit them the opportunity to be assessed. The reason for that of course is that, in order to make a placement order and in order to make the decision that adoption is the only thing that can happen for this child, the family has to have been completely ruled out. Q633 Baroness Morris of Bolton: Martha, is that the pre-proceeding work that you said would have to be done—a lot more of it, too—to identify as many people as possible? Martha Cover: Yes. It is a resource issue. It is also a culture issue because, as Professor Munro has said, we have to restore social work to become a high-trust profession. It has to be a hightrust profession so that individual social workers can go out there and make judgment calls. We know what works. We know from Ofsted’s report what works is a long-term, sustained and honest relationship with a key professional with the family, whether it is a social worker or a health visitor or someone from a youth offending team with older children. That is what works. We have to strip away a lot of the heavy managerial style and bureaucracy and allow social workers to exercise autonomous judgment. We also have to allow them to make mistakes, I am afraid, because no system will eliminate risk. They are managing high-risk situations every day. Nothing will eliminate that. The problem is they are managing the case with one eye on the child and one eye on the tabloids, and that is just the reality of their lives. Q634 Baroness Knight of Collingtree: Do you think that what you have just said is one of the reasons why we have seen figures that fewer and fewer children are being adopted and more and more are being taken into care by social services? Martha Cover: I think that the number of children adopted from care has remained pretty consistent for many years. Under the previous Government, Tony Blair led the Prime Minister’s Cabinet Review on Adoption in 2000, and there was a very strong push towards getting more children adopted from care. A huge amount of resources was put into it and they did get the figures up from about 3,000 a year to about 4,000 a year, or a little bit more. It is now back to 3,000 a year but, if you look at it over a 10-year period, it has remained remarkably consistent. There are a lot of reasons why more children are not adopted from care. Other routes towards having a child—surrogacy and other forms of having a child—are becoming more available to people. That is another reason. 440

Martha Cover, Nicola Jones-King and Ian Bugg—Oral evidence (QQ 622–667) Baroness Knight of Collingtree: That is interesting, thank you. Q635 Baroness Walmsley: I would like to ask about placement orders. Is it your experience that it is common practice for local authorities only to start seeking a family to adopt once a placement order has been made? If the answer is yes, do you know why? It has been suggested to us that this is happening, although of course it cannot happen at all in the case of fostering for adoption, can it? It seems to us strange if that is common practice. Ian Bugg: It is common practice. Baroness Walmsley: It is? Why? Ian Bugg: The reason that has been given to me regularly is that adoption agencies guard their lists of adopters jealously. They are a small group and the agencies have invested an awful lot of time, energy and money into selecting and vetting their lists. They do not want to relinquish the names to social workers around the country who are looking for permanent placements until they are guaranteed that that is going to be at least taken to a match, which they cannot do without a placement order. So, rather than permit one of their names to be taken off the radar, they wait until there is a placement order. There is a corollary to that. If, as happens fairly often, a judge says, “I want there to be a thorough search of prospective adopters, even though there is not yet a placement order”, it looks like a suspicious case. It looks like a case in which there may be a delay for a placement order, and so agencies are even less inclined to let those names go forward. It is not a criticism. It is simply the fact that they have such a small list that, as soon as that name comes off and is presented to a social worker, they are not available for other social workers. I think it is the form F that identifies the carer. They are taken off the availability list, so effectively they are lost to another child who may come along the following day. Nicola Jones-King: It is also about the adopters themselves who are making a commitment to that child at that point. It is very difficult to ask adopters to commit to a child who you cannot tell them is ready to be adopted. That is the usual reason for waiting. Q636 Baroness Walmsley: Do you think it would speed things up if we were able to break down those difficulties? Ian Bugg: You would still have the same difficulties with adopters. They would have misgivings about permitting their name to go to a matching process when there was no certainty that that child would be available at the end of the day. The point about the placement order is that they are aware that, once a placement order is made, there is a relatively short period of time before the child is available to go into their care, but without a placement order it could be a six-month delay, it could be a year, so that there would still be the disquiet that they have on the agencies and within the adoptive families. Q637 Lord Warner: That protectiveness sounds as though it is a function of the smallness of the agencies handling the adoption. I can understand that if you are a small agency and you put a lot of time and effort into getting your little list, that might be a pattern of behaviour, but I cannot understand why it would be a pattern of behaviour if you were a much bigger agency with a much bigger list. Why would you be so worried about one or two of them in that?

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Martha Cover, Nicola Jones-King and Ian Bugg—Oral evidence (QQ 622–667) Ian Bugg: Because, whatever the size of your list, you are taking somebody off the list who would be available to a child with a placement order. Q638 Lord Warner: If I may pursue this because it sounds like a policy of despair almost, that there is nothing that you can do, that there is some ineluctable pattern of human behaviour that will always stop change in this area. Does it not sound like a bit of a policy of despair? Martha Cover: Social workers are very conservative—rightly so—about upsetting people who have been fully assessed by them as prospective adopters, getting their hopes up that they can have a child and keep a child. They will start making a psychological and emotional commitment to that child when they see a photograph, let alone a video, let alone meet them, so it is very hard on the adopters. I think social workers jealously guard them, not just because of the investment they have made, in terms of time and money, but because they sympathise with their position and they do not want to start to search for a specific family before they have a placement order. That is a pretty entrenched culture. I think you can change it but you have to educate social workers to think in a different way. Q639 Baroness Hamwee: We put this point to social workers who gave evidence last week—because we had heard it from others—and they denied it fairly vehemently, I think I am right in recalling. Obviously this can be only anecdotal, but have you detected any difference in the type of agency, the size of agency or indeed geographically? Martha Cover: They will begin searching in the sense that they will begin an initial sift. There is a great deal of paperwork involved. They will look at a whole load of profiles and they will say, “Well, for child X and his little sister, these people are clearly not suitable. We have a short list, perhaps, that we are looking at”. They may then widen the search to other adoption agencies, but there are referral fees that go on—as you may have already heard—between different local authorities. There are turf wars about, as Ian says, “These are our adopters”. They will do the initial sift and try matching in terms of paperwork, but they are not prepared to go as far as going to visit prospective adopters and showing them photographs of the child—they know how attached they can start to become to that child—without a placement order in place. That is certainly our experience in the Association of Lawyers for Children. There may be authorities where they do go that far, but not in our experience. Baroness Hamwee: It is more about giving up your asset. Martha Cover: Yes. Ian Bugg: From the social worker’s point of view, who is responsible for trying to place the child, they are not averse to taking on any of the resources available—Be My Parent or whatever the publications and the websites may be—but there is a limit to how far they can go before a placement order becomes a necessity. Nicola Jones-King: It should not necessarily result in a huge delay because the social worker who has done that initial trawl and has identified some possible families will very often say, at the final hearing and at the placement order hearing, “I have pencilled in time next week to go and visit family A or B to take that next step”. In saying that they are not giving the details of a child to an individual adoptive family, that is not necessarily causing a delay in the overall process. It is just being realistic with those adopters that, until the order is in place, that child is not available in the full legal sense. 442

Martha Cover, Nicola Jones-King and Ian Bugg—Oral evidence (QQ 622–667) Q640 Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top: Sometimes children are left with a placement order for an inordinately long time and they clearly are not going to be placed. Is there any evidence that there are applications to revoke placement orders, and do you think there should be a form of default mechanism set down that would say that if a certain period of time has elapsed then the placement order should be reviewed? Nicola Jones-King: Yes. We feel that a review mechanism would be extremely helpful. I am certainly seeing more applications to revoke. From the point where there were none there are more coming through, and they will tend to be applications by the parents seeking leave to apply because they are concerned that the child has not been placed, or there are parents who have been working hard on the issues that they faced in the care proceedings. They have undergone therapy, or whatever the things were they needed to address, and are now saying to the court, “We want to be reconsidered. We feel we can resume the care of this child”. Q641 Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top: It is not the authority? Nicola Jones-King: No. Those are fairly rare and will be cases where something might have prompted the local authority to say, “No, we have to accept this child is not going to be placed in an adoptive placement and we will revoke”. But most applications I see are parents seeking leave. Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top: That is interesting. Ian Bugg: It is often identified during the hearing itself that a child may be a particularly difficultto-place child. I have done cases where the judge says, “I will grant a placement order but I want to limit it in time. If you have not placed this child within one year then the matter either returns or the placement order has to be reviewed at that point”. There is no means of doing that unless the placements orders have a shelf life and naturally expire after a couple of years, which would assist. Martha Cover: Under the previous law, under “freeing for adoption” as it was called, the local authority had to inform the family if the child was not placed within 12 months, and no such revision was placed on the adoption until now. I think it was a triumph of hope over experience that all these children would be placed and that it would not be a problem. We do think that there should be a review mechanism so that the local authority has to inform the court at the end of one year. Whether there should be any duty for the local authority to apply to revoke a placement order, I do not know whether we have a determined view about that, but certainly there should be an annual review. The other problem is that, once a child is the subject of a placement order, the care order goes into suspended animation and ceases to have effect. The whole mechanism of protection of the care order is suspended and, although the child continues to be a looked-after child, the whole idea of sharing parental responsibility with the birth family also seems to go into suspended animation. They should be invited to looked-after reviews but they are often not. They are often in a state of depression and despair, having just had a placement order made in respect of the child, so they are not in a good place to be that child’s advocate if things are not going well. Q642 The Chairman: Can I just ask you about that? You say there should be a review mechanism. Where do you see that––in primary legislation? Martha Cover: I think it would have to be in primary legislation. 443

Martha Cover, Nicola Jones-King and Ian Bugg—Oral evidence (QQ 622–667) Q643 The Chairman: With then the review and revocation: is that what you are really asking us to do? Martha Cover: There should be an annual review if the child is not placed. The court would have to determine whether or not the local authority should be applying to revoke. There has been a very serious decision recently by Mr Justice Peter Jackson. The Chairman: We saw that. That is why I was asking. Martha Cover: Yes. That was of course freeing because those boys were of an age where it was freeing, but the only advocate for the children’s rights—under the Human Rights Act or otherwise—was the Independent Reviewing Officer, and there were manifest failures in that system which were outlined in that case. The Chairman: Yes. Q644 Baroness Knight of Collingtree: I am cutting to the chase here. I have two questions––one for Mr Bugg and one for Ms Cover. How effective are the children’s guardians in representing the child’s interest in adoption proceedings, and do you have concerns about the current practice? Allied to that, reading your details, Mr Bugg, I see that you represent both the local authorities and the parents. It seems to me that I must ask you: is that not a conflict of interest? Ian Bugg: Yes. Sorry, not at the same time. My experience is representing local authorities, and on separate hearings parents and on separate hearings children. Yes, it would be a conflict if I represented all of them at the same hearing, although perhaps that is for the future. How effective the guardian is at adoption hearings in my experience is incredibly variable around the country. It can be very inconsistent where you may have, in an adoption hearing, parties represented, you may have birth parents turning up, you may have the child represented. In another hearing you may find that almost nobody attends court. Certainly the child is unrepresented and Cafcass knows very little about it and forms the view that there is no need for the child to be represented unless the birth parent is attending or applying to oppose the adoption. So it is very variable. Q645 Baroness Knight of Collingtree: Of course, there have been worrying cases where the child has literally been wrenched from the mother, even a newly-born child. If the local authority has said that, then the police back that up, it seems to me. In that case, supposing you were called for the family, would you be able to put all their concerns in a court hearing? Nicola Jones-King: Yes. That is the very first step and that would be a removal under police protection or an emergency protection order. So you are back at the beginning at that point and, yes, the family are entitled to be represented and challenge an initial application. That is a long way from the end and looking at adoption. You have to go through a lot of steps between the two. Q646 Baroness Knight of Collingtree: How is it that, although every other petitioner in every other type of case seems to be able to hear the evidence against him or her without question, if it is a parent and the local authority is taking the child in, then apparently—this may

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Martha Cover, Nicola Jones-King and Ian Bugg—Oral evidence (QQ 622–667) be quite wrong and I would be delighted if you can tell me that it is—the parents are not allowed to hear the case against them? Nicola Jones-King: They are entitled to hear the case against them. The only time they would not be is if it is a police protection order where a decision is made by an inspector that the child is in such immediate danger that that child needs to be removed for an extremely short period of time. It is a very short order and it has to come back if the child is going to remain separated from the parents. If it is an emergency protection order the parent will be represented unless the situation is so extreme that the court has taken the view that it can be dealt with without the parents being notified of the first hearing. Again, that would be for a short period—a matter of days—before the parents come back and are represented. They will then see the local authority evidence and that will be challenged fully on their behalf. Q647 Baroness Knight of Collingtree: They would automatically hear the case against them unless it was a very strong case? Nicola Jones-King: Unless it was a case where the child’s safety was such that it required to be dealt with. Baroness Knight of Collingtree: I see. That is a great help. Martha Cover: The legal test, which has been set down by the Court of Appeal, is that a child can be removed under an emergency procedure like that, without a court hearing, only where the child’s welfare demands an immediate step to be taken so there is no time to go to court and have a hearing. They are for short periods of time and then it comes into court with the parents properly represented. Nicola Jones-King: They are rare. That is a very, very small part of the cases. Q648 Baroness Knight of Collingtree: Thank you. I may take this further later on because there are concerns expressed on this point. I was very interested to read the “O guardian, where art thou?” piece because that highlighted what seemed to me to be a running feud between the social work departments and the guardians. In one place you say, “Social work departments often resented the guardians parachuting in”. In another part you say, “Guardians who disagreed with social workers were seen as gamekeeper turned poacher”. Then again you say social workers resented the guardians’ freedom to investigate. That is three different parts of your report. Then again, you talk of Cafcass giving evidence to the House of Commons Select Committee, “It was not necessarily important for guardians to visit a child, if the child was under six”. Then you talk about other advice, which Cafcass ignored, “Self-employed guardians were refused work, even as waiting lists grow”. These are just several points picked out. The impression I have is that there is a strong antipathy—I will say no more than that— and big root and branch opposition from one important part of a child’s adoption proceedings and another. Martha Cover: I am sorry. I am not making the link between the point I made about Cafcass and the culture that had grown up where social workers often resented guardians parachuting in and telling them that they had done everything wrong and that they must do it all again. It was certainly evidenced in the Cabinet Review on Adoption in 2000 that that was the attitude of local authorities towards guardians: that guardians interfered, that they wanted everything done again, so that they could see that it was being done properly and so on. But I am not 445

Martha Cover, Nicola Jones-King and Ian Bugg—Oral evidence (QQ 622–667) making the link with your question about how they represent children in adoption proceedings because, first of all, they often do not. Where there is a placement order, the child is not usually represented by guardians at the adoption application stage. You have the care order, the placement order and the adoption order. That is the sequence of legal events. If there is a placement order—Nicola can deal with this as well—unless there are special features of the case, the child is not represented by a guardian and a lawyer in court at the adoption order stage so it does not arise. The conflict or challenge that guardians present to local authorities’ plans for children really arises at the care order stage. If there is going to be a fundamental challenge by the guardian to the local authority’s plan that is where it will arise. Lord Warner: I wonder whether we could move us on to the next question. We can come back to some of these points, perhaps, if there is time at the end. Q649 Baroness Eaton: You have mentioned social workers, and we have certainly seen some and they have given evidence. There really is huge pressure and I fully understand that. My question is about the work of social workers. Do you think they are currently in a position to deliver the timely, high-quality assessments needed that will alleviate the court’s current reliance on independent experts, and do you support the current moves to reduce reliance on experts in care and adoption proceedings? Martha Cover: The answer to the first question has to be “No”. In a significant proportion of cases, they are not in a position to deliver timely, high-quality assessments prior to proceedings. This is despite their best efforts and the best efforts of the judges in developing preproceedings protocols. The resources are not there. Also the social workers on the ground are simply not sufficiently well-trained, well-supervised or allowed the time to do this type of work. When you do see it you think, “How has she done it? It is a fantastic piece of work. She has got in there. She has held on to a family where there is alcohol abuse and violence and people going to prison, and she has hung in there and she has done this assessment. She has seen these children at school, she has seen them on their own, she has seen them with their mother and with their grandmother”, and so you have the information and you just want to present them with bouquets, really. I have to say it is rare, it is quite rare. I do not know whether my colleagues want to chip in. Ian Bugg: The system has tended to de-skill social workers to a large degree. When I started in practice the social workers customarily would produce reports about the children’s attachment and make recommendations about the future. Over time the system—probably the advocates have played a part in this—has de-skilled the social workers so that we suggest that attachment assessments and things like that ought to be done by experts rather than the social workers. Q650 Baroness Eaton: No, that is understandable. We are largely talking about what happens to social work training experience and supervision. If that was better resourced and better-developed, then there would not be the need for the experts, but because one is failing then obviously we are reliant on the other. Ian Bugg: I think it is all resources. Nicola Jones-King: It is caseload, of course. Many social workers, if they have the experience and skills, have too many cases to be able to put that level of input into each individual family to produce that piece of evidence, so that is the other part of the balance.

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Martha Cover, Nicola Jones-King and Ian Bugg—Oral evidence (QQ 622–667) Q651 The Chairman: Is one of the reasons that the social workers with experience tend to be moved upwards into management posts, and so they then tend not to have a caseload? Would you think it would be desirable if more senior social workers retained some caseload, in addition to doing line management and so on? Nicola Jones-King: That is certainly helpful. You have probably seen something about the triborough project in London, where they are working on trying to improve the social work evidence that is presented with the first application. One of the things that they are working with in that is having a more senior person effectively checking all the work before it comes to court just to give that eye to it and say, “Well, perhaps we ought to look at this again. We could have done that a bit better” so that the document that is presented at the first hearing has a higher quality, has more analysis and thought. That obviously then assists the court in making a decision about whether it needs any additional evidence or whether it has sufficient in that statement. Q652 The Chairman: It is quite clear that the Government is very anxious to reduce the number of experts in these care cases. With the six months limit, it is going to make it more difficult. Consequently it is going to be important, is not it, that social workers do what you were saying Martha and produce those expert reports that you and I have seen in the past? Martha Cover: Yes. Of course there are large areas where they simply will not have the expertise. Social workers are not clinicians. One of the factors is that we are much more sophisticated—some people might think we are too sophisticated—about diagnosing or overdiagnosing ADHD, autistic spectrum disorder and so on. If those issues arise, whether in the context of a child’s education, the school is saying, “We think this child might be on the autistic spectrum”, and the social worker cannot do that assessment. We do know that the majority of expert reports in these cases are on the adults so that the majority of psychological and psychiatric reports are about the parents. That is because 50% of parents in these cases have some form of mental health difficulty and 25% or 20%—depending on which survey you read— have learning disabilities, so they are massively over-represented. Quite often we find that those parents are coming into care proceedings and they have never been diagnosed before, so that social workers who have had two years of involvement will say, “Well, the mother seems very pleasant, and she agrees with everything we say and she says she will do it” and then she goes away and she does not do it. You get into care proceedings and you find out that she has an IQ of 68 but, because she has a good social manner, no one has mentioned the fact that she has learning difficulties and so you have to work with her in a different way. That is the sort of expertise that social workers cannot replicate, I am afraid. However there is no reason why those assessments should not be done pre-proceedings, except for resources. Lord Warner: Can I move this on to contact? Baroness Morris. Baroness Morris of Bolton: Sorry, I thought I was doing eight? Lord Morris of Handsworth: I think I am doing it. Lord Warner: Sorry, I have the wrong gender. Lord Morris. Q653 Lord Morris of Handsworth: Thank you. I am making the assumption that, at any part of the process, contact is probably the most sensitive area to be handled, dealt with and advised on. What, if any, impact has the 2002 Act had on contact arrangements between the 447

Martha Cover, Nicola Jones-King and Ian Bugg—Oral evidence (QQ 622–667) child and members of the birth family, both prior to and after final adoption orders are made? Do you have any concerns about the way in which the arrangements for contact with birth family members—both prior to and post-adoption—are handled, and the role of the court in particular? In your view, is any legislative change needed on the issue? Martha Cover: The Adoption and Children Act set out a new welfare checklist, because it appreciated that making decisions about adoption are qualitatively different. As Ian has said, making a decision that a child should be looked after by a local authority in law is not a permanent decision because the local authority must review that plan every six months, as a minimum, to see whether that is still in the child’s interests. We do not need the European case law to tell us that, but that tells us that as well. Of course an adoption decision is the most serious intervention in a child’s family life, and in his parents’ family life, and it severs the legal relationship, so the checklist in the Adoption and Children Act sets out a much higher test for looking at the effect on the child throughout his life of being an adopted person and not just his childhood, and the effect on him of stopping having relationships with certain people, and so on. The effect of the way it is worked out in practice is that, in our view, contact is rarely properly considered and analysed at the placement order stage. By the time you get to the adoption application, although the birth parents are still legally entitled to be there, and they are automatic respondents to that—they are served with notice of the adoption application—they are not represented. They are there sometimes; they do turn up. The commonest factor in all care proceedings is poverty. About 85% of families who are the subject of care proceedings are living at or below the poverty line. These are not people who have been well-educated. They are not articulate and it is hard for them to put a case for contact on their own at that point, so the effect— Q654 Lord Morris of Handsworth: Forgive me, but are you saying that there is no provision in law for the voice of the birth parents at that critical moment? Martha Cover: No. It is very, very difficult to get legal aid for them, and by definition they cannot afford to be legally represented. They can turn up but they are not entitled to oppose the adoption order. They have no right in law to oppose the adoption order. The judge has a legal duty to consider contact, but there is nobody to make a case for them and their child is not represented either. The net effect of the way that it is operated is really to prevent proper judicial scrutiny, with parents and child legally represented, about the possible benefits to the child of continuing contact. Q655 Lord Morris of Handsworth: Do you think that should be changed? The last sentence of my question: is any legislative change needed on the issue of contact? Martha Cover: It is not so much legislative change as change to practice, so that we are enabled under legal aid rates—it is not a “get rich quick” scheme or anything—to represent these people and to make a considered application. We know about the research into the benefits of post-adoption contact for children, not in every case but in many cases, but those arguments are not being put. Ian Bugg: There are several opportunities for the question of ongoing contact to be scrutinised. It is in the care plan for a start—or it should be—so it is considered at the time that the care order is made. If at the same time, or shortly after that, there is a placement

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Martha Cover, Nicola Jones-King and Ian Bugg—Oral evidence (QQ 622–667) order application, it has to be reconsidered then, and then finally at the adoption stage it is supposed to be reconsidered. The problem is that, having decided it at the care order stage, it is often given no time at all. Both parents seldom understand that—the niceties of there being a care plan that has already been approved—and so will say at every occasion, “But we want contact” and their voice is heard less and less as that process continues. Lord Warner: I want to try to move this on a little bit because I want to leave enough time to go through the draft legislative clauses at the end of this session. Q656 Baroness Morris of Bolton: Moving on from that, and thank you very much, they were fascinating answers. Given that we now have increases in social media—Facebook, Twitter—it makes it much easier for birth family members and adopted children to identify and make contact with one another post-adoption. Obviously in an ideal world we would have everything—the answers you gave in your last question—but is there anything that the court can do within their existing powers to perhaps manage this? Do we need new legislative measures to tackle the problem? If indeed it is a problem, it may well be a benefit. Nicola Jones-King: It is a factor of modern life. It is realistic. Any young person is going to be using social media and that young person, if they are an adopted young person, will want to make inquiries. We have to be honest and realistic about that. Perhaps the focus should be more on supporting adopters to be ready for that point in their child’s life and how to handle that point. The thought of saying to a young person, “No, you must not make inquiries” seems to me completely wrong and unhelpful for them, so I would be reluctant to see us trying to limit that process. Rather, we should just embrace the reality of the lives of most young people and the way people communicate now and accept that that is going to limit that process. Baroness Morris of Bolton: I think I would agree. Lord Warner: Special guardianship, Baroness Armstrong. Q657 Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top: Yes, I wonder whether you can just comment on special guardianship. When it was introduced we all thought it would be for older children, but it looks as though many more younger children are being granted special guardianship orders. Can you tell us a little of how you perceive the circumstances in which special guardianship orders are made, and is there anything that you think we should be concerned about in terms of how they are currently being used? Ian Bugg: In my practice they are used exclusively in kinship arrangements, so with family members who are looking after children, their grandchildren, their nephews, their nieces. They are given a special guardianship order in order to ring-fence that arrangement as an enhanced form of residence order where they are not placed under care orders, which has—so it is said—a stigmatising effect on the children because they have to continue, as looked-after children, to have reviews, medicals and that sort of thing. That is what they are used for. Personally, in my experience, I do not know that I have seen them being used more customarily for babies and young children. It seems to be children of any age. Nicola Jones-King: Foster carers will sometimes seek a special guardianship order for a child that has been with them for some time if the resources are right to make that the right decision for that child.

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Martha Cover, Nicola Jones-King and Ian Bugg—Oral evidence (QQ 622–667) Q658 Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top: You do not have any particular worries that we should be thinking about here? Martha Cover: I think there has been an increase in special guardianship orders, but I am with Ian and Nicola on this. It is not so much the age of the child but whether or not a kinship placement is appropriate or a foster care placement to become a more permanent solution legally. Ian Bugg: I do not see the foster carers applying for them very often. I am a bit disappointed about that. I think that they could be used more frequently because they last a little longer. At that time of life, at 15 or 16, where a child might be going into the post-16 team and being moved on from a foster placement, they are often at their most vulnerable, and it would be useful for them to remain in placement for longer, knowing that the foster carer has the resources to keep them. The problem is that SGO finance packages are limited in time and they are means tested, and so you have a foster carer who wants to be a permanent carer, wants to keep their door open to their foster children, but there is no guarantee that the resources will continue to be made available. What I tend to find is that foster carers do it for free instead of getting rewarded or remunerated for it. Lord Warner: That brings us to the draft legislative clauses on adoption, on which we are very keen to have your views. Q659 Baroness Hamwee: Firstly, the change that will mean that in England at any rate— the Welsh Government has said that they do not want to go along this route and they are thinking about their own thing—the provision about, “Giving due consideration to the child’s religious persuasion, racial origin and cultural and linguistic background” is being taken out. Although I realise you will know all that, I have read that out in full remembering that we are being webcast. What are your views about that coming out? Do you have any concerns about those factors being given too little weight in the decision? The provision in subsection (4)(d), which refers to the child’s background and characteristics—which a court or agency considers relevant—is that adequate to consider these factors? Martha Cover: We do not find that social work departments are rigidly applying these concerns so that, on the whole, they are refusing otherwise excellent placements for a child solely on the grounds of these factors. In any event, under the main provisions of the adoption welfare checklist, they have to consider the child’s needs and that must include the child’s religious, cultural and ethnic background. It seems rather politically motivated. In other words, it does seem to us that it is because these are the sorts of things that are picked up by the press and you hear horror stories about children waiting for years because, “They are oneeighth African/Caribbean and one-quarter Asian/Subcontinent”. It really does not happen. If you are talking about placing a black child somewhere in England where they will be the only black child—I have had those people later on as care parent clients themselves—that is a very different consideration from placing a child of dual heritage in an inner city borough where many of their friends and many of their adoptive parents’ friends will be of a different racial background. It is a very different kettle of fish. I think that it is political. It might be rather embarrassing if England says we are not going to do this but Wales says, “Yes, we are”. It does not look great, I have to say. Our membership does not find that there is

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Martha Cover, Nicola Jones-King and Ian Bugg—Oral evidence (QQ 622–667) a rigid, ideological approach by local authorities on these issues, but they do give it consideration and they should. Q660 Baroness Hamwee: Having said that, and having referred to the child’s needs, do you think there is a danger that insufficient weight will be given to those aspects of the child’s identity because of the change in the provisions? Ian Bugg: If the difficulties are raised in the first place because of a failure, as inevitably will have occurred at some point—a failure in the matching process—then the fact that the rules are either explicit or not probably matters very little. Good social work practice requires them to try to find the best match for this particular child, regardless of a whole range of other factors, and as close a match as possible, and they will continue to do so. I have no doubt at all that they will continue to do so. Q661 The Chairman: I am concerned about the political effect of it on social workers, and perhaps on the wider public interest in this, if it is taken out. It seems very odd, I have to say, if it is taken out in England and not taken out in Wales, although I appreciate that Wales has two languages anyway that, at the moment, we do not technically have in this country. If we do not have it in anywhere, what are people on the ground going to think; that they are to pay less attention to it? That is why I suggested that we put it into subsection (1)(4), just to have it as part of the characteristics. I would like to know whether you think that would be a good idea or not. I appreciate that Mr Bugg said that it is not necessary, but I wonder whether it might be politically a wise thing to do. Ian Bugg: No, I can see that. Martha Cover: I think that if it were in subsection (1)(4), it would simply read, “The child’s needs, including his religious persuasion, racial origin and cultural and linguistic background”. Any social worker worth their salt is going to look at those issues. What people often do not understand is how these things are interpreted on the ground. Social workers, who are often poorly supervised and trained, may have an edict that these things are no longer to be considered at all. The Chairman: That is what I am concerned about. Martha Cover: I think that that is absolutely right. We are not going to place a Muslim child with a Jewish family, for instance. I know it does happen sometimes but we are not going to do it as the first choice. We are going to think about it. We are going to wait and think about the effect on that child throughout his life. We are not going to place, as a first choice, a black child in the countryside, where that child will be the only black child in his school, without thinking about it very carefully. If it is a very good match on every other ground then perhaps that is the thing to do. Q662 Baroness Hamwee: I entirely share the concerns of Lady Butler-Sloss about “on the ground”. But coming off the ground again, and looking at the current provision, which is about “giving due consideration”, subsection(1)(4) gives the list of what must be had regard to. Is there a difference between “having regard to” and “giving due consideration to”? Martha Cover: No.

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Martha Cover, Nicola Jones-King and Ian Bugg—Oral evidence (QQ 622–667) Ian Bugg: If they want there to be then there is, but we would hope not. Martha Cover: We are not that clever, and we cannot think of a difference between them. If we could we would but I do not think we have. Q663 The Chairman: We have these phrases: concurrent planning, parallel planning, fostering to adopt. We have heard from Coram about concurrent planning. We wonder how far that is being used. Secondly, is there any practical difference between “concurrent planning” and “parallel planning”? Do you see any difference between the Government talking about fostering for adoption and, say, parallel planning? Do you see any legal obstacles to it? The other point is: are the judiciary in any way hostile to any of these particular schemes, which will be putting the child with a family at an earlier stage than placement? Finally, if you still have the energy for it, what do you think of the proposed amendment to section 22 c, the three clauses, 9 a, b and c, which I am afraid I have expressed a rather strong view about already? Ian Bugg: I have had some experience of concurrency in my practice and, as I understand it—I may be wrong because the jargon does change over time—concurrent planning and fostering for adoption amount to the same thing. With regard to parallel planning, I have always read it to mean that, during the course of proceedings, the local authority and all the experts and the parties are assessing alternative carers for the child if the child does not return home at the same time as assessing the prospects of a satisfactory reunification. Parallel planning is planning for the worst while hoping for the best. Concurrent planning and fostering to adopt are placing the child with carers, who are concurrently assessed as potential adopters, while being fostered by them, which is excellent in a very small number of cases for those children where, for a range of reasons, there is very little prospect of them returning home. They may be badly affected by a number of moves, so the number of moves of placement is kept to an absolute minimum and adopters are available to that child at a much earlier stage. It is a very small number of cases and there are a number of downsides to the process that make it difficult. I think those difficulties have led the judiciary, in a certain number of cases, to feel as though it was disadvantageous to the birth family for the child to be placed with people who were, essentially, making attachments with that child as adopters, rather than as foster carers. Certainly the birth family perception, if not reality, was that people who were caring for the child, who had a vested interest in the child not returning to the birth family, might lose their objectivity and might report, for example, that the child returns from contact a bit upset or clingy. Foster carers would report that and the birth family would say, “Well, they would say that, wouldn’t they? They have no intention of me ever getting my baby back”. That led to a tension between the birth family and the foster carers that would not exist in a conventional foster-care placement. Doing it in practice what I also encountered was that, in reality, quite a good working relationship could develop between the foster carers and the birth family, which would then extend beyond if the child did not return home; and more often than not they did not go home. The birth family were not demonised. There was no mystery about where this child came from, because the foster carers knew everything about them, warts and all, and that could be a help to the families later. However, it will not reduce delay. It only reduces the number of changes that the child makes, because you are recruiting your foster carers from your already small pool of adopters. You

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Martha Cover, Nicola Jones-King and Ian Bugg—Oral evidence (QQ 622–667) are not recruiting your adopters from a much larger pool of fosters carers. Foster adopters are not people who are unexpectedly rewarded with a baby at the other end of fostering. They enter the programme believing that, sooner or later, they will get the baby that they want and will cherish out of the process. Q664 The Chairman: Therefore, does that look as though the proposed amendment, 9 a, b, c, is not likely to make a great deal of difference to the number of children placed? It is clear that the Government thinks this is going to be a real encouragement. Ian Bugg: It is not. It is a very resource-heavy undertaking because there is a considerable amount of training that goes into foster carers anyway, but even more into foster carers who are, effectively, doing it for the very first time. These children may well be born with neonatal abstinence syndrome. Often the sorts of children chosen are chosen from mothers who have a chronic history of drug use, so the prospects of rehabilitation are fairly slim. Not being a trained foster carer can be a problem in that situation. Not only are they resource-heavy but they are heavy emotionally, so the placement probably requires more support than a conventional foster placement. It is not going to encourage a greater number of people to put themselves forward as foster carers. Q665 The Chairman: As a member of the Bar, what do you think of the wording of these amendments? Do you find them easy to understand? Ian Bugg: No. The Chairman: No, because I do not. Ian Bugg: It is difficult to understand when read with the Department’s written statement, which suggests that these legislative changes are designed to cut down unnecessary delay. The phrase “delay” is used repeatedly, and yet it does not appear to do that. It also goes further and says that, “It is only in the case where there is a satisfactory match”. Matching is not referred to in the legislation and it would have to be because, on the face of the proposed legislation, it is simply for the local authority to decide whether it considers this child should be placed in a foster-adopter placement, in which case it has a duty then to do it without further recourse. There is no suggestion that that has to be independently verified in a matching process. Q666 Baroness Walmsley: Could you clarify for us which of these sets of jargon implies positive engagement with the birth family with a view to rehabilitation of the child within the family? Do you think any of these sets of jargon—these processes and procedures—undermine the rights of the birth family in any way? I am sure we will hear more from the Family Rights Group about this, but perhaps you could give us your view. Martha Cover: I think it is very difficult for the birth family and for the rather mythical population of prospective adopters who are going to wish to be foster carers in this situation. It is very hard on them as well to make that emotional attachment to a newborn baby and then face a real prospect of it being removed from them when what they wanted all along was to adopt, not to foster. It is very different psychologically, emotionally and practically in every way. It is very difficult to explain to a birth mother that under the concurrent planning projects, “This child is going to be placed with people who are approved as adopters for your child, but if you do everything really well then you have a chance of getting the child back”. The dice are

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Martha Cover, Nicola Jones-King and Ian Bugg—Oral evidence (QQ 622–667) heavily loaded against the birth mother at that point because, even if she does as well as she possibly could, she is still going to be a risky option for a judge who, at the end of the proceedings, has to make a welfare decision about whether to leave the child with approved adopters, to whom he is now securely attached, or move him back to a mother where there are inevitably going to be risks. It is the prejudging of the position that I think creates considerable judicial unease. The concurrent planning projects have a very low success rate, in terms of rehabilitation to the birth family. That may be because of the population of parents that they choose, so that the parents who are chosen at the beginning are, for instance, the eighth child of a heroin-addicted mother who has not shown up for her drug test or something like that. Other projects, such as the Family Drug and Alcohol project that District Judge Crichton has run at the Inner London Family Proceedings Court, have the same sort of profile of parents and yet a much higher rate of rehabilitation because of the intensive work that is put in with those families. I think that there is some judicial unease about the prejudging, to some extent, of the issue. The great benefit is that the child does not have to move. Q667 The Chairman: I need to ask something different. If we could go back to guardians for a moment, I share Lady Knight’s view about your extremely interesting article, which I had not actually read. It is a very worrying article actually. We understand that at the adoption order basically the die is cast but it is not cast at the placement order. It may be concurrent with care proceedings or it may be slightly later. I think that, where possible, the intention is, with Mr Justice Ryder’s reforms, that they would be heard together. How effective are children’s guardians at that stage where adoption is up front as the main thing? Are they doing the job that is required of them? Martha Cover: The test for making a placement order is that the child’s welfare requires that the parents consent to it is dispensed with. That is the only test now—other than that they cannot be found or are incapable of giving their consent—that the child’s welfare requires it. The guardians often take the view, “We have just had a great big hearing into this child’s welfare, and we have decided that the child’s welfare requires that the child should not return to the parents but should be the subject of a care order and remain in care for the time being” and so it is the same test. But it is not because, as Ian has already said, a decision that a child should be looked after by a local authority is not a permanent decision. A decision that the parents’ consent to a placement order should be dispensed with is, effectively, the permanent decision, although it is not the adoption order but it is putting that child’s feet firmly on a track to adoption, which it is very hard to divert him from. I think that too many guardians are simply regarding it as the same test. They are not thinking separately, having made the care order, “What about a placement order? Does the child’s welfare require that the parents’ consent is dispensed with and that this adoption should go forward without a parental consent with opposition from his parents?” I do not think that enough guardians are thinking about it separately. I think they do understand that a different welfare checklist still applies. I know that you will be aware of the decision of Lord Justice Thorpe recently, where a placement order was made and the guardian had not even been reappointed in the placement order proceedings. None of those steps had been taken and the judge simply said, “We have just had this hearing about welfare, if the guardian wants to say anything now they can” and

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Martha Cover, Nicola Jones-King and Ian Bugg—Oral evidence (QQ 622–667) then made a placement order. It was really a rubber stamp at the end of care proceedings. From the child’s point of view, that is very, very concerning. Lord Warner: Thank you very much. It was always probably a false hope to think that we would finish in an hour with such excellent witnesses. Thank you very much for coming. Thank you for your patience. If there are any other thoughts that you have after this, do let us know and drop us a line.

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District Judge Nicholas Crichton—Oral evidence (QQ 694–717)

District Judge Nicholas Crichton—Oral evidence (QQ 694–717) Evidence Session No. 12

Heard in Public

Questions 694–717

TUESDAY 20 NOVEMBER 2012 Members present Baroness Butler-Sloss (Chairman) Baroness Eaton Viscount Eccles Baroness Hamwee Baroness King of Bow Baroness Knight of Collingtree Baroness Morris of Bolton Lord Morris of Handsworth Baroness Walmsley Lord Warner ________________ Examination of Witness District Judge Nicholas Crichton, Family Drug and Alcohol Court.

Q694 The Chairman: Nick, it is a great pleasure to see you. It really is. I ought perhaps to declare an interest. Nick is a long-term friend of mine, and I keep being invited to your court and I fail to get to it. District Judge Crichton: It is a great pleasure to be here, and thank you. The Chairman: We have been told so much about your court from every sort of source. It is absolutely fascinating. Whether it has been the social workers or the academics or Coram, or whoever else it may be, we have heard a lot of evidence and almost everyone has pointed to you. We have given you a half-hour slot because, in a sense, you are not the major part of our collaboration, but it would be madness of us not to involve you in it. We are extremely glad to have you here. District Judge Crichton: Thank you for inviting me. The Chairman: We have some questions. We had a very useful note from you and an absolutely fascinating Guardian report on you by Juliet Rix.

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District Judge Nicholas Crichton—Oral evidence (QQ 694–717) District Judge Crichton: Oh yes. The Chairman: We have been sent that as well. We can start with Joan, Lady Walmsley. Q695 Baroness Walmsley: I am going to ask you the first question. I do hope you will forgive me, but I shall probably have to leave as soon as you have answered it to go to an International Children’s Day event, which is appropriate, is it not? District Judge Crichton: It is. Baroness Walmsley: The first question is: could you outline for us the key features of the Family Drug and Alcohol Court and tell us how it differs from standard care proceedings? District Judge Crichton: It is almost completely different. It is difficult to know where to start. The first thing to say is that the parents come in every two weeks and they come before the same judge. Once they have made their decision to come into FDAC the lawyers fall away, because the Legal Services Commission were not willing—and I understand this completely—to pay for lawyers to come in every two weeks for 20 minutes just to hold their client’s hand. That has been a huge bonus, because we start engaging with the parents without lawyers in the courtroom. The lawyers are still available to them. They are still represented by them, they still have legal aid, and they can refer to the lawyers at any time they want. However, when we have those two-weekly sessions it is the parents, the children’s guardian, the child’s social worker and the team worker, the key worker from the FDAC team, and we discuss how their programme is working, what can be done to tweak it, what can be done to make it better, and what can we take out that is not working well. They begin to take ownership of their lives, and I think they have confidence in the fact that they are meeting the same judge every two weeks. I refer to it as being like Weightwatchers, actually; they come and stand on my scales, and we talk about how things are going. Another difference is that on the morning of FDAC—and I did it yesterday—I have a meeting with the FDAC team at 9 o’clock in the morning, in the absence of the parties, and we talk through the progress they are making, what sort of message we need to be delivering today, do I need to get tough, or do I need to go gently because things are fragile. We talk about them before we come into court, so that I have a picture of how things are going. I will also have had a short report on the Friday evening emailed to me telling me about their progress, so it is very much coming together, supporting, teamwork, trying to help parents to recovery. Sometimes it works and sometimes it does not. When it does not, they often have a better understanding of why they have failed than they would in the more normal care proceedings, which a lot of parents see as punitive. We are far from punitive. We do have parents who fail, who understand why they have failed, who do not fight to the last ditch and end up bitter and resentful, and we have a number of parents who are now in for the second time, who failed the first time round, who have become pregnant again and who have come back to us and said, “We have a better understanding of what we have to do. Can we do this again?”, and some of them are making it. Q696 Baroness Hamwee: The lawyers fall away but not one lawyer: you. I wonder if you could amplify how you see the role of the court in your court. I took it that you meant that the lawyers fall away in the adversarial sense, but clearly you are fulfilling a very wide role, which is probably more than that of a judge.

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District Judge Nicholas Crichton—Oral evidence (QQ 694–717) District Judge Crichton: I would say that we are harnessing the authority of the court, and we think this is crucial. A number of civil servants have said to me, “If your team are so good”— and they are; they are brilliant—“if you have the social workers beginning to work with the team and things are going well, why do you need an expensive resource like a judge?” The answer to that is quite simple. It is the authority of the court being used to urge people on. I come back to the Weightwatchers. It is knowing that you have to come and stand on the scales every two weeks that makes you do it. I will go wider, just for a second, if I may. I believe very strongly that, as we advance into the 21st century, we need to be finding better ways of using the authority of courts to try to accomplish change, rather than just to process people. Q697 Baroness Knight of Collingtree: Judge Crichton, I think you have answered the first part of my question already, but I am going to ask it anyway. When Brunel University carried out an evaluation project, they found that more children returned home to their birth parents when the case was dealt with in FDAC than in the comparator group, where the case was dealt with in standard care proceedings. You sound as though you listen very much to the parents, and you said that the parents are more suspicious. Is what you have told us really the answer to that—that your system works rather better than the procedure that they go through with social work? District Judge Crichton: I think so. Rightly or wrongly, I think a lot of parents feel that social services are the enemy and care proceedings are punitive. Sometimes I think that is very unfair on social workers who are trying hard to work with them, and sometimes I get a feeling that if I was in their shoes I would feel the same way. This is a much more—I am using the same words—collaborative effort to try to help this parent, or these parents, to hold on to this child. It is my belief that if they can genuinely tackle their substance misuse problem and hold on to this child, the risk that they will have another 10 children in the next 12 years—and that is what happens—will be significantly reduced, as will all those children going into the care system where we know that, by and large, they do not do terribly well. Children do belong in families, if we can achieve that for them. Q698 Baroness Knight of Collingtree: The figures we were given is that the success rate is almost double that. District Judge Crichton: Yes. Baroness Knight of Collingtree: Do you also put that down to listening to the parents? I understood that in some family courts parents are not allowed to speak, but they are to you? District Judge Crichton: I think that is part of it, yes. It is also the intensity of the programmes that we put them through and the constant monitoring of their progress through. They really feel valued, listened to, that they have the support that they need. Not all of them make it. I think Brunel are continuing to research us, and I think that our figures may not be quite as good as they were in that early evaluation. One of the reasons for that is that we are struggling financially to continue. Government funding has been withdrawn, and I keep going to all sorts of charities trying to find the funding to keep going, and they all say, “This is absolutely brilliant, but it is Government business”.

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District Judge Nicholas Crichton—Oral evidence (QQ 694–717) Now, because we are limping a little bit, we have drawn two more local authorities in, and when we draw new local authorities in they tend to start by bringing us their hard-end cases, the cases they have already worked with for years and got nowhere. We have had some success with those cases, but those are not the cases that we think we ought to be working with. We believe that we belong with the young, drug-addicted mums, who are perhaps on their first or second pregnancy, for whom there really is a real chance that we can turn things round before they become those hard-end cases. Q699 The Chairman: Have you already lost Government funding? District Judge Crichton: Yes. The Chairman: I thought that was not going until next year. District Judge Crichton: No. It went in March of this year. The way we are working now, we are working in a different way from how we were. Our local authorities have all guaranteed to buy a certain number of slots from us each year, and what they are doing is bringing us their hard-end cases. We believe we belong in the maternity wards. We are actually getting in prebirth in some cases. That is where I think we can make the most difference, because if we can work with the parent for the last, shall we say, three months of her pregnancy, we are stealing time for the child, which is terribly important. Q700 Viscount Eccles: Did the Government give you an explanation as to why they were withdrawing the funding, and was the fact that you are different—and the Civil Service does not like anybody who is different—part of the reason? District Judge Crichton: I take that second point very clearly. Civil servants find it even more difficult than the rest of us to embrace change. But, no, it was a pilot project. They initially agreed to fund us for three years. It was then realised that for the research purposes we needed a slightly longer period and so they agreed to fund us for four, but it was always understood that the funding would come to an end at the end of four years, and it did. We live in very difficult economic times, but I would have hoped that Government would have said, “Here is something new. Here is something different. We need to support it”. We are not talking a lot of money. We are talking about £500,000 a year. The Government found £430 million following the riots last summer. £500,000 of that for the next five years would be extremely useful. The Chairman: Lady Knight, I cut you off. I am so sorry. Q701 Baroness Knight of Collingtree: Just finally, we understand that in the United States there are similar things done that you do in your court. The outcome that I described earlier, was that in line with expectations, and was it consistent with the experience from the United States? District Judge Crichton: We got the idea from the United States. I went there and researched it and we adapted. Not much, we did not have to adapt much, but we are facing a different level of problem here. I have a sense that in America you only have to be caught smoking a spliff and you are going to find yourself in care proceedings. You only have to be caught driving a car while drunk and, if you have children, you are going to find yourself in care proceedings. We

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District Judge Nicholas Crichton—Oral evidence (QQ 694–717) wait much longer before we start care proceedings and therefore we have much tougher cases. The Americans are claiming anything from a 50% to 90% success rate, but they are dealing with a much lower level of drug and alcohol misuse. We are dealing with the top end. When we started, it was my aspiration that we would be doing well if we got one in four children home permanently. The early evaluation was one in three, so we were doing a little better than I had hoped. I think we are now touching nearer one in four. Q702 Baroness Morris of Bolton: Good morning. How does your court differ from good social work practice, i.e. detailed initial assessments, setting of clear objectives, ensuring quick, easy and effective access to joined-up services and support? I was going to ask you if the judge’s authority is essential to that but you have already answered that, so perhaps you would like to elaborate on that and how it all comes together. District Judge Crichton: This is not a good time to be a social worker. They are overworked, carrying far too many cases on their caseload. They are working in the shadow of Climbié and Baby Peter Connelly, so they are hugely risk-averse. I think it is easier when you are overworked to be completely risk-averse than it is to spend more time properly analysing the problems of this family and seeing if they can be supported. What we are finding is that the social workers whose cases come into FDAC, to begin with there was a sense that they would think, “Oh gosh, thank heavens, somebody else is dealing with this case. I can pull back and work on other cases”. We found those cases did not work well. We have developed a much better relationship now with the social workers for the children that are coming into FDAC, and their contribution is very significant. They become part of a process, which I think they enjoy becoming part of. Part of the FDAC team’s responsibility now is to mend the fences between the family and the social workers, because at the end of the FDAC process we are going to make a supervision order and those social workers are going to be left working with the family, so if we can improve that relationship, we do. A social worker said to me recently—and this was not an FDAC social worker; this was a local authority social worker—she said, “Suddenly I find myself doing what I think I was trained to do, which is to keep families together rather than break them up”. Funnily enough, a social worker in America said exactly the same thing to me. Q703 Baroness Morris of Bolton: Obviously you must be seeing the same social workers several times. Are you seeing a change in their attitude and their practice? Are they becoming less risk-averse? District Judge Crichton: Some of the individuals very definitely are, as they engage in the process in the courtroom. I love FDAC. I want to do it every day of the week. Q704 The Chairman: You are only doing it once a week, are you not? District Judge Crichton: Yes. We do it every Monday, and I alternate with another judge, so I do it every other Monday. Q705 The Chairman: The rest of the week—so the Committee can know—you are sitting trying family cases? District Judge Crichton: That is right.

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District Judge Nicholas Crichton—Oral evidence (QQ 694–717) The Chairman: Straightforward family cases? District Judge Crichton: Correct. The Chairman: Not straightforward, but not in the FDAC court. Q706 Lord Warner: Can I turn to an issue about judges acting out of conventional roles, which is in fact what you are doing in FDAC? Does this model of intervention create any problems regarding the role of the judge, who in these circumstances is expected to be both an interventionist problem solver, a kind of case manager, and also a hands-off adjudicator, within what is essentially still an adversarial process? Have any concerns been raised, for example, about conducting review hearings with parents in the absence of legal representatives? I should declare the fact that I have seen the Red Hook courts in New York with young offenders, where again the judge is acting in a role very similar to the one that you are pursuing in FDAC. District Judge Crichton: I understand the point completely. Before we started we were quite worried about these issues, and I went anonymously to a High Court judge with a number of questions specifically along the lines that you are expressing. That judge said to me, “What you are doing is so completely innovative that you must follow your nose and do what you think is best, and if anybody appeals you, hope that you get an appeal tribunal that has some understanding of what you are trying to achieve”. To begin with I think some of the lawyers were really quite worried about the non-lawyer reviews. Some said to me, “What is my client going to say when I am not there to protect them?” However the clients were going back to them saying how much they appreciated the procedure, the way in which they were being treated, and the opportunity to talk openly to the judge, so that the lawyers’ concerns drifted away. There have been no appeals. I worried about that 9 o’clock in the morning discussion with the FDAC team about families, in the absence of families, when the FDAC team were going to be in court. Nobody has raised any objection to these things—and I should perhaps touch wood. I am sorry, I have lost the thread. However, to see a family come in and to start talking to them, and you say, “I want to see you again in two weeks’ time at 10 o’clock”—and out comes the diary; we give them a diary—and they start saying, “Judge, I am awfully sorry, I have to see my treatment provider at 10 o’clock. Can I do it at 2 o’clock?” Imperceptibly, they are taking control of their lives. They hardly notice they are doing it. Q707 Lord Warner: Could I ask a supplementary. How do your peers see all of this? To some extent, the issue of whether you can replicate FDAC is dependent on whether your peers will take the same approach as you and take the risks, in a sense, that you could be said to be taking. District Judge Crichton: There will always be judges who cannot—and probably should not— try to do this, but there are plenty who can. I have one other who I alternate with. We have a third who covers us when we are unwell or on leave. We trained two more because we thought we were about to expand. That expansion did not quite happen, but those two have sat in FDAC a couple of times each and have really enjoyed doing it. It is a question of finding the right people to do it, and there are plenty who can and who would wish to, and the proof

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District Judge Nicholas Crichton—Oral evidence (QQ 694–717) was in the pudding. I was taken ill for the first six months of FDAC, which infuriated me, but it was set up and running without me, and it went perfectly well. Indeed, it was all I could do to persuade them to let me back in when I was well. There are judges who can do this, and there are plenty of them. Q708 Viscount Eccles: Can we move to the question of the length of time that things take to happen, and the worries that there are about delay in meeting—what you might describe as—the child’s timetable and the needs of the child, for things to be done in as expeditious a way as possible? Now there is a legislative proposal to make a six-month rule. It seems that your court proceedings take about the same time as other proceedings, although when children are returned home it tends to take a bit longer. Your summary of your views on this whole subject would be very valuable to us. District Judge Crichton: I like to keep in mind that two months is 1% of a child’s childhood. I am not very good at maths, but that just about works. Therefore, we have to make timely decisions for children. I accept that entirely. I will explain to you very briefly how FDAC works. We work to a 12-month timeframe, and we divide it up into four quarters. We spend the first three months trying to get the parents stabilised. By the end of three months some of them have already gone. The next three months we work on their relapse prevention, understanding the triggers for getting them involved with drugs, so that at the end of six months we hope to have them stable and we hope to have them with some deep understanding of why they became involved. By the end of six months some more of them have failed. That is your 26-week programme. I do not much like a man-made timeframe, but I do understand the importance of timely decision-making for children. Therefore I have no problem with saying at five months we can identify the following families as people who will fit the exception and go on beyond 26 weeks. For the next three months we work on the parenting issues, with a view to trying to get the child back at the end of nine months so that we have three months of the child at home before we exit FDAC. If some families are doing well but going a little slowly we can probably stretch that out to 15 or 16 months, but that is about as far as we would want to go, and it is only with a view to that child going home. We think it fits, because what we are about is trying to get children home and trying to avoid having another 10 children going into care in the next 12 years, so it is worth a bit of investment of time and energy. We think we are getting better at this. I was going to use the expression “weeded out”, but it is probably not the best expression. We think we have identified by the end of five months the families who are not going to make it, and so we are making a more timely decision for those children than I think would happen in normal care proceedings. Perhaps I can come back to the point that Lord Warner made, because it just occurred to me it was where I lost the thread for a second. One of the problems that we saw at the beginning is: what happens if a family fails in FDAC but wants to challenge the decision from FDAC that they are not going to make it? We thought there might be significant challenges to the FDAC judge hearing that case when it became a contest, but there have not been. It has astonished me. I thought that parents would say, “I do not want that judge. He has been through this with me. He is part of the FDAC team and FDAC have ruled me out. I do not want that judge. I want another judge”. I have tried to keep as many of those cases to myself, which means that I can

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District Judge Nicholas Crichton—Oral evidence (QQ 694–717) deal with them much more quickly because I know the background, and I cannot think of a parent who has succeeded in that subsequent contest, but they have all accepted it. Q709 Lord Morris of Handsworth: District Judge Crichton, you have explained the constraints on resource that do not enable your model to be expanded elsewhere. One of the downsides of that is comparative data would be very sparse if we looked forward five or 10 years. That said, could you please tell us from your experience in those cases where a child cannot be returned home and a final care order is made, are parents whose cases are being handled by FDAC able to engage more constructively in the planning for the child’s future, including planning for adoption? District Judge Crichton: Some do and some do not. Probably a higher level does in FDAC than would in normal care proceedings. I have a vision for FDAC. Can I share my vision? If I knew that we were safe for five years, say, three might do but five would be ideal, I would like to have—and I think I have the connections where I could make this happen—one or two houses where these mums could go with their babies and not be separated from their babies, where they would form a little community of perhaps six or eight mums. I saw this in America, and it works. The mum goes off every day to her treatment provider, to AA or to NA, and to everybody else that she needs to go to, because there are people in that community caring for her child, but she comes home in the evening and cares for her child and cares for the child at weekends. That has to be better for the child. It has to be better for the mum, because so many of these mums are isolated, and when they go back out into the community they do not have the community support. Sometimes they get all the way through to nine months and then fail because they do not have the community support. If we could set up one, two or three of those houses and put these mums in there, they will form a community. They will not be separated from their babies. The whole thing would be much more supportive and, more importantly, the babies will not be separated from them. That would be my vision if we could get to a five-year secure period. Q710 Lord Morris of Handsworth: Is it purely a resource issue or is bureaucracy getting in the way? District Judge Crichton: Both. We need to open the Government’s eyes. Q711 Lord Morris of Handsworth: Yes. Do you have any unit cost comparisons to go on in terms of the expansion? District Judge Crichton: We have some early figures from the Brunel research, and Ernst and Young did some research for the Department for Education. Funnily enough, I was talking to the Children’s Minister about that last week. I do not know why that research has not gone up on the website, but it shows that we are marginally cheaper, only marginally at the moment. Q712 Lord Morris of Handsworth: We have a report to produce at some point in this process. What advice would you want to offer, in terms of dealing with this issue in our report? District Judge Crichton: I am not sure that it is my job to advise. Q713 The Chairman: Do bear in mind, District Judge Crichton, that sitting as a judge you are not obliged to answer a question that you think perhaps a judge should not answer.

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District Judge Nicholas Crichton—Oral evidence (QQ 694–717) District Judge Crichton: I have never been worried about those issues. The Chairman: I know you have not but I felt obliged to put that warning in. And then if you chose to do it, I would be delighted. District Judge Crichton: Oh, I choose. Of course we live in difficult times economically, but I personally get quite frustrated that every discussion, every argument, about these sorts of issues, comes down to money. I am much more worried about what sort of society we are and want to be, and I am much more concerned about enabling children to live within families, because I think we would all accept that that is where children belong, but also identifying as quickly as possible those children who really cannot live within families. I worry that we are in danger of losing the balance and the focus on keeping children within families. At the end of the day, if we can do that better—and that is what I hope that FDAC is showing: that we can do a little bit better—it has to make sense economically, because 10 years down the line there will not have been that further series of children all going into care. It is fine to have a system that says, “We protect children. We remove children from these dangerous families”, but by the time that we have removed the sixth, the seventh, the eighth— and in some cases it is more than that—all of those children going into care, and we think about the cost of that down the line, if we can spend some time addressing the core problem and stopping that succession of children being born and going into care, then we are saving a lot of money further down the line. The problem is that the bean counters, the civil servants, are only concerned with this year’s bottom line and next year’s bottom line. They are not really very concerned with five or 10 years from now. That is what I am concerned about. The Chairman: I think we have to move on, unfortunately. Q714 Baroness King of Bow: On the same subject, you are making a very clear and passionate argument for early intervention, which obviously is not just morally sensible but is economically sensible. Given that you have more or less answered my question, which was on the relative cost between yourselves and other family courts—obviously, if you have anything to add on that then please do—I wonder if you could let the Committee know if you have had discussions around other types of funding, for instance through social impact bonds or any other type of innovative funding. I think we would all agree you must be funded. It is a scandal if your work cannot continue. District Judge Crichton: I do not know much about social impact bonds. I talk to civil servants, I talk to Ministers when I can get at them, but largely I do not get anywhere. I talk to charities, but as I told you the charities say, “This is central Government business, you cannot ask us for money”. I am not really very good with money. Baroness King of Bow: No. I was going to say it is really not your job either, but that is the tragedy of it. It is not your job to find the money, so perhaps it is our job to assess if there are more imaginative ways. If I could flag one thing up that you mentioned, about the idea of the houses where mothers could go with their babies, it is so obvious and so sensible, is it not. It would save so much money, so we cannot do anything other than say that you are talking immense amounts of sense and we hope that we can chivvy Government Ministers and others to listen to you more carefully.

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District Judge Nicholas Crichton—Oral evidence (QQ 694–717) Q715 The Chairman: With regret, I am going to have to ask the last question. We are running out of time, and we have the three academics that we are looking forward to hearing and we have to hear. Let me just ask this: we need a bit more advice from you, which is particularly, what do you think are the elements of the procedure and the practice of your court that would be relatively easily transferred, to implement it in the ordinary standard care and adoption proceedings? You sit in both courts, so you can see exactly how that works. Do you think we could recommend any aspect? It is not strictly our business, but I do not think that is going to stop us. What could be transferred across, do you think, from FDAC into ordinary care proceedings? District Judge Crichton: Judicial continuity is the biggest. At the level at which I work in the Family Proceedings Court we have District Judge Magistrates’ Courts, but there is no job for people to apply for to become District Judge Magistrates’ Courts, Family. I jostled my way in to the position that I have held for the last 20-odd years, but there is still nothing for people to apply for, and there are loads of very experienced, very capable family lawyers—both barristers and solicitors—who would love to have a job to apply for. At the moment, the District Judges who come into my court come for eight, 10, 12 weeks a year from the Criminal Courts. They have been trained in family law, but what they cannot do is offer the judicial continuity that I offer. From every point of view, it works better if a judge holds on to cases and sees them all himself. You would understand that. I suppose anything I would add to that would follow from that. It is being concerned, having an interest—thank you, Baroness King—the passion, to actually care about these people and that means doing a lot of homework outside court, but you have to get the right people to do it. Q716 The Chairman: Of course, Mr Justice Ryder in his proposals, as Head of Modernisation—and they are coming to give evidence, I think it is next week—is going to stress judicial continuity. I do not know whether he is doing it in the Family Proceedings Court. Do you know whether that is so? District Judge Crichton: I do not know. He was giving evidence at Portcullis House this morning and I was listening to that. I only arrived here just in time. Q717 The Chairman: I fear, because we have other evidence that we must hear, that we must bring this to an end. We do that with regret, because we would love you to stay and tell us a lot more, and we are extremely grateful to you for coming to give your evidence. Thank you very much. It is also very nice to see you. District Judge Crichton: Elizabeth, Baroness Butler-Sloss, thank you very much. I would extend an invitation. If anybody wants to come and watch FDAC you would be more than welcome. I will not dish out my business card, but you can get to me through Elizabeth. The Chairman: I know that Earl Listowel has been, has he not? District Judge Crichton: Yes, he has. He is a great supporter. The Chairman: A great supporter, yes, I know he is. Thank you very much indeed.

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Department for Education—Oral evidence (QQ 1–79)

Department for Education—Oral evidence (QQ 1–79) Evidence Session No. 1.

Heard in Public.

Questions 1–79

TUESDAY 26 JUNE 2012

Members present Baroness Butler-Sloss (Chairman) Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top Viscount Eccles Baroness Hamwee Baroness Howarth of Breckland Baroness Knight of Collingtree Baroness Morris of Bolton Lord Morris of Handsworth Baroness Walmsley Lord Warner ________________ Examination of Witnesses Witnesses: Annie Crombie, Deputy Director for Adoption Reform, Shirley Trundle, Director of Families Group, and Sandra Walker, Deputy Director of the Children's Services and Family Law Team, Department for Education.

Q1 The Chairman: Good morning and welcome. We are delighted that you have come at such an early stage in our post-legislative scrutiny. It is important to know what the Government want—which is not necessarily going to be what we would advise—but it is a very useful start to what we are doing. Ms Trundle, you are the director of the families group. Are you going to lead? Shirley Trundle: I will do so, yes. The Chairman: We also have Annie Crombie— Annie Crombie: Yes, hello. The Chairman: —and Sandra Walker. Sandra Walker: Yes. 466

Department for Education—Oral evidence (QQ 1–79) The Chairman: We are delighted to have you with us. We have a lot of questions, which you have seen. The format of one or two of them has been slightly changed. It would be interesting if you could give us any idea of what is likely to be coming out in principle because obviously it will have an effect on what the Government are thinking of doing, although at the moment that is not part of our questions. My first question is: why are the Government focusing on adoption as the preferred route to permanency as opposed to earlier and more effective intervention in the birth family? What can and should be done to support birth families in difficulties, for whom adoption is not necessarily the most important thing? Shirley Trundle: We are very clear that we do not see this as an either/or option. Ministers at all levels, from the Prime Minister to our Secretary of State to the Parliamentary UnderSecretary of State for Children and Families, are very focused on adoption, which they see as an area that has been neglected in recent years but as a very good option for some of the most vulnerable children in the care system who cannot return to their birth families. They do not see this as the only solution. They are pursuing a whole range of policies directed at earlier intervention with families, from the earliest intervention—the refocusing of Sure Start children’s centres on the most disadvantaged families—to things like trialling free parenting classes, to see what impact we can have through that. The Munro reforms are directed at giving social workers more time to work with families and less time on tick-box bureaucratic exercises. Of course, our colleagues in the Department for Communities and Local Government are working on the troubled families programme, which is directed at helping and supporting families who are facing multiple problems, including difficulties caring effectively for their children. Our department is funding a whole range of evidence-based programmes, including some that are directed at supporting families whose children are on the edge of the care system. So it is very much not an either/or; there is a whole range of things that we are doing, but we are still very clear that for some children, adoption is going to be the best option. Q2 Lord Morris of Handsworth: Is there any reason to be concerned about the falling number of adoptions? In assessing whether there is a problem, why look at the number of adoptions each year as opposed to the number of outcomes securing permanency for the child, such as long-term foster care? Shirley Trundle: We look at other forms of permanency as well. We are clear that for some children those alternatives are indeed the best option. We have seen rising and falling patterns of adoption. We saw rising levels of adoption following Tony Blair’s initiative on adoption but these have tailed away more recently. We think it is right to have a range of options but we are concerned about the falling number of adoptions. Following the publication of the adoption scorecards, we have been having detailed discussions with a number of local authorities whose performance on adoptions looks to be particularly slow. In a number of cases they have acknowledged that perhaps they have taken their eyes off this area. Particularly following the tragic case of baby Peter, a lot of local authorities have focused a great deal of attention on the child protection part of their systems and in the process have perhaps taken their eyes off adoption a bit more. We see this as an area that needs particular attention at the moment. Q3 Lord Morris of Handsworth: Is there any measurable outcome from the Blair initiative that you mentioned?

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Department for Education—Oral evidence (QQ 1–79) Shirley Trundle: We saw a rise in the level of adoption following that initiative. The introduction of special guardianship as a new option also saw rising numbers of children securing permanence through that route. Interestingly, special guardianship has tended to be used perhaps not in the way that was initially expected. It was seen originally as an option particularly suitable for older children but in practice it is being used quite a lot for very young children as well. We have commissioned some research to see whether or not that is appropriate and helpful. Q4 Baroness Walmsley: Given the increasing focus on early interventions with birth families, if the number of adoptions continued to fall, would you really see that as a problem or could it be seen as a result of the success of the interventions with birth families? Shirley Trundle: Certainly, it would be very desirable if we could get to a point where birth families are able to look after their children very effectively. This should be looked at very much in the context of other options, including other options in the care system. Certainly at the moment we think that there are children in the care system who could benefit from adoption who are not achieving that permanence option at the moment. Certainly in the foreseeable future, we would see an increase in adoption as potentially a success. Q5 Lord Warner: Perhaps I can come back to this question about the falling numbers of adoptions. You have helpfully given us a lot of figures relating to 2008 to 2011, but is it just a question of them taking their eye off the ball or in some cases, given the range of performance you are showing for local authorities between 2008 and 2011, is it that some authorities have never had their eye on the ball in the first place? If you look at other public services—for example, the NHS—the same trusts have been underperforming not for three or five years but for 10 or 12 years. Are we facing the same problem here in adoption? If we back before the Blair initiative, is it the same old people who show up on the wrong bits of your helpful data for 2008 to 2011? Can you say a bit more about that issue? Shirley Trundle: We are certainly extremely concerned about the variability in the performance of local authorities. Obviously, you would expect a degree of variation according to the particular circumstances of different authorities but the variability seems to be much wider than it ought to be, and some of that indeed reflects poor performance by individual local authorities. I confess that we have not done the analysis and tracked very much further back in time. It would be fair to say that we see patterns sometimes in local authorities where there are weaknesses not just in one service but across a range of services, perhaps reflecting a weakness of leadership in a particular local authority. There are local authorities where we have concerns about their performance around children in care and child protection, and some of those are also ones where we have concerns about adoption performance. Annie Crombie: One of the things that is really interesting about the work that we have been doing with the scorecards is that it has thrown up some quite surprising things in terms of which local authorities do better and which do worse. For example, some local authorities generally consider themselves to be high-achieving authorities but do very poorly against some of the timeliness indicators, and are even a bit affronted that we are looking in detail at their adoption services because they consider themselves to have strongly performing systems. That has been an interesting feature, which suggests that in those authorities they have taken their eye off the ball in terms of their adoption services.

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Department for Education—Oral evidence (QQ 1–79) Q6 Baroness Knight of Collingtree: There is a case described in the papers this morning about two brothers who have been adopted a number of times, which has had a very bad effect on them. Would that be what you have described as poor performance? Does it often happen? Is it counted in the number of adoptions a council achieves if those adoptions are not sustained? Shirley Trundle: I have not seen that particular case. We have quite limited knowledge about the rates of breakdown of adoptions. There have been a number of different studies, which have tended to look at only the early stage; that is, when the child is placed with the adoptive family but before an adoption order is made. Individual studies suggest that the rates of breakdown there could be as high as 20%, but that has been largely around older children, who we know can be harder to place. Further on, beyond the adoption order, we have very limited information about the levels of breakdown, so that is something else that we have commissioned some research to look at. Because children’s identities change once the adoption order is made, it is actually quite difficult to do longitudinal studies and it is something we need to know more about. Annie Crombie: It is quite a limited study but Nina Biehal did a study looking at adoption placements versus long-term fostering placements. She estimated that after three years 11% of adoption placements had broken down, compared to 28% of long-term fostering placements. Of course, in a long-term fostering placement, you are also trying to secure stability for the child and there is some evidence that it is much more stable within an adoption placement. We are also looking very actively at how we can try to include that element of disruption, of adoption breakdown, in the local authority scorecards. It will take us a little while to work out how to do that and gather the data but we want to do that so that when we are talking to a local authority, we can use that as a critical part of the picture of whether we think it is performing well and in the interests of the individual children it is placing. The Chairman: This will have to be the last question on this particular issue. Q7 Baroness Morris of Bolton: You talked about leadership. In this variance that we see, does philosophy come into it? Are there people who maybe do not see adoption as being the answer? Shirley Trundle: That is something that is difficult to get a purchase on but, yes, we pick up from conversations and the way that different local authorities approach things that there are different philosophies, and we certainly see that even more strongly when we talk to individual social workers. There are varying degrees of commitment to adoption as a good outcome for children. We are very clear that the Government are very strongly committed to this as a very good placement option. Q8 Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top: That feeds in very well to my question because in the Action Plan for Adoption there is a very clear statement that in many cases adoption is the best option for looked-after children. What is the evidential base for this? Annie Crombie: A part of the answer to that is not evidence based, which is about the fact that adoption is special and different and something that takes you beyond your 18th birthday—you are part of that family forever. That conviction is behind the Government’s position and the Secretary of State’s commitment to wanting to see more adoptions so that more children have

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Department for Education—Oral evidence (QQ 1–79) that. When you look at the various different bits of data, you can put together a picture that shows you that it would be possible to have far more adoptions than we have at present. The variability point is relevant again: in some local authorities only 2% of children leaving care leave it for adoption; in others it is as high as 26%. Of course, there are different circumstances behind that, but it is a very significant difference. We can also learn something from what we know about the extent of delay. Of the just over 3,000 children adopted last year, the vast majority were in the age bracket between one and four, and after the age of four the number of children adopted decreases very significantly. If you look at that alongside the amount of time it is taking at the moment—a year and nine months on average but longer than that if you are older; if you are two and a half, it will take almost two and a half years, so you will be past five by the time you are adopted—that starts to build up a picture that suggests that if the process was faster and children were identified for adoption earlier when they were younger, and we know that children are getting younger when they come into care, it would be possible for far more children to benefit from adoption than do so at the moment. Q9 Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top: Are you finding a correlation between those authorities that really are committed to evidence-based early intervention and how they are performing in terms of the children they take into care and adoption? Is there any work going on on that? Annie Crombie: We certainly see a correlation in the authorities that have a really active approach to case management of children from when they are first identified as being in need through their pathway into care and beyond, where decisions are made swiftly in their best interest, whether that is for adoption or the rehabilitation of the family. That is what I would identify as being relevant there. Shirley Trundle: I know that a number of local authorities have focused heavily on early intervention but in relation to older children. There are two peak ages at which children come into care: either when they are very small or there is another bulge around the teenage years. I know that a number of local authorities have introduced intensive programmes to work with the families of those older children. Certainly individual authorities would say that they have seen a big impact and have been able to reduce the number of older children coming into the care system. I do not think that anyone has done the same work for the younger children. Q10 Lord Warner: The first graph that you helpfully gave us shows that there were an estimated 1,000 residence orders a year after the Children Act 1989 and 2,000 a year for adoption. If the claim of an evidence base for the benefits of adoption stands up, you would think that there would be enough data around since 1989 to show what the outcomes were for residence orders. The claim in the plan that there is an evidence base needs to be supported by evidence that residence orders have relatively failed in relation to adoption. What is the position of your department on that? Shirley Trundle: I do not think that we have that systematic evidence base, if you like, so I find it quite difficult to answer that question in the way posed. I am looking at Annie Crombie to see whether she has any more knowledge than I do. Annie Crombie: Sorry, I just want to be clear that I understand the point.

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Department for Education—Oral evidence (QQ 1–79) Q11 Lord Warner: Is there any evidence that residence orders, which are a substantial contribution to the permanence agenda, are any worse or any better than adoption, given that they have been around a long time? Are the outcomes any better or any worse, or are you really saying that you just do not know? Annie Crombie: I certainly do not have to hand the breakdown of outcomes by residence orders versus adoption. Partly the problem is, as we said, that we cannot track the outcomes of adopted children reliably because once they are adopted we no longer track them within our data collections, and the ability to do that better is one of the things that we are thinking about. The other relevant point is that residence orders have a different purpose, so we would not necessarily expect a direct comparison to be instructive in helping us to understand what outcomes might be for adopted children, because they are intended for a different cohort. Q12 The Chairman: It seems to me that residence leaves the opportunity for the natural family to come in and make applications at any time they choose, which can give a feeling of insecurity to a family who want a permanent placement with the child. Is that a point that you pick up? Annie Crombie: Residence orders are intended to give greater stability to people who are looking after children who cannot be with their birth parents but want a stable placement. For example, a family member might have a residence order so it might be not be appropriate for that person to adopt the child—they would not want to; they already have an existing relationship with the child. Q13 Lord Warner: That is not my point. My point is: do you have any evidence about whether residence orders have worked? The answer seems to be no. Annie Crombie: We do not have any analysis about that. Lord Warner: That was my simple question. Q14 Baroness Howarth of Breckland: I do not want to take anyone else’s question but it is terribly important that we get this sorted because from the outset we need to understand whether or not what is best for children is reflected in your figures. Although adoptions appear to be going down, your graph tells us that permanent placements are going up. What is important is what the Government are saying to the world—and which local authorities are able to respond to appropriately rather than defensively—is that we are doing better at finding permanent placements for children. First, is that right? Secondly, do we know which bits of that are more or less successful? What you said about adoption and fostering was helpful but we know that fostering placements do not turn into adoption placements because those children have difficulties; the research shows that they are more likely to break down if the children have more difficulties. As a baseline, what is the real picture? Clearly there are delays and clearly we need to do something about it, but we need to focus on the right question. If a different picture is being given out, everyone focuses on the other question. Does that seem a reasonable premise? Shirley Trundle: You are undoubtedly right that the graph says that an increasing number of children are achieving permanence if you take those three forms of permanence together. We want to understand better the outcomes of those different options, which is why we have

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Department for Education—Oral evidence (QQ 1–79) commissioned some further research, but as Annie Crombie said, we also have to bear in mind the different purposes of the different orders and not necessarily see them as totally interchangeable. Baroness Howarth of Breckland: But it does not necessarily follow that adoption is the best outcome if we do not have the evidence. We know that permanence makes a difference to children. The research shows us that, if not what sort of permanence. I am just trying to get a sense of a baseline. Shirley Trundle: Yes. Thank you. Q15 Baroness Walmsley: I want to explore this assumption that adoption is the best option. You may have answered my question, but what about the long-term outcomes? How much do we know? You talked about the difference in the breakdowns between long-term fostering and adoption; obviously adoption is better on those criteria. But how much do we know about the long-term outcomes in terms of education, health, mental health and involvement with the criminal justice system? It is only fair to compare adoption with other types of being in care because all those children have suffered traumas in their previous lives. It is not so fair to compare adopted children with children with birth families that have always been successful and who have always stayed with them and have not had the same traumas. Does the research that you are commissioning explore those issues in the long term? It is only those very longitudinal studies that will give us those answers. Shirley Trundle: To be honest, we are very limited in what we know from very long-term longitudinal studies about any of these children, whether they end up in foster placements or adoption or whatever. There is a particular difficulty about being able to track children who have been adopted. More recently, we have just begun to be able to link our data sets about children in the care system with the national pupil database, which is beginning to allow us to track what happens to children’s educational outcomes. That has been able to tell us for the first time, for example, that children who stay in care for longer tend to achieve better outcomes the longer they are in care. That is helpful for us because there has been a very longstanding narrative that care itself is bad for children, but that has always tended to compare children in care with the general population of children who have not suffered abuse, neglect and the other traumas that children in the care system have. Evidence is beginning to emerge that the care system helps children and that is a really important finding. But what we do not have are very long bits of that data matching yet. I think about four or five years is the longest period we have been able to look at, and we are not able to do that at the moment for adopted children. Q16 Baroness Walmsley: Will the national health computer system be able to do the same sort of thing for health indicators? Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top: No, because of data protection, I suspect. Shirley Trundle: We have not explored doing any of that kind of linking. We are working within the data sets that we have in the department at the moment. Annie Crombie: There is one piece of relevant research evidence that I know of that relates to the adoption bit of your question. A fairly recent study by the Hadley Centre showed that education and employment outcomes post GCSE were significantly better for adopted children 472

Department for Education—Oral evidence (QQ 1–79) than for other disadvantaged children, including children in care. It was a fairly limited study but it was a clear conclusion. Of course, one of the difficulties is controlling within that for the different types of children you are looking at. Q17 Viscount Eccles: Is the methodology by which you measure outcomes available? Shirley Trundle: You can obviously look at a whole range of different outcomes. The ones I mentioned have tended to be educational outcomes. There is obviously a whole range of other outcomes that we could look at—health, employment, not being involved in the criminal justice system—in order to see how children in general are progressing. Q18 Viscount Eccles: I was not trying to pursue the theory of outcomes; I was trying to pursue how we measure outcomes—if we do—because it seems to me that if we are comparing one formal currency with another, it is pretty important to know how we judge success or failure. Shirley Trundle: Aside from those outcomes for the children, the other thing that we have a strong interest in is the stability of different forms of placement. We know that stability is really important for a whole range of outcomes for children. That is one of the things on which we routinely collect data in relation to children in the care system. Again, children who have been adopted are not part of that routine data collection because they are no longer children in care. Q19 The Chairman: I think we had better move on to question 4. Shirley Trundle: There was a specific question about how many looked-after children have adoption as their preferred plan or are awaiting placement. In March 2011, about 5,300 children had placement orders, but of course that will always be a snapshot. Some of those will be in the process of being matched, some will be waiting while a local authority does family finding and some will be on the verge of moving in with a family. It is a snapshot but does not necessarily tell us a huge amount about how long those children are waiting. Q20 Baroness Morris of Bolton: One of the saddest things that I have read for a long time was in the information that you sent us: “It is not known how many children with an adoption recommendation are never placed”—these forgotten children. Why is that information not captured somewhere? That would be a very good measure of the success of adoption in the system. Annie Crombie: One of the things that we have been looking at with local authorities when we do visits to follow up the scorecards is the question of reverse decisions—in how many cases did they decide that adoption would be the plan for a child but then reverse that decision? That is slightly different from just the child’s decision not being reversed at all. Baroness Morris of Bolton: But that is important. Annie Crombie: Yes, exactly. Those two bits of information are both worrying in suggesting that the decision first made for a child and the hopes that were raised for that child either were not right or were not followed through in the way that could lead to the best outcomes. Q21 Viscount Eccles: I am not sure if you know what question 5 is, about the alternatives to adoption and your views on special guardianship and other permanency arrangements such as

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Department for Education—Oral evidence (QQ 1–79) long-term fostering and residency. We have already had a fair amount of discussion on those topics—do you have anything to add? The Chairman: Perhaps we might concentrate on special guardianship. Are there any particular points about special guardianship rather than residence that we ought to be looking at? Shirley Trundle: We are interested in the way in which special guardianship has developed. As I think I alluded to earlier, when it was introduced, the thought was that there was a group of older children for whom adoption would not be appropriate—they did not want to completely sever their links with their birth families and change their identities—but that special guardianship would enable someone to exercise parental responsibility and give them that sense of permanence. In practice, lots of much younger children are having special guardianship orders. It may be that that is entirely appropriate and that practice has developed in way that we had not envisaged but is proving to be the right answer for children, or it may be that in some ways it is being allowed to become a default option when adoption might be better. We simply do not know, which is why we have commissioned this research. Q22 The Chairman: Do you know why some local authorities are choosing to put the child into special guardianship? Is there any evidence for why that is happening with the young children? It seems odd. Shirley Trundle: It does, and our understanding about that is fairly limited. No doubt I could gather some anecdotal views from Annie Crombie and other colleagues who work on this, but that is about as far as we would be able to go at the moment. Q23 Viscount Eccles: It is possible that because the present regime has been running in its current form only since 2006, the jury is out and the department does not really know what it thinks about what constitutes a real improvement. That would be perfectly reasonable because six years is a very short time in the history of what happens to children in care. At least this first graph, to which Lord Warner referred, is on an upward trend in total. So where are we? Shirley Trundle: As you say, the jury is probably out on special guardianship. That is something that we will want to reach a view about. I would not want to mislead you about Ministers’ views on adoption. We are not seeing enough children being adopted—they are very clear about that. Q24 Lord Warner: Can I just ask you about special guardianship? If you look at your graph, the trend line of special guardianship and adoption continues up to the top of the special guardianship line. Your own data strongly suggest a substitution effect between adoption and special guardianship. What is the evidence that particular local authorities have indeed done just that? You presumably have some evidence about the relative performance between 2008 and 2011 of individual local authorities. Does the hypothesis that there was a substitution effect for particular local authorities explain what has happened? Shirley Trundle: With this, as with everything else, we see enormous variation. To be honest, we have not done a study or a correlation that asks: are the ones that have most used special guardianship also the ones where the adoption numbers appear to have gone down in parallel?

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Department for Education—Oral evidence (QQ 1–79) We know that some local authorities are using special guardianship to a very large extent; others are scarcely using it at all. Annie Crombie: But the hypothesis that you suggest is something that the research that we are doing at the moment is exploring. We should have some initial conclusions from that fairly early next year. Q25 Baroness Knight of Collingtree: I just want to get an answer to the third question I put, which links in very much with what Viscount Eccles and Lord Warner have said. Are multiple adoptions unusual? I asked whether, if a local authority made four or five different adoptions for the same child, that would be counted as an adoption every time. Would it be struck out when the child had to be re-adopted? Does it happen often? Shirley Trundle: We do not know for sure whether it happens often. From what I know of the system, I would be very surprised if many children were having multiple full adoptions. One of the difficulties is in tracking this: a child might be adopted as a baby; we know that sometimes problems in the adoption do not emerge until the child enters teenagehood, and at that point, if the family breaks down and the child is brought back into care—they may be living in a different part of the country—it may not even be apparent initially that they were an adopted child. It is more plausible to think that there might be breakdowns not after the adoption order but between the child being placed with the family and the family seeking the final adoption order. We know a little bit about disruption in that phase and it does happen. I would certainly be very worried if a local authority was placing a child in that situation multiple times because that is clearly extremely bad for the child and suggests some failure in the matching process or the process to prepare, equip and support the adoptive parents, perhaps to deal with an extremely troubled child. Q26 Baroness Walmsley: What do the children know about all these various options? Although I am on the whole in favour of children being fully informed and involved in decisions about their future, it strikes me as particularly cruel and damaging for a child to be sitting in a foster placement, or multiple foster placements, knowing that they are up for adoption but for 15 years nobody has wanted them. Customarily, how much do children know or does this go on in the background while, as far as they know, they are in a family looking after them? What happens? Shirley Trundle: I hesitate to set myself up as someone who could talk about what customarily happens, because we do not see the detail of the management of individual cases of children. Certainly the whole framework that we have in place sets an expectation that children will be informed and have their views and wishes sought and taken into account at all stages in the process. For example, a child going through court proceedings will have a CAFCASS guardian; a large and important part of their role is to understand the child’s wishes. Clearly you cannot meaningfully establish a child’s wishes without giving them some sense of the range of options and the things that might be under consideration. This must be a matter of incredibly difficult, delicate professional practice—to what extent do you give the child the expectation that they are going to be adopted, if you think that is actually going to be very difficult to achieve? I would be deeply concerned about any practice that left a child thinking for 15 years that they might be adopted. If it has taken that long, there should have been a more decisive point much earlier at

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Department for Education—Oral evidence (QQ 1–79) which the local authority decided that adoption would not be possible in that case and to secure the best other form of permanence possible for the child. The Chairman: Lady Howarth, I think that this will have to be the last supplementary before we move on. Q27 Baroness Howarth of Breckland: The research shows that children who know what is happening to them are far more likely to deal with it than children who do not know. My question is about the fact that that dogma is, I think, really the enemy of the truth; for example, starting from a premise that adoption is best for children when we do not know that. I am not saying I am anti-adoption; I am very pro-adoption. I am very interested in the research that you are going to do on special guardianship and how long that is going to take and whether there are any indicators about not only what that constitutes but whether it is a good option for the children themselves. Presumably the permanency outcome remains the important factor, based on the evidence and the research we already have. Shirley Trundle: It does. I would like to start by slightly nuancing something that you said. Neither we nor Ministers have said that adoption is best in every case. What we want is the best outcome for the individual child, and that must depend on the child and the circumstances. What we and Ministers have been saying is that we think there are more children for whom adoption is the best option and some of them are not getting that when they should be. That is a very important distinction. Annie Crombie: In relation to special guardianship, we do not have anything of significance by way of indications, but we should have by early next year. We are going to provide a written response so in responding to this question we could give you a little bit more detail about precisely what we should be able to tell from that research. Baroness Howarth of Breckland: What the question is will be interesting. The Chairman: That would be very helpful. We should move on to the legislation. Lady Hamwee. Q28 Baroness Hamwee: Yes, of course that is our primary focus. What was the objective of the 2002 Act? Has it met its objective, and what should we be looking at by way of amendment if it has not? Shirley Trundle: There was a whole range of objectives. Crucially, there was the intention to align with the Children Act and ensure the primacy of the best interests of the child. There was an intention to speed up processes; to widen the pool of people who could be considered as adopters; to open up more support for adoptive parents and improve the way that adoptive parents were assessed to give them more confidence to come forward; to enable people who had been adopted to come back and secure better information about their past; and to open up the option of special guardianship orders. There were a large number of objectives there. Obviously, the fact that we are now doing so much work on adoption means that we do not think everything is working exactly as we would want it to. Equally, it would be fair to say that a lot of the work we are doing suggests that the problems are less in the legislative framework and more in the way that things are happening in practice. A lot of what we have been looking at and proposing, for example through the Adoption Action Plan, is not primarily about changing

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Department for Education—Oral evidence (QQ 1–79) primary legislation. We will probably do some of that, but it is much more about the regulatory framework that sits below that, the incentives and leadership at local level and the skills, capabilities and practices of social workers. Q29 Baroness Hamwee: You have articulated seven objectives, of which possibly six fall within “the best interests of the child”. Are there any in particular that you think we should be focusing on? You mentioned the regulatory framework, which is also legislation, although it is secondary legislation. Since you are saying that that may be more where there are problems, perhaps you would like to expand on that a bit. Shirley Trundle: We did a major revamp of the regulatory framework, which came into effect in April 2011. That was a recognition that time had passed and it was necessary to go back and have a look at that. It is probably a bit early to judge what impact those changes have had. The Adoption Action Plan sets out a number of things that we are planning to do; for example, looking again at the process by which prospective adopters are assessed. Despite the best intentions we seem to have accreted a very long, detailed, rather bureaucratic process and we wanted to streamline that to make it much more analytical rather than just being about gathering information, and to separate out the phases so that adoptive parents could come forward to make inquiries about adoption, learn about adoption, ask as many, if you like, silly questions as they needed to in a way that felt quite open and non-judgmental, and then move into the assessment phase. We picked up from quite a lot of adoptive parents that they were finding the process intimidating; they felt that they were being judged right from the beginning and that inhibited their ability to ask questions and challenge things. Q30 The Chairman: Why do adopters who have already adopted two children have to go through the entire formal process for the third child? As I understand it, every time you adopt you are treated as if you are a newcomer. Why does that happen? Shirley Trundle: Indeed. I cannot give you the history as to why that happens but certainly we are interested in considering what should be looked at again when someone comes forward to adopt a second or a third child and what should be taken as read. Obviously, you need to look again at some aspects and make sure that someone who had the capacity to take on one child will be able to cope with another one, so there are some questions to be asked. Q31 The Chairman: The real reason that I ask is that Lady King, who cannot be here today because her children have got chicken pox, has three adopted children. She had to go through the adoption process with number three as if she had never adopted. Is this government policy that you should have to do this all the time? Annie Crombie: It has been, but it will not be. What we have said in the action plan is that that will change and there will be a fast-track approval process for experienced adopters, and we are just working out the detail, as Shirley Trundle says. Q32 The Chairman: I read that, but I just wanted to be sure that you really were going to do it. Shirley Trundle: We are conscious that there is a similar argument in relation to foster carers who want to adopt the children that they have been fostering. It does not seem sensible to

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Department for Education—Oral evidence (QQ 1–79) require them, having been through a rigorous assessment process to become a foster carer, to go through the full adopter assessment process from scratch. Q33 Baroness Hamwee: We are told that the Government will bring forward a draft clause later this year, which we will have a chance to look at, with a view to—and I know that these terms are loaded—reducing delays in the adoption of black and ethnic minority children. What could such a clause say and what should we be thinking about in assessing it? Sandra Walker: That is exactly the question that I have been grappling with. It will obviously need to consider the nature of the duty that needs to be imposed on local authorities when they are placing children for adoption; for example, there might be a requirement for a more nuanced list of factors rather than just the cultural and religious background of the child. As I say, it is early days and we are trying to work out the best way of formulating this new provision. Baroness Hamwee: It would not be fair of me to ask you whether or not that was suitable for primary legislation, so I will not. Q34 Lord Morris of Handsworth: When it arrives, will the guidance on the transracial adoption issue seek to express that, for the adopter, there will be a race-neutral position, irrespective of the child? Annie Crombie: It will try to say that the critical thing is the adoptive parents’ parenting ability and their ability to empathise with and understand the child’s background and where they come from but that in some cases—which we expect to be relatively few—it may be a appropriate, for example, where a child expresses a wish to stay within a particular ethnic or cultural community, to take that into account. In those cases we would not expect the system to be entirely neutral on it. That is where we hope to come out. Q35 The Chairman: What we particularly need to know is when your clause is going to be drafted. We have been told that not only are we a post-legislative scrutiny committee but we will be asked to look at any potential new legislation. The sooner we can get it, the better. Obviously this will be quite an important factor in some of the questions we will put to the people we hear evidence from after the Recess. We rise on 26 July. Is it likely to come before that, or during the Recess? Annie Crombie: I do not think that we will have it before the Recess. Q36 The Chairman: Do please give it to us before December. We will not be hearing any more evidence after December. Annie Crombie: September is when we would hope to have it ready. Q37 The Chairman: Will you get it to our clerk? Shirley Trundle: We will make sure we do that, yes. The Chairman: Yes, it is really important. Q38 Baroness Walmsley: In your first answer to the original question from Lady Hamwee, you said that the evidence is that the legislative framework is roughly right but that what

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Department for Education—Oral evidence (QQ 1–79) problems there are seem to be in relation to the local authorities. Nobody has mentioned money yet, so I would like to ask you: do you consider adoption to be a cost-effective option in the widest possible sense? If you do, why are some local authorities dragging their feet, because it is upon their budgets that the burden falls when a child is in long-term care? Shirley Trundle: Indeed. The way in which local authorities take decisions sometimes puzzles us, because sometimes we see them taking decisions that on the face of it do not appear to be particularly cost-effective. We do not primarily think of adoption in those terms; we think in terms of adoption being a good outcome for a number of children. When we go into local authorities and look at reasons for delay and reasons for practice, we see them sometimes taking decisions that do not appear to be entirely rational, which can be driven by things such as not really understanding the full overheads in the organisation or not attributing those to the particular department that is thinking about adoption. Sometimes it seems to be about the way in which budgets are held, so that perhaps the person who holds the budget for recruiting prospective adopters is different from the person who holds the budget for foster care, and they do not always seem to be in a position to make the sensible read-across. If you see a particularly strange case, you can refer it to somebody more senior who will be able to sort it out, but it is not always working down at the front-line level. Q39 Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top: Are the Government looking at their policy of payment by results in this area? Shirley Trundle: That is a very interesting question. Adoption is very particular in that there are some elements of it that, if we are going to remain compliant with our international obligations, cannot be made into a profit-making business. That said, there are obviously some elements of adoption work where that does not apply. We are always interested in innovative new ways of thinking about things. A number of organisations have talked to us about exploring different ways of bringing in additional social investment, which might or might not be incentivised by the use of payment by results. The Consortium of Voluntary Adoption Agencies has been looking at social impact bonds as a way of perhaps securing more investment in adoption support, so we are very interested in having a conversation with it about that. Q40 Lord Warner: There is a particular issue that I would like to pursue a bit more, in the light of your answers to Lady Hamwee and others in the last question. It is very clear from the line of questioning that there are some serious issues around performance and the huge variability in the performance of local authorities. The thing about legislation is that it makes an assumption that you can actually get everybody up to a reasonable standard. You can streamline the processes, you can do all sorts of other things to make the general process better, but it does not follow that the laggards who have been bad under the previous legislation will necessarily respond to the new legislation. Can you say a bit more about the follow-up on the poor performers as you streamline legislation, and are you going to use legislation to produce some consequences for those who continue to be poor performers? How are you going to use legislation to drive performance? Shirley Trundle: We already have legislation that gives the Secretary of State the power to intervene with local authorities that are underperforming, so it is not so much a question of needing to legislate for that. It is possible that the end result for some of the local authorities whose scorecards have given us cause for concern will be some quite drastic consequences. At

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Department for Education—Oral evidence (QQ 1–79) the moment, we are in the process of talking to local authorities because we do not see the scorecards as something you just read off and say pass or fail; this is very much the starting point of a conversation with a local authority about the reasons for its apparent poor performance and a diagnostic process involving others to work out why things are poor. At the end of the day, if we decide that the performance really is poor and the authority does not show the commitment or the capacity to improve, Ministers have the power to issue improvement notices, which require the local authority to do certain things to improve performance. Ultimately Ministers have the power to take responsibilities away from local authorities, require them to contract them out or ask someone else to do them for the authority. There is a whole range of things already there that can be used. Q41 Lord Warner: Has anyone ever used them? Shirley Trundle: They have been used quite extensively in the past, under the previous Government, in relation to local authorities that were not doing enough to support the performance of their schools and quite heavily in relation to local authorities whose performance on safeguarding was poor. Q42 Lord Warner: But not on adoption? Shirley Trundle: It has not been used in recent history for adoption but that could happen in the future. The Chairman: Does anyone want to ask any questions specifically on legislation? Otherwise, we will move on. It may be that some supplementary questions will come up as primary questions a bit further on. Q43 Baroness Howarth of Breckland: My question is about where you perceive the worst delays—I feel that I should probably be answering this question not asking it. Clearly one of the issues is safeguarding both the birth family and the child while moving the system on. We have talked about local authorities, but local authorities are not the only factor in the delaying of adoption. The courts system is clearly another. Can you elaborate on where the worst delays are and how we can speed the process up but keep these safeguards? Shirley Trundle: There are delays in different places at all stages in the process. This is why there is no magic bullet for this; we have got to work on all sorts of different parts. Slide 15 in the data pack shows by local authority what the different lengths of time are in the process. You are absolutely right that part of the issue is around the family justice system. That was very much the conclusion of the family justice review led by David Norgrove, which accumulated a lot of evidence about delays in the courts system and the causes of those, and set out a very large reform programme, which the Government have accepted and are implementing. A Family Justice Board has been set up, which for the first time brings together all the players at national level and then in equivalent bodies at local level. One of the key findings from the Norgrove review was that there was hostility, misunderstanding and mistrust between the various players in the system: the courts not trusting social workers; social workers not feeling that they were listened to or that judges necessarily understood child development; both parties thinking that CAFCASS was not enough on the ball or delivering children’s guardians quickly enough or providing enough input to the court. The aim is to bring those parties together and make them sit down and talk about what is happening in each local area to work out what the particular 480

Department for Education—Oral evidence (QQ 1–79) causes of delay are and what all these organisations are going to do, collectively, to fix the delays. At national level, we have the Family Justice Board. We are in the process of recruiting an independent chair for that board, and that brings together the judiciary, who have been incredibly engaged, enthusiastic and energised about this challenge, representatives of local authorities, the Legal Services Commission, CAFCASS—all the parties who need to be at the table are there with that sole aim of driving improvement in that particular system. Q44 Baroness Howarth of Breckland: While I am speaking, I will ask the other question in this group, because I think it links with it. There is a group of children for whom concurrent planning is obviously important. Can you talk a little bit about how this could be made to work more effectively for that group of children who it is determined from an early stage are likely to need that? Will this partnership help this and could we do more in terms of concurrent planning? Could more children be placed in this way to stop delays? Shirley Trundle: There is more that we could do on concurrent planning. That will always be an option for a relatively limited group of children, but there are other related things that we might want to do about securing earlier placement with families. Annie Crombie: We made a step towards this in the action plan, but we are a bit worried that we have not been clear enough about that. We envisage a small number of children, probably very young children—the research evaluating the Coram concurrent planning pilot suggested that concurrent planning was of most use for very young children—for whom concurrent planning could be far more used than it is at the moment. We estimate that it has been tried in about 20 authorities, only a very small proportion, so there is room for significant expansion there. We think there is probably greater potential in trying to place children earlier with their future potential adoptive parents on a foster care basis, so that we have a sort of fostering-foradoption practice, where of course the court will still decide whether or not the child should be adopted. Just as in concurrent planning, the carers run the risk that the child will return to its birth parents but there is not the same sort of active rehabilitation going on as is the case in concurrent planning, because that is not part of the child’s care plan and is not appropriate. If we could do that and make that widespread practice, that would cut out a huge cause of delay for children who are waiting for a family to be found after a placement order has been made, which is a significant delay in the process at the moment. At the moment we are making some new regulations that will make it much easier for people to be designated as temporary foster carers if they are already approved prospective adopters. So you would be placing the child with foster carers but that would be much easier than it is at the moment. That is the first step that we are taking. We are then going to think about what more might be necessary to try to make that sort of practice more widespread. Q45 The Chairman: I declare an interest as a governor of Coram. A number of local authorities, particularly in the Manchester area, did it for a while and then gave it up. Is there a degree of opposition to concurrent planning among some local authorities that might otherwise take it up? Annie Crombie: There is a capability issue. It feels like it requires some particular skills among social workers. There is a problem with people being willing to volunteer to do it as

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Department for Education—Oral evidence (QQ 1–79) prospective adopters, because you run the risk of losing the child, and a lot of local authorities worry about the courts’ attitude to concurrent planning. Q46 The Chairman: I am a bit worried about that—that was my last question on this. Are you finding that some of the judges are against it? Annie Crombie: We are not quite sure. We have a mixed picture. For example, Martin Narey has had some very positive signals when he has spoken to the judiciary about this, but local authorities tell us that they are worried that the courts do not welcome it. It is an unclear picture at the moment. Q47 Baroness Morris of Bolton: Following on from that, I was speaking to a couple of judges in Manchester who were very keen on it, and I therefore wondered whether there might be a cost implication as well, or if there is a perceived cost implication from local authorities. Annie Crombie: There may well be, perhaps particularly in terms of the training that social workers would need. It is not a core capability thing for the social workers who would do it, so there is that issue. There is also the question of training and preparing prospective adopters for full concurrent planning practice. The other sort of practice that I described, the fostering for adoption, has another advantage in that it would not require so much training on behalf of the prospective adopters. The Chairman: Perhaps Lady Morris will ask question 9. Q48 Baroness Morris of Bolton: A good deal of my question was covered by Lady Hamwee’s supplementary question but we might be able to explore it a bit more. An Action Plan for Adoption suggests that delays are being caused by efforts “to achieve a perfect or near ethnic match between adoptive parents and the adoptive child”. Does the cause of that problem lie in the legislation—maybe that is why we are going to have some new legislation—or, as is the problem with all legislation, in how it is interpreted and the practice of the local authority? Sandra Walker: I do not see a particular problem with the legislation; it is more an issue of practice, but it may be that some change in the legislation might enable better practice at the end of the day. Annie Crombie: An interesting piece of research by Elaine Farmer in 2010 looked at this issue and the wider question of delays caused by family finding. She identified that in most local authorities family finding only tends to start after the court has made a placement order and that many local authorities strive for a long time to find a notional ideal family—that may not just be an ethnic match, as they may be looking for other things as well. It seems to be largely a practice issue that she is identifying, but, as Sandra Walker said, one on which perhaps we can clarify the balance that we think is right through the legislation. Q49 Baroness Morris of Bolton: Again, we need to find a way of making sure that it is interpreted. I suppose that is our job as well, to make sure that we say exactly what we expect the legislation to do. Something that has not come up is the issue of possible delays in placing siblings. Do you have any data and statistics on how many families are kept together? Is there a particular delay in finding adopters who are willing to take on a whole family? Might there be a

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Department for Education—Oral evidence (QQ 1–79) more permanent way through special guardianship? It is an important aspect that we have not touched on. Shirley Trundle: If you look at prospective adopters, there are certainly significantly fewer who are willing to take on large sibling groups, so there is a significant mismatch between the children who are being placed as a family group and the range of adopters who would be willing to take on a large sibling group. I do not know whether Annie Crombie has the information immediately to hand, but we have data from the adoption register that show that particularly starkly. Annie Crombie: The last time that I looked at this, I think there were three prospective adopters on the register willing to take on a sibling group but there were more than 60 sibling groups of three or more children waiting on the adoption register. That is not the complete picture but it gives you a flavour of the problem. Q50 Baroness Knight of Collingtree: It is a very long time since I chaired a local authority children’s committee and it did not happen then, but is it the case now that there is a particular social worker in the department who concentrates on adoption or is it not an area that has a special person? Shirley Trundle: Again, I am slightly wary of being drawn into pronouncing on this when I do not have the detail for every local authority. My impression is that most local authorities have specialist adoption teams. Different authorities will construct things in different ways. Most local authorities are operating on quite a small scale in terms of adoption so they tend to be quite small teams, which throws up all the challenges of how to equip them to do the more specialist things such as concurrent planning. It also makes it quite difficult for them to be as effective as they could be around recruitment of adopters because they are just too small to do it really strategically and develop a lot of expertise in marketing and customer insight and the things that you might need in order to draw in a wider range of prospective adopters. Q51 Baroness Knight of Collingtree: So you would not advise that any local authority, except perhaps the very large ones, should have a specialised expert in this? Shirley Trundle: Every authority will need social workers with expertise in adoption. There is a question mark about whether the smallest authorities can afford by themselves to have the optimum full range of adoption expertise. Q52 The Chairman: Are some local authorities resistant to accessing the national adoption register? Annie Crombie: We do not know for sure, but we suspect that local authorities have not been as good as they might be at referring people swiftly on to the adoption register. We are trying to strengthen the requirements on them to do that by putting some things that had previously just been in statutory guidance into regulations, which was part of the action plan. It is probably fair to say that they are perhaps not as energetic as they might be with regard to their use of the register. The Chairman: Very tactful.

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Department for Education—Oral evidence (QQ 1–79) Q53 Lord Warner: What I would really like to get a sense of is this: you have pretty much owned up to your concerns that some small local authorities will probably never be able to cover the full range of adoption capabilities, so what is the answer? Are we going to see a more proactive attempt to encourage people to move into bigger consortia? Is the department thinking about using legislation to drive this? Can you throw some light on the data that you have kindly given us about what is going on in the voluntary adoption agencies, which seem to be shrinking in number? Are they part of the problem, or are they part of the solution? Are some of them too small, or are they just not cutting the mustard as far as children in care are concerned? Can you throw some light on this issue of scale and this duel system of local authority and voluntary adoption agencies? Shirley Trundle: We have started looking at this, but we are still at quite an early stage so we have not got to the point of, if you like, forming solutions. We are very much at the phase of trying to work out what the issues and problems are. We think that there is an issue of scale. We know that quite a lot of authorities already use consortia arrangements, whereby typically they might agree to swap prospective adopters. For example, if one authority has managed to recruit a prospective adopter but does not need that person at that point, the authority might have an arrangement whereby the adopter can be used by a different local authority. That sort of practice already goes on. Different authorities have different practices in relation to the way that they use voluntary adoption agencies, and we think that there are problems here. Again, this comes back to whether local authorities always take decisions that are genuinely cost-effective. Many local authorities, when looking for prospective adopters for a child, will go in a sequential way: they will look first at their own people whom they have on their books; then they might look at those of other local authorities; and only then might they go to the voluntary agencies because they perceive that getting a prospective adopter from a voluntary agency will be more expensive. We are not clear that, if you took a totally rational view that included the authority’s overheads and took a long-term view on whether the child might be adopted more quickly, it might be more cost-effective to use the VAA, but things are not set up in a way that encourages the local authority decision-maker to do that at the moment. We think that there is probably scope for the voluntary agencies to be doing more, but they are finding it difficult to operate in a world where local authorities are not necessarily making as much use of them as they could. Q54 The Chairman: Is the department going to do anything about that? Shirley Trundle: As I say, Ministers are interested in this. We are doing the problem analysis and we will continue to work with Ministers, but we are not at the point today of having moved to solutions. The Chairman: But you are looking at it, obviously. Q55 Baroness Morris of Bolton: On the issue of the voluntary agencies, we have the demise of the Catholic adoption agencies—I declare an interest as a Catholic. I do not want to go into the whys and wherefores of why that happened, but the Catholic adoption agencies were particularly good at placing some of the more difficult-to-place older children who have

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Department for Education—Oral evidence (QQ 1–79) been in care. Now that those agencies are not operating, is that one of the reasons why we may be seeing a fall-off in the adoption of some of the older children? Have you looked at that? Annie Crombie: We have not looked at the precise impact of the demise of the Catholic adoption agencies, but with partners in the voluntary sector such as the Consortium of Voluntary Adoption Agencies—the recent interest in adoption has led those agencies to be fairly confident about the ability to expand recruitment over the next few years, so they are projecting an optimistic forecast—and organisations such as Coram, we are working to look at how we might, if you like, try to tap other sources of prospective adopters for children with particular needs. For example, perhaps with societies for children with particular disabilities we could try to explore other routes into finding prospective adopters who might have an interest in taking on a child with a particular set of needs. But that is the stage that we are at. We are very aware that we need to have a much better picture of what the current situation is so that we can then have a strategy for improving the recruitment of adopters where we have a serious shortfall. The Chairman: That sounds like a good moment for Lady Walmsley to ask question 10. Q56 Baroness Walmsley: That leads quite nicely on to my question while also referring back to an earlier one. Is there a problem recruiting prospective adopters from particular ethnic groups? If so, why do you think that is and what more could be done to change that situation? Annie Crombie: I think that the Government’s view is that we should not be particularly trying to recruit people from particular ethnic groups. We think that there may be a shortfall and we want more people from all backgrounds to come forward to adopt children, but we would slightly contest the idea that we ought to be looking specifically for adopters from particular ethnic groups in order to match them with children from those ethnic groups. I just want to make that distinction. We do not hold data about adopters by ethnicity. We look at their marital status and we gather those data, but we do not know what their ethnic breakdown is. Generally, we would like to have a much better picture of what makes people want to come to adoption and what other routes there might be to tap that we have not yet explored. The British Association for Adoption and Fostering—BAAF—tells us that over 80% of people who come forward to adopt come from failed fertility treatment, so that route into adoption accounts for a really high proportion. I think that we would like to look at that a bit more to understand how we might be able to channel those people better into adoption, to reduce the attrition rate—which we think is very high between initial inquiry and entering the approval process—and to look at whether there might be other sources of people who might make excellent adopters but who do not currently make up a large proportion of adoptive parents. Q57 Baroness Walmsley: Can I just explore that a little more? If ethnicity and cultural background is a factor in the consideration of the appropriateness of a match—and I accept what you say about the balance or the extent to which that should or should not be weighted—surely it would make sense to know the ethnicity of prospective adopters. It surprises me a little that you say that you do not know. If ethnicity is a factor—whatever weight you give to it, even if it is only 1%—surely you cannot possibly know if you have the right match if you do not even know. 485

Department for Education—Oral evidence (QQ 1–79) Lord Morris of Handsworth: Could I ask a supplementary to that? At any one time, how many children from ethnic minorities are in the queue waiting to be adopted? Annie Crombie: We have the data for children broken down by ethnic minority. Often in local authorities the numbers are so small that they are not published because the numbers are suppressed. I think that I agree with Lady Walmsley that, ideally, we would want to know more—we would want to have all possible information—about prospective adopters, because the challenge of recruitment is such a critical one at the moment. However, at whatever point the decision was taken, the data do not currently allow us to do that. I think that it would perhaps feel a bit odd to introduce that at this stage unless it was part of a general review of all the things that we might want to know about. Q58 Baroness Howarth of Breckland: Can I just comment on this? Local authorities keep ethnicity data on practically everyone who crosses the threshold. If you have got to the point of asking questions about getting on the database, which most people will do, surely there must be an answer to this question. I just wonder why we cannot collate it. I suppose that I am just amazed that the information is not there. I can understand that the Government might not want to take a particular view— Baroness Walmsley: It is misguided political correctness. Baroness Howarth of Breckland: —but surely the facts must be there. Shirley Trundle: We are not in a position to say why the data collection, which was set up some time ago, does not include this. I think that you put a very fair challenge about whether we should have such information in the future, but I am also mindful of the fact that the Government’s general approach is to reduce data collection burdens and the general thrust is to collect fewer data items than we do at the moment. Q59 The Chairman: It is very odd to have the data on the children but not on the adults. If you did not have any of it and instead said, “Everybody was colour blind, so we do not know where people came from”, that would be understandable. But you do know about the children. It is quite extraordinary not to know about the adults. Shirley Trundle: A much more detailed collection of data on children has always come into the department. The data that the department has at national level, as opposed to those that local authorities hold, are quite limited. The data collection is not nearly so detailed. Q60 Baroness Hamwee: I am puzzled by this as well. If one regards a major problem as being delays in finding adopters for particular groups of children, one would think that there would be attempts to correlate information about children and prospective adopters. Therefore, let me ask the question that I was going to ask from a slightly different point of view. Given that we are told that there are particular problems in the case of adopting black children, are there differences in different parts of the country, given that the populations in different parts of the country are different? Is that below the radar as well? Annie Crombie: Our data suggest—this will not surprise you—that the adopting of black children is where the delays are greatest and there is certainly a London emphasis to the geographical distribution, but there are obvious reasons for that. However, there are fewer

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Department for Education—Oral evidence (QQ 1–79) than 20 authorities where the number of children in this category is high enough for us to do any meaningful analysis, so it is quite a specific issue for certain local authorities. The Chairman: We need to move on to the issue of court proceedings. Q61 Baroness Knight of Collingtree: Sorry, can I just ask a question very quickly? Would it be the case that—it is not a question of being a racist or anything—many adoptive parents, particularly those who adopt very young children because they cannot have children of their own, want to have a child that could be their own? They are not being racist. Would that be accurate? Shirley Trundle: I do not think that we know enough about the detailed motivations of prospective adopters to say that that is the case. We certainly hear anecdotally from quite a lot of parents who are very keen to adopt who say, “I was turned away because I was white and the authority said that it was looking only for black and minority ethnic adopters”. Our sense is that there are people who would be very willing to adopt black children, and the problems lie in the matching process within the local authority. Annie Crombie: One of the tragic things is that the data show that black children who go on to be adopted are actually younger when they come into care than the average for white children. Despite them being younger, their delay is so much greater. Q62 The Chairman: That is very sad. We move on to the issue of court proceedings. Q63 Baroness Howarth of Breckland: We know that you are already taking some action in relation to adoption panels following Norgrove, but there may be some danger in not going through panels in that they do a lot of the preparation work; for example, sending back work that has not been properly looked at. They are not always nit-picky just to be difficult, but to get it right for the child and the family. Will there be a problem in terms of these delays being transferred to the court, which will then have to do this work—unless, of course, social work suddenly becomes perfect? Shirley Trundle: Of course, we have a programme of reform for social work and certainly intend to improve social work practice. We all recognise that you do not achieve that overnight. Norgrove consulted very widely for the family justice review and the responses to that suggested very wide support for this change. Of course, there are always risks with change, and in trying to rebalance the system in one way you run the risk of opening up some other problem. We are of the view that overall the benefits of making this change are worth the risk. The decision-maker in the local authority is still going to have to make a decision, in principle, that a child should be placed for adoption, before the case goes to court. We need to look to those people to ensure that they have got the right work done in advance. Q64 Baroness Howarth of Breckland: Another issue is that Norgrove was keen that judges did not do the casework but should be interested in the follow-through. Might this not encourage them to do a bit more of the casework? Shirley Trundle: Well, it is a risk. Equally, the engagement we are having with the judiciary suggests that judges understand much better than they did the impact that delay has on children and that you have to balance the desire to seek every bit of evidence possible in order to take a

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Department for Education—Oral evidence (QQ 1–79) hard decision against the fact that every month longer a child is waiting for a decision it is getting older and has not got a permanent placement. The judges are gaining a much better understanding of that and are very willing to engage with that. Q65 The Chairman: I declare an interest as a former judge and former President of the Family Division in asking the next group of questions. First, are you in discussion with Mr Justice Ryder? I hope you are. Shirley Trundle: Very much so. The Chairman: Good. Shirley Trundle: He is one of the judicial observers on the Family Justice Board so he is very strongly engaged. Q66 The Chairman: I gather that he has become the judge in charge of modernisation or some splendid title like that. He is very good. He comes from the right part of the north-west of England. Baroness Morris of Bolton: From Bolton. The Chairman: From Bolton, indeed. I am very glad to hear about that. My main question is: is it realistic to place a six-month time limit on care proceedings? I cannot resist asking whether the legal aid reforms, which of course exclude legal aid from some part of the family law process, will have an impact on the timeliness of care and adoption proceedings. Obviously every adoption is post care: 80% to 90% of adoptions will have to go through the care process. Shirley Trundle: Obviously the Government believe that it is possible in principle to move to the six-month time limit. They have said that that is what they are going to legislate for. We do not underestimate how challenging that is going to be. It is very much not just a question of legislating. This has to be underpinned by a great deal of support and, crucially, as Norgrove identified, the system working together to make this happen. We think that previous attempts to bring down the length of care proceedings have not made the progress that we would have wanted because different parts of the system have not all been pushing in the same direction and working together. There is a whole set of different things that we have to do in concert to make this possible, including: getting expert reports to be much more clearly focused on the issues that have to be resolved to enable a decision to be made in the case; taking away some of the work that is probably pretty nugatory at the moment, such as the continual renewing of interim care orders; being much clearer about which aspects of the care plan the court ought to be taking a view on and which should properly be left to the local authority as the corporate parent of the child; and the taking out of the adoption panel loop. A whole set of things need to work together, overseen by the Family Justice Board, bringing all the partners together. The reforms of legal aid relate to private law so our Ministry of Justice colleagues are not changing the basis on which children or birth parents can have legal representation. We do not envisage that the reforms will have any significant impact on care proceedings. Q67 The Chairman: I wish you luck in thinking that because a lot of them are tried by the same judges—that is the problem. Shirley Trundle: So you are thinking in terms of the impact on judges’ time?

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Department for Education—Oral evidence (QQ 1–79) The Chairman: That is exactly the point I was making. I appreciate this is a Ministry of Justice issue, but has your department taken on board the potential for the courts to be clogged up? Shirley Trundle: We are certainly very aware of all the concerns about litigants in person in private law cases. Q68 Baroness Hamwee: Perhaps I can ask one probably stupid question on court proceedings. How many applications are refused? Are applications ever refused? I would not begin to suggest that the courts are rubber-stamping, but is this the inevitable final stage in a process that always has the right conclusion? The Chairman: Really, nowadays, since 2002, the question is how many placement orders are refused rather than adoption orders. That is after my time, actually. Shirley Trundle: The placement order is supposed to be the point at which everything is resolved, making the adoption order much more of a formality. The Chairman: Do you have any statistics on that? Shirley Trundle: We do not have them with us, unless Annie Crombie has them in her head. Annie Crombie: No, I do not, I am afraid. Shirley Trundle: My sense is that the courts sometimes say that the local authority has got it wrong, perhaps aided by advice from the CAFCASS guardian, but I do not have the figures. We can certainly see if we can include something on that in our written evidence. The Chairman: It would be very helpful if you could find that out. It would be a useful way to fill up the gaps. Q69 Lord Warner: My question is simple. If you cannot answer it today, perhaps you could send us some information. What is the scale of improvement that the 25% worst-performing local authorities will have to achieve to hit the six-month deadline? Annie Crombie: I do not know that off the top of my head, but we can easily work that out. The Chairman: Let us move on to post-adoption support. Q70 Baroness Hamwee: Do we need to place a clear obligation on the local authority within primary legislation to provide post-adoption support for adoptive families? Shirley Trundle: Perhaps Annie Crombie would like to talk about that. We are doing a lot of work on post-adoption support at the moment. Annie Crombie: This is an area that our action plan was quite silent on. There is a lot of pressure at the moment from local authorities and our voluntary sector partners for us to respond to a proposal that they have put forward for something called an adoption passport. We think that there are three issues with post-adoption support: first, the quality and frequency of the assessment of need done by the local authority; secondly, the provision of support against that assessment; thirdly, a wider structural problem about the consistency of the landscape of support. We do not know enough about post-adoption support at the moment, the demand for it and the level of provision. We are doing some work on that over

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Department for Education—Oral evidence (QQ 1–79) the summer and we have committed to give a more formal response to the proposal for an adoption passport in due course. We think that there is an issue with the assessment. Adoption UK did a survey where a quite incredible 64% of adoptive parents who responded said that they had not been offered an assessment of need, so we need to look at that point of assessment very carefully and understand a lot better what support is available. We are doing a speedy survey over the summer with local authorities and voluntary adoption agencies to try to understand what they are actually providing to adoptive families. That work will put us in a much better position to answer your question about whether a new legislative duty would be the right way forward, which of course would also have some cost implications that we would need to understand better. Q71 The Chairman: If you are going to do that, you have a legislative vehicle coming up. Would you think of putting that in as a potential clause in the Bill that we are being told about? Annie Crombie: I dare say if Ministers were minded to do that, they would probably look to consider that. Shirley Trundle: One other thing about post-adoption support that comes out quite strongly from the evidence from adoptive parents is that this is not just about the local authority providing services or not; it is also, crucially, about the attitude of the universal services that these children are using, such as schools and GPs, and there is a sense that those organisations and individuals do not necessarily have a terribly good understanding of adoptive children and their needs. That is a tricky one to crack and the solution will not be around legislating for local authorities to provide services. Q72 Baroness Hamwee: You obviously cannot answer the question that I was going to ask about whether lack of support might be a deterrent to prospective adopters. Today’s discussion leads me to ask, in the case of special guardianship, about support for birth families as well as the child’s new family, if I can put it that way. Shirley Trundle: We recognise that all kinds of families can require various different kinds of support. Of course, a lot of the issues that face an adoptive family who, for example, adopt a child with a disability or special educational needs will be the same problems that face a birth family with a child with those needs. We have a programme of reform around children with disability and SEN that should be of benefit both to adopted children and to other children. Q73 Baroness Hamwee: The needs of birth parents and siblings in any of the situations we have been discussing are quite complex, but the work you are doing at the moment is with adopters. Is that right? Shirley Trundle: That is the specific focus of the work we are doing as part of a programme centred on adoption. The Chairman: Lady Walmsley, perhaps you can combine the last two questions. Q74 Baroness Walmsley: I do not think that I can combine them, but I will certainly ask both. On the possibility of legislation to ensure that local authorities not only assess the need for post-adoption support but then supply it, is there not a danger of a parallel with the

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Department for Education—Oral evidence (QQ 1–79) statement of special educational needs, where there is at least a perception that local authorities are reluctant to provide that statement if they also have the duty to provide the costly support? It could possibly be a self-defeating measure. Have you considered that? Annie Crombie: Our colleagues who sit just round the corner from us in the department and work on special educational needs are thinking about this very actively as they prepare their own legislation. We are trying to learn all we can from the reforms that they are introducing around assessment and SEN so that we can try to model the best of that in the adoption system. We are aware of that risk and we want to try to learn what we can from the SEN experience. Baroness Walmsley: It is important to consider whether the assessment should be done by one independent group and the support should be supplied by somebody else. Annie Crombie: The role of health professionals is also critical in that assessment. Q75 Baroness Walmsley: Thank you. Let us move on to monitoring and the scorecards that we are promised. Can they take account of all the enormous variations among local authorities? We have differences in the demographics and size of the populations and in the number of contested adoptions and permanency priorities—lots of variations. How simplistic is the scorecard, and how subtly can it respond to all these variations? Shirley Trundle: It is important to say that the scorecard is not a pass/fail test. The scorecards have some really important headline indicators to reflect the experience of children moving through the system, and as we get more data we will also reflect the experience of prospective adopters going through the system. The scorecards also include, not as the headline indicators but to give context, a lot of other background information about that local authority area. We are conscious, for example, that a local authority might have apparently poor performance on timeliness but that might reflect the fact that it is trying to provide for children with very complex needs and other harder-to-place children, which might explain why it is apparently slower than other authorities. The scorecards give us the starting point for further work: further diagnosis of why the authority’s performance appears to be poor and an assessment of whether the local authority recognises that and has the capacity and the plans to improve for itself or whether it needs more help. It is always just the starting point for a dialogue. We have been involving the new Children’s Improvement Board in those conversations with local authorities, which can be a source of peer support and help that local authorities can draw on. Yes, the Secretary of State has a big stick if necessary in the ability to issue an improvement notice to a local authority, but that would never happen solely on the basis of the data in the scorecard; it would always involve those other steps as well. Q76 Baroness Walmsley: That sounds very fair, and one wants to be fair to local authorities as well as achieve the best results for children and improve everything. How public will these scorecard results be? The media in this country have a terrible tendency to take raw figures and put them into a league table, which could be terribly unfair on somewhere like Birmingham, perhaps. Shirley Trundle: We have published the first edition of the scorecards so the data are out there and, yes, the media did a little bit of that for themselves. Of course, that can be uncomfortable for local authorities but the Government are very clear that part of their agenda

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Department for Education—Oral evidence (QQ 1–79) of how to drive public service reform is by being very transparent about the data and performance. That can be uncomfortable and sometimes the media can be unfair. Baroness Walmsley: Have you tried to educate them? Annie Crombie: Yes, and we need to do more of that as we move into the implementation phase, to bring out the excellent practice that exists in some local authorities. On the league table point, we spent a lot of time working with our colleagues in local authorities about the presentation of the scorecard and we have deliberately presented it so that you can only rank local authorities against one indicator or the other, with the other indicator there alongside it. When you look at how the local authorities perform, it is very different against the two indicators, which supports the point that delays are in different places in the system in different authorities. We have tried to make it a subtle tool, so there is not a simple 1 to 52. You cannot do that with the scorecard; it is more complicated than that, although I take your point about the media being a law unto themselves in that regard. Q77 Lord Warner: In being fair, you can actually end up providing excuses, as we have seen with lots of public sector performance measures under successive Governments. How are you going to guard against that? It sounds like you want to be really fair, but actually you drive change by not always accepting all the excuses that the data enable people to make. Shirley Trundle: We need to be fair to the extent that, if the Secretary of State is going to decide to intervene with a local authority and take what might be quite draconian action in forcing it to restructure its services, that is a decision where the Secretary of State is exercising a statutory power and he will have to have a robust enough evidence base to be able to uphold that decision if it is challenged by a local authority in court. We are mindful of that need to be fair but I would not want you to think that that means that our Secretary of State is going to pussyfoot around this or accept excuses, because he is very clear and very determined about driving up performance on adoption. Q78 The Chairman: I am going to bring the questions to an end because we have given you an absolute grilling for two hours. I will just say that we have raised a huge number of issues but is there anything that you wanted to say to us about anything we had not raised with you? I will just give you that opportunity. Shirley Trundle: Well, we have ranged very widely. I do not know if there is anything either of my companions wants to raise. Annie Crombie: There are some things we will pick up in our response to your call for evidence. On reflection, I just want to say one thing: relatively speaking, we have not dwelled very much on the problem of recruitment and the mismatch between the number of children waiting for adoption and the number of approved prospective adopters. I do not have a great deal more to contribute on that now, but that is probably the most pressing challenge we have at the moment. Q79 The Chairman: Could you perhaps add a bit on that in your written evidence to us? We will be extremely grateful. I thank all three of you on behalf of the Committee. You have stood up to our questions marvellously well and we are very grateful to you.

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Department for Education—Oral evidence (QQ 1–79) Shirley Trundle: We very much appreciate the chance to come and talk to you about something that is a very active and all-consuming part of our lives at the moment. The Chairman: Thank you all very much indeed.

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Department for Education—Written evidence

Department for Education—Written evidence Background 1. As is appropriate to a fundamental intervention in the lives of individuals, adoption is governed by significant regulation and the process is subject to the independent scrutiny of the courts. The delivery of the service is mostly carried out at local level: adoption is part of the wider care system and again, we think that it is right that local agencies play a leading role in how adoption is delivered as part of that wider care system locally. 2. However, we know that there is considerable delay in the adoption process, and there is strong evidence from research (e.g. Selwyn 2006) of the harm this does to children. As the recently published Action Plan for Adoption set out, the whole process, from entry into care until a child is adopted, lasts on average two years and seven months, and within that, an average time of one year and nine months to obtain the placement order. There is also strong evidence that delays in the assessment of prospective adopters mean that many suitable families are either turned away or do not continue the assessment process. Without more families available, children cannot be placed for adoption. 3. Our reforms need to address these issues, but so far we have not considered that we need fundamental structural reform to do so. However, success in reforming the adoption system will rest on wider reforms. The Munro reforms should lead to less drift and delay in child protection system. Reforms to the social work profession will give social workers the skills, knowledge and capabilities they need, supported by the right kind of professional supervision and support from employers. The family justice system reforms are intended to streamline care proceedings in the family courts and reduce delays and we have promised legislation for a 6 month time limit. 4. Where children can’t return home and no suitable kinship care is available, the Government would like to see more children benefiting from adoption than is currently the case. Following the then Government’s review of adoption in 2000, the number of children leaving care and adopted rose, peaking at about 3,700 in 2005, since when numbers have fallen back to about 2,450 at 31 March 2011 – still higher than in 2000. Taken with special guardianship and residence orders, the number of children leaving care under one or other of those orders continues to rise, reaching about 6,000 at 31 March 2011. Special guardianship orders came into force in December 2005. We want to understand better than we do how special guardianship orders are being used, including whether adoption could ever be a better option for a child. We have commissioned research to explore this (discussed further below at paragraphs 37-39). 5. We also know that there is however very significant variation between adoption numbers in different local authorities: looking at the 3 years to 31 March 2011, whilst nationally 12% of children who leave care do so for adoption, at local authority level the range is 2-26%.38 This suggests that practice and attitudes in local areas is also behind the recent fall in the 38

Statistical First Release http://www.education.gov.uk/rsgateway/DB/SFR/s000878/index.shtml

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Department for Education—Written evidence number of adoptions. Legislation 6. The 2002 Act reformed the law of adoption. The Act aligned adoption law with the relevant provisions in the Children Act 1989 to provide for the child’s welfare throughout their life to be paramount in all decisions relating to adoption. It imposed a duty on local authorities to provide an Adoption Service which includes the provision of adoption support services and a right to request and receive an assessment of needs for adoption support services. It also provided a new regulatory regime for adoption support agencies requiring those carrying on such agencies to be registered in respect of them under the Care Standards Act 2000. 7. The Act changed the process of adoption. It repealed (subject to transitory provisions) freeing orders and provides that adoption agencies may only place a child for adoption with the birth parents’ consent (and that consent may be consent to placement with prospective adopters identified in the consent or with any prospective adopters who may be chosen by the agency) or under a placement order. Placement orders replaced freeing orders. The intention was to ensure decisions about whether adoption is the right option for the child are taken early in the court process. The intention was to provide greater certainty and stability for children, by dealing with consent before placing a child for adoption, minimising the risk of disruption; to remove uncertainty for prospective adopters who faced a contested hearing at the adoption order stage and to reduce the extent to which birth parents were faced with a fait accompli at the final adoption hearing. 8. The Act widened the pool of adopters by allowing adoption orders to be made in favour of single people, married couples and, for the first time, unmarried couples and, from 2004, civil partners. The Act includes measures intended to tackle delays in the adoption process and encourage more people to come forward to adopt and to help adoptive placements to succeed. The Act provides a new framework for managing and disclosing information to adopted adults and others about adoptions which take place after 30 December 2005. It provides for the first time a new regulatory framework within which intermediary agencies are able to assist adopted adults to obtain information about their adoption and facilitate contact between them and their adult birth relatives, where the person was adopted before 30 December 2005 (known as intermediary services). The Act also introduced special guardianship orders which are intended to provide permanence for children for whom adoption is not appropriate. 9. Most changes in the 2002 Act have been implemented. The concept of a statutory register for adopters has not been fully implemented, as we have so far succeeded to continue to run the national Adoption Register, currently under a contract with the British Association for Adoption and Fostering, within the framework of primary legislation without the need for regulations. The 2006 Act has been fully implemented. 10. The Government has already explained its intention to legislate to address delay in the matching process – in particular to ensure that children suffer no further delay while social workers seek a perfect or near perfect match, particularly one based on a child’s ethnicity. Within the past few weeks we have set out plans to legislate to see greater use of fostering by a child’s prospective adopters prior to placement order – placing a new duty on local authorities

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Department for Education—Written evidence to consider using this approach wherever possible. We are also considering further changes to legislation on contact between birth parents and children, and will be conducting a short consultation on this over the summer. 11. The Coalition Government accepted the Family Justice Review’s recommendation that, to reduce delay and duplication, the requirement that local authority adoption panels should consider the suitability for adoption of a child whose case is before the court should be removed. Regulations have been made, amending the Adoption Agencies Regulations which will remove the adoption panel from the process where the local authority (LA) has to apply to court for a placement order in the case of every child for whom adoption is the plan. Time taken in placing children 12. The evidence from the data provided annually to the Department is quite clear that in many cases the time taken at all stages of the adoption process is too long. It is particularly evident that for black children the time taken is disproportionate, with black children taking about a year longer than other groups to be adopted, even though black children who are adopted are younger, on average, on entry to care than white children who are adopted. 13. The reasons for this delay are varied. Our data shows while one part of the process may be the most significant cause of delay in one authority, in another authority a different part of the process is at fault. We are clear that good case management and a sense of urgency at all stages of the process are critical factors in limiting delay. Availability of appropriate approved adopters is a factor too – and our proposals for a National Gateway to Adoption and new streamlined adopter approval process should help to address this. We will be consulting on supporting regulatory change, including a fast-track approval process for existing adopters, in September. There is also evidence that whilst local authorities, the courts and the voluntary sector can work well together, that is not always the case. That is why, at the time of publishing the Action Plan, the Government asked Directors of Children’s Services to review with their local court services what could be done to improve those working relationships, and to reduce delay, whilst at all times retaining the independence of the court scrutiny. 14. Our proposals on early permanence (published on 6 July and attached to this submission) are designed to reduce the time taken for children to move in with a stable family, and minimise the disruption of late placement moves. For some children, where it is not certain that adoption will be the plan for the child, concurrent planning can be very successful. Concurrent planning is not widespread, and we would like to see all local authorities considering this approach. We would also like to see more authorities placing children for whom adoption is the plan with foster carers who also approved adopters, on a fostering basis whilst the court consider the application for a placement order – “Fostering for Adoption”. If the court makes a placement order, the placement can become an adoptive placement and it is the adults who take the risk of disruption, not the child. 15. The reasons for variations between local authorities are not entirely clear. We know that some local authorities are prepared to push very hard to place the hardest to place children for adoption, and that can sometimes take longer – at the same time, there are local authorities who place more older children, and do so quite rapidly. Others are pro-active in

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Department for Education—Written evidence seeking out adopters based on the needs of the children, and others offer innovative and appropriate adoption support so adopters know that they will be properly supported whatever the child – or children’s – particular needs. We would like to see authorities sharing those good practices. The number of potential adopters 16. Section 1 of the 2002 Act places the needs and welfare of the child at the centre of the adoption process. It makes the welfare of the child throughout the child’s life the paramount consideration for a court or adoption agency in all decisions relating to adoption including placement. Making a good match between a child and prospective adopter is a highly skilled task and is vital for both the child and the prospective adopter. The social worker has to consider a range of issues: meeting the child’s identified needs; the parenting skills of the prospective adopter; working quickly to avoid the damaging effect of delay. If the prospective adopter can meet most of the child’s needs, the social worker must not delay placing a child with the prospective adopter because he or she is single, older than other adopters or from a different racial or cultural background. 17. We do not have comprehensive national data comparing the number of approved adopters with the number of children in need of adoption. The numbers in the Adoption Register, however, suggest that at present there is a significant gap between the number of adopters and the number of children waiting. There is a particular shortage of families for sibling groups. We do not collect data on the ethnicity of adopters – but while we should like to see more adopters from all backgrounds coming forwards, we do not consider that finding more adopters from specific ethnic groups is the only way to address the delay suffered by particular ethnic groups of children. This is because we should like to see social workers making a swift decision about the best available adopters for a particular child, based on their strengths as adoptive parents and their parenting skills, rather than prioritising the search for adopters who are a perfect or partial ethnic match for the child. This is the intention behind the proposed legislation announced in the Action Plan. 18. We do not know enough about the motivations of people who might consider adopting, and we are working with voluntary adoption agencies and local authorities to improve our understanding – and to inform our approach to recruitment in the future. We think that voluntary adoption agencies have a critical role to play in the recruitment of adopters and should like to see them able to expand significantly their capacity. In future years we also expect to have better data about approved adopters, and we have committed to including data on the timeliness of adopter approval in the adoption scorecard as soon as it is available. 19. We also know there is significant variation in the approaches that adoption agencies take to recruiting and assessing adopters, and as a result how successful they are in maximising numbers. So for example, some LAs recruit adopters for a general pool of approved adopters and others only recruit when they have specific children they wish to place.

Court proceedings

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Department for Education—Written evidence 20. Proceedings for care orders, including those which are put to the court where adoption is the plan for the child, currently take on average 54 weeks. It is a long way from the 12 weeks envisaged when the Children Act 1989 was introduced and is far too long for children, including those for whom adoption is the appropriate route. Research (Selwyn et al, 2006) has found that children's chances of adoption reduce by almost 20% for every year of delay. This is why we are acting to tackle the delays in care proceedings. Significantly reducing the time it takes for care cases to progress through the courts will offer benefits for all the children involved but should bring particular benefits for those for whom adoption is the best route. 21. The reforms which the Government is setting in train following the Family Justice Review are specifically designed to reduce the time it takes for care and supervision applications to progress through the courts. We plan to amend the Children Act to require that, in all bar exceptional cases, proceedings for care and supervision orders are concluded within 6 months – roughly halving the average time it currently takes for cases to be completed. Our aim is that wherever cases can be concluded quicker than this, they should be. Introduction of the six month time limit will be supported by other legislative changes including stripping out unnecessary and unhelpful duplicate processes and ensuring that the commissioning of additional expert reports, which can be very time-consuming, only occurs when this is genuinely essential to the case. We are also working closely with local authorities to ensure that the high quality care applications already submitted to the courts by some LAs extends to all. This, too, will ensure that care cases progress more speedily and help avoid the need for the high numbers of additional assessments which are currently commissioned. 22. The reforms to care proceedings we have announced will not change the legal provisions currently in place for guardians to represent children’s views and interests when cases are before the courts. More timely decisions in care cases, will, of course, require more timely input from guardians and for this reason the Department has asked Cafcass to allocate care cases to guardians within 3 working days. Cafcass are currently achieving this. Following the Family Justice Review, we are keen to explore what more can be done to ensure those children’s views and interests are effectively represented throughout the court process and beyond, including by ensuring closer links between the Guardian and the Independent Reviewing Officer. 23. It is hard to construct any meaningful comparison of placement orders and freeing orders. Prior to the 2002 Act, local authorities did not need a court order or parental consent to place a child with prospective adopters. In order for the court to make an adoption order, parental consent was required. So adoption order stage could well be the first point at which the question of birth parent consent to the adoption was fully explored. 24. Under the 2002 Act, a child may not be placed for adoption without either parental consent or, where that is not given, a placement order. This resolves the parental consent issues, and like a freeing order, should mean that the adversarial aspects of adoption are resolved prior to the child being placed. A birth parent cannot oppose the making of an adoption order without the permission of the court and the court cannot give permission unless there has been a significant change in circumstances since the placement order was made.

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Department for Education—Written evidence 25. However, unlike placement orders (in cases where parental consent has not been given) freeing orders were not compulsory before a child could be placed for adoption, and this makes it hard to compare how effective they have been in relative terms. It is though certainly the case that once children have been placed for adoption, it is now very unlikely that an adoption order will not be made. 26. The Select Committee will be aware of the recent court judgment, (A and S and Lancashire County Council) which concerned two children whose legal status was “freed for adoption” (subject to a freeing order under the Adoption Act 1976) but who were not adopted. They may also be aware that Tim Loughton has written to all Directors of Children’s Services [on 9 July] asking them to review all cases in their authority where a child has the legal status “freeing order” or the legal status “placement order” but the child’s plan has been changed away from adoption. It is of the utmost importance that a child is in an appropriate placement, and that it is secured by an appropriate order (whilst recognising that, for example, it is for the adoptive parent to apply for the adoption order). 27. Courts can consider a care application at the same time as the placement order where the local authority has completed all the necessary investigations and assessments and is satisfied both that applying for a care order is needed and that adoption is the appropriate route for the child. The main advantage is the avoidance of delay. Statutory adoption guidance makes clear that it is essential for applications for placement orders to be issued without delay and that the local authority should coordinate their actions with the court proceedings. In some cases, however, this approach is not possible: adoption may be a likely or possible plan for the child when care proceedings are being considered by the courts but further work may still be needed before the local authority can finalise its decision that the child should be placed for adoption. In such cases the placement application may have to be submitted and considered after the care application. 28. The Government is not planning to make any changes to the availability of legal aid for children where they are a party to family proceedings, as in public law care cases and in adoption cases. Post-adoption support 29. In Redesigning Adoption, published alongside the Action Plan, our Expert Working Group put forward the idea of an Adoption Passport for all adoptive parents. The Government welcomed this proposal in principle. We are in the process of reviewing the evidence base on the quality and reach of adoption support, and what adoptive families say they need, and considering what the Adoption Passport might look like. We expect to bring forward our further thoughts about this in the Autumn. This work relates to support for adoptive families, but local authorities are also required to provide support to birth parents, which is important both for them and for the successful adoption of the children.

Inter-country adoption

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Department for Education—Written evidence

30. The intercountry adoption process in England and Wales is compliant with Hague requirements and those processes are governed by legislation, principally the 2002 Act, the 2006 Act and the Adoptions with a Foreign Element Regulations 2005. The 2002 Act provides a number of safeguards relating to bringing children into and taking children out of the United Kingdom for the purposes of adoption. Part 2 of the 2006 Act makes provision for special restrictions to apply in relation to intercountry adoption from a country outside the British Islands where there are concerns about practices in that country in connection with the adoption of children which means it would be contrary to public policy to further the bringing of children into the UK from that country; and extends the restrictions on bringing children into the UK after adoption abroad from six months to twelve months after the adoption to reduce the risk of adopters not being assessed for their suitability to adopt. 31. The Secretary of State now has a statutory power to restrict adoptions from countries outside the British Islands where there are public policy concerns about the process of intercountry adoption, such as concerns about child trafficking. There are currently four countries on the restricted country list: Cambodia, Guatemala, Nepal and Haiti. The restrictions are reviewed on a regular basis. 32. We think these changes have led to improved safeguards, because adoptions can more easily be restricted where there is evidence of concerns about adoption processes in a particular country. The number of applications for intercountry adoptions fell significantly in 2008, following the restriction of adoptions from Guatemala and Cambodia, and the impact of China implementing the 1993 Hague Convention. 33. The extension from six to twelve months for the restriction on bringing children into the UK after adoption abroad is thought to have reduced the risk of people adopting without being properly assessed as suitable by an adoption agency in the UK. Prior to its implementation the Department was aware that some adopters were using the shorter time limit of six months to avoid assessments and adopt outside the British Islands by leaving the child abroad with another carer for six months before bringing them into the UK. The Department believes this measure is having the intended effect of increasing safeguards for children by reducing the number of people who could adopt without being assessed in the UK, but it is difficult to quantify. However, the nature of the amendment means that is not possible to calculate how many prospective adopters are now being assessed who previously would have chosen to avoid the assessment. 34. The UK ratified the Hague Convention in 2003, established for the protection of children who are adopted in Hague Convention countries, and our processes are Hague compliant. We consider that the current international and domestic provisions provide sufficient safeguards. However, the Adoption (Designation of Overseas Adoptions) Order 1973 (known as the Designated List) which provides for the automatic recognition of overseas adoptions from countries named on the list pre-dates the rest of the current domestic legislation and the Hague Convention. Following a public consultation that ended earlier this year we are considering an amendment to the Designated List and the Government expects to publish its response to the consultation shortly.

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Department for Education—Written evidence Access to Information 35. The 2002 Act has made it easier for adopted adults and birth relatives to trace each other, but perhaps more so for birth families. This is because prior to the Act coming into force they did not have the right to information which identifies an adopted person. For children adopted before 30 December 2005, the legislation makes it possible for an intermediary to help establish the current identity of an adopted adult or birth parents. Any contact with that individual would be subject to their consent. Although we do not collect data on the number of applications made for this intermediary service, we know that Ofsted has registered agencies to provide it. 36. It is too early to know the impact of the Act on children adopted after 30 December 2005. This is because those children and their birth relatives will not be able to make use of the services to seek contact until they are 18 years old. In 2005/6 the average age of a child when adopted was 4 years and one month39. Other permanent placements 37. Special Guardianship is a private law order which was introduced to provide a permanence option for children, particularly older children, for whom adoption was not appropriate. Special guardians exercise parental responsibility to the exclusion of others including parents but cannot consent to adoption. The number of looked after children placed with carers through Special Guardianship Orders has continued to increase since the orders were introduced in 2005 from 70 in 2006 to 1790 in 2011. 38. Special Guardianship Orders are intended for older children but are also being used for younger children. Anecdotal evidence suggest that sometimes SGOs have been granted in respect of young children for whom local authorities considered adoption by strangers to be a more suitable permanence option. Again anecdotally it is claimed that SGOs in such cases are more prone to break down or the child moves around the family, but there is no substantive evidence of this. Local authorities have also indicated that Special Guardianship allowances are increasing the financial burden on them. 39. To explore these and other issues, the Department for Education has commissioned research on special guardianship from the University of York, in collaboration with the British Association for Adoption and Fostering (BAAF). This research will assess how well special guardianship is working for children and guardians and will also explore the development of policy and practice since its inception in early 2006. This research builds on previous research into special guardianship undertaken at York University soon after the policy was implemented.40 The study involves a national survey of all local authorities in England as well indepth work in eight authorities. It also includes a survey of special guardians and interviews with a sample of guardians and their children. The final report is due in June 2014, though some interim findings may be available earlier. 39

Statistical First Release http://www.education.gov.uk/rsgateway/DB/SFR/s000878/index.shtml

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This was published by BAAF in 2010 as Special Guardianship in Practice (Wade, Dixon and Richards).

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Department for Education—Written evidence Monitoring 40. The Adoption Scorecards are a useful tool to monitor the performance of local authorities and we think they have already helped local authorities focus on the damaging delays being experienced by children in the adoption system. However, the scorecards’ main timeliness indicators alone cannot give a full picture of the overall performance of authorities in relation to adoption. Contextual information is included on the scorecards to give further insight and the Department also holds other data. The first release of scorecards highlighted a number of authorities of concern and the Department have used them as a trigger for further investigation in these authorities, leading to some having diagnostics of their adoption services carried out by the Children’s Improvement Board. 41. The scorecards are being further developed to incorporate data on the service prospective adopters receive from authorities, strengthening them as a monitoring tool. Scorecards are certainly not the only means available to monitor performance in local authorities. In particular, Ofsted inspections are a vital tool to assess performance more thoroughly, and Ofsted are currently working to improve the framework with which they assess adoption agencies. 42. Data on looked after children who are adopted is collected as part of the annual SSDA903 return from Local Authorities, which takes place each year from April-June and collects data based on the previous financial year. Details of the data items collected as part of this return are detailed in the guidance notes which are submitted to Local Authorities in advance of the collection. This document sets out the different data items together with the codes and definitions used. The data are loaded into a web based data collection system which contains a series of in built validation rules which ensure the format of the data is correct and the data is provided according to the relevant definitions. These validation rules are set out in a further document which is provided to Local Authorities in advance of the data collection. The Department carries out further checks to compare the information submitted with data supplied in previous years to ensure that data are consistent. 43. Local authorities are aware that these data have been used in the past to calculate national indicators and continue to be used to monitor performance. They are also aware that analysis of these data informs policy decisions. Therefore data are rigorously quality assured within local authorities to ensure that data provided are accurate. They are also signed off by senior managers before the data are submitted to the Department. 44. Full details of the data collected on looked after children from local authorities via the SSDA903 return can be found in the data collection guidance notes which can be found on the Department’s website via the link below: http://www.education.gov.uk/researchandstatistics/stats/childrenlar/b00200554/children-lookedafter-general-guidance-2011-12. 45. The Committee also asked for data on number of placement orders refused. The Ministry of Justice has provided data which shows that the number of applications for a placement order refused in county courts or Family Proceeding Courts in England and Wales

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Department for Education—Written evidence was as follows: 2009: 24; 2010: 17; 2011: 2. July 2012

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Department for Education—Supplementary written evidence

Department for Education—Supplementary written evidence Adoption breakdown after the making of the adoption order Data collection From 1 April 2013 local authorities will start to collect data on breakdowns. For children entering care, local authorities will record whether the child has previously been adopted or left care for special guardianship or residence order and, if so, the date and local authority who made the arrangements. The data for 2013/14 will be published in autumn 2014. Research: An investigation of adoption breakdown post adoption order DfE has commissioned Julie Selwyn at the University of Bristol to undertake research to understand better the number and causes of adoption breakdowns. The report, An investigation of adoption breakdown post adoption order, will be published early 2014. The adoption breakdown research aims to investigate the rate of, and reasons for, adoption breakdown, which for the purposes of this research is defined as when a child returns to care after an adoption order has been made and includes children of all ages. The researchers will explore the issue of adoption breakdown in detail, including:       

the rate of adoption breakdown and how long after an adoption order is granted breakdown occurs; the reasons for adoption breakdown; the characteristics of the children whose adoptions break down (e.g. gender, age at time of removal from birth family, placement and breakdown, ethnicity, care and pre-care history (including abuse and neglect), length of time in care, and health and wellbeing); the characteristics of the adopters who experience breakdown (e.g. gender, age, ethnicity, health, family structure, and income and education levels); how adoption breakdown compares with breakdown in other forms of permanence e.g. long term fostering, special guardianship and children who are the subject of residence orders; the impact preparation prior to adoption and the provision of adoption support services have on adoption breakdown; and the experiences and outcomes for children and families where an adoption has broken down.

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Department for Education—Supplementary written evidence National Adoption Gateway The National Gateway for Adoption (Gateway) will have an informal role in acting as a complaints mechanism for prospective adopters. Its primary function is as an information and guidance service to prospective adopters. Where prospective adopters raise issues/complaints about an adoption agency to the Gateway they will be signposted to the adoption agency directly to discuss their concerns and to use the adoption agency’s complaints procedures. There may be circumstances, however, where an informal approach to the adoption agency will be more expedient and in such cases the Gateway will raise service issues with the DCS or CEO of a voluntary adoption agency and ask them to review the circumstances and decision, and voluntarily report the outcome to the Gateway. In cases where there may be evidence of malpractice or systemic issues the Gateway may report concerns to Ofsted as well as to the DCS or CEO of a voluntary adoption agency. The Gateway will not, therefore, investigate or determine on issues/complaints raised as the accountability for this remains with the adoption agency. The Gateway service has been contracted to a new consortium, First4Adoption, comprising Coram, Coram Children’s Legal Centre and Adoption UK. The full service will be available by 31 March 2013 but we expect to be able to provide a telephone Helpline and basic website before Christmas 2012. The contract will be published online by January 2013. Currently the invitation to tender sets out the services to be provided. This can be found here http://www.publictenders.net/node/1825275 26 November 2012

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Edward Timpson MP, Minister for Children and Families, Department for Education—Oral evidence (QQ 805–830)

Edward Timpson MP, Minister for Children and Families, Department for Education—Oral evidence (QQ 805–830) Evidence Session No. 14

Heard in Public

Questions 805–830

TUESDAY 4 DECEMBER 2012 Members present Baroness Butler-Sloss (Chairman) Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top Baroness Eaton Viscount Eccles Baroness Hamwee Baroness King of Bow Baroness Knight of Collingtree Baroness Morris of Bolton Lord Morris of Handsworth Lord Warner ________________ Examination of Witness Edward Timpson MP, Minister for Children and Families, Department for Education

Q805 The Chairman: It is very good to see you. We are very grateful to you for being prepared to come. Secondly, we must apologise for asking you to come in late. We got slightly carried away with discussion and I only just realised the time. I am very sorry that we are starting you late. Edward Timpson: That is not a problem at all. It was clear from some of the noises emanating out of the room that you were having fun while I was waiting. The Chairman: This evening we are meeting a number of children who have been adopted, so we were discussing that. Roger Morgan is bringing them, which we thought would be a good idea and I think it will be very interesting. The first question is going to be asked by Lady King, largely for the benefit of the television. It is very good of you to allow that. That is part of what we were laughing about. Baroness King of Bow: Yes. I apologise about that. Just to reiterate that nothing you say will be used.

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Edward Timpson MP, Minister for Children and Families, Department for Education—Oral evidence (QQ 805–830) The Chairman: Will you ask the first question? Q806 Baroness King of Bow: Minister, thank you for coming before the Select Committee this morning. I wonder whether you think the current focus on adoption as the gold standard meant that other possible routes to permanency were not given the priority that perhaps they should be, and what you think of using those routes such as long-term fostering, which I believe you have a great knowledge of, and also special guardianship. Do you think such focus on adoption is justified when so many children in the care system—approximately half—are over the age of nine and will never be adopted? Edward Timpson: The first point to make—and I assume we are all attacking this from the same angle—is that whatever decision is made for a child’s long-term permanency is done based on what is in their best interests rather than deciding there is a hierarchy about what sort of placement is better than any other, as if there is a dogmatic approach to that decisionmaking. We know there are about 67,000 children currently in care, and in the last year we have had about 3,450—I think the figure is—of those who were adopted. It is still very much the minority. It will always be a minority, but there is a lot of evidence to suggest that it could be much more than it currently is. For instance, if you look at the number of placement orders that were made last year, it was over 7,000 placement orders, yet we only had just under 3,500 children who were adopted. We have over 4,500 children, whose plan is for adoption, who are still in foster care and waiting to have their permanent adoptive placement matched, and for them to be moved on and to get that long-term stability. It is important in every case that all options are considered for that individual child. That is the right thing to do, and I would expect every social worker and every judge to go down that route. With the growth in the number of special guardianship orders—which I think came in on 30 December 2005 from memory—since 2008 we have seen around an 88% rise in the number of special guardianship orders to over 2,000, of which two-thirds are made to foster carers. There are a large number of different routes that children’s permanency can now be made using. I am not sure anyone has suggested to me that there is an unhealthy obsession with adoption. I think it is right that it is prioritised because we know—and I know from my own experience—the great stability and stronger placement that it gives those children that are adopted. That is not to denigrate other routes of permanency. We believe that there is more that we can do on adoption. That is not to say we are not doing work in relation to fostering, special guardianship, residence orders, residential care and also rehabilitation. We have to remember that, of children who come into the care system—you mention those who are over the age of nine—many are in double figures in terms of their age, and often do not spend that much time in the care system and are reunified with their family and rehabilitated. We have to recognise that and make sure that we are providing children with the best possible outcome for them, once they come into the care of the state. Baroness King of Bow: Thank you. Q807 Lord Warner: Could I move us on to the structure of adoption services, on which we have heard quite a lot of evidence, and particularly some of the issues around some of the smaller adoption agencies and authorities? Do you think that the current adoption system does

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Edward Timpson MP, Minister for Children and Families, Department for Education—Oral evidence (QQ 805–830) need to be streamlined by making greater use of regionalisation and standardisation of the resources, policies and procedures? Are you satisfied that enough local authorities are moving in a direction that will deliver sufficient scale of operation on adoption, to ensure good quality professional practice by social workers? Edward Timpson: The short answer to those two questions is “yes” and “no”. I shall expand on both of them, in terms of the current structures, the scope for further regionalisation and better working together of local authorities. I think if you were designing the adoption system from scratch, if you were to believe that the best structure would be 188 separate adoption agencies spread across the country, of which about a third of those only recruit less than 10 adopters individually, I am not sure that would necessarily be the best system that you could come up with. We have seen with some local authorities, for instance, in the tri-borough area and up in the north-west—in my neck of the woods, where we have seen the three councils of Chester West and Chester, Halton and Knowsley working more closely together to try to increase their pool of potential adopters and potential matches between them—that there is scope within the current system for local authorities to work more closely together. The adoption scorecards, which I am sure you pored over last week, demonstrate the concern that there is still too much wide variation within the current structure. Ultimately it is not just about the structure, it is what the structure is delivering. I would not want to get obsessed completely about the structure, but it has now been in place for some considerable time and it is still failing to produce what we need, which is more adopters who are recruited, assessed and available, and children being matched to them in a timely manner that gives them the best possible chance of having a placement and the ability to form attachments to their long-term carers as soon as possible. We do need to look at how we can improve the current structure, so that we can deliver for the children for which it is meant to be there to help. Lord Warner: Minister, should we take from that answer that you feel a cattle prod may be needed, from time-to-time, a little more energetically than has been used in the past? Is there anything implicit in what you have said about using your existing powers under the current legislation to deal with what you might call “failing” authorities? Edward Timpson: As I am sure you are aware, Lord Warner, there are a number of interventions that can be made at certain points of the process. On the back of the adoption scorecards, I have written to every local authority: those that have performed well, I think it is important that they know that we appreciate the efforts that they are making—and there are some good examples of that—but also there are those that are still falling short of what is required. Of course beyond that, we can look at the intervention powers that are available and whether it would be appropriate to use them. We are into the second round of scorecards. They are over a three-year average, so the latest ones are 2009 to 2012, so parts of it are still historical before we started the reforms that we brought in. The time is coming when we need to consider whether there are other ways that we can improve the performance across the whole of England and across every local authority. Q808 The Chairman: How is the Government going to facilitate joint working, in areas where there is not already the tri-borough or similar joint working such as in the north-west? Will it be necessary for the adoption regulations to be changed to facilitate this joint working on adoption?

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Edward Timpson MP, Minister for Children and Families, Department for Education—Oral evidence (QQ 805–830) Edward Timpson: There are a number of ways in which you can improve joint working, first of all, by highlighting examples of where it is already working well. I know you are probably sick of hearing about Coram and Harrow and how close those— The Chairman: I ought to declare an interest. I am a governor of Coram so I cannot possibly object to that. Edward Timpson: I have cited the example up in the north-west where three local authorities are working more closely together, trying to increase the pool that they have available to them, rather than being confined to their own boundaries. At the moment we have this slightly bizarre situation where there is no incentive for a local authority to overrecruit for adopters within their local authority area. Part of that is because of the way the interagency fee is set up. You have the in-house fee and then you have the interagency fee between authorities, which is around £13,000 to £14,000, and then you have the interagency fee with voluntary adoption agencies, which is about £27,000. So there is this sequential decision-making that goes on within local authorities, where they look in-house; then they look into other local authorities and then they look at voluntary adoption agencies. One way that you can improve the collaboration between voluntary adoption agencies and other local authorities is to look at equalising that fee, to try and move away from this disincentive not to overrecruit and increase the pool of prospective adopters that there are for those children that they are trying to match. I have been having, I think, fruitful conversations with the ADCS and the LGA on precisely that. To my understanding, that would not require regulation to do that: it is at the behest of the LGA to bring that equalisation of fees about. That will certainly make an impact on trying to improve collaboration between VAAs and local authorities, as well as increase the pool of potential adopters. The Chairman: One further question on this: where the local authorities have combined, currently I think Ofsted is inspecting them in each separate local authority. Would it not be sensible, where they have a combination such as the tri-borough, that they should be inspected as the team rather than as the individual local authority, for adoption purposes? Edward Timpson: Yes. At the moment, the way Ofsted inspections are structured, they have to inspect each individual local authority and the service it is delivering. I am not aware—unless I am told otherwise—of any instances where they inspect across borough boundaries. Clearly, if they are delivering one holistic service, in effect, then that is something that we need to look at. I am very happy to talk to John Goldup at Ofsted and see whether they have considered this— The Chairman: It would be helpful to look at that, yes. Edward Timpson: —and also the feasibility of doing it. Q809 Baroness Eaton: Presumably in future the scorecard will be a joint one, rather than for the individual authority, for the assessment of how well they are doing? Edward Timpson: It will depend on how integrated their services were. If it was just in relation to recruitment, then that is only one aspect of the adoption service. If they are truly integrating the whole of their adoption service, then of course that would place them on a different

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Edward Timpson MP, Minister for Children and Families, Department for Education—Oral evidence (QQ 805–830) footing. I am happy to look at making sure that the scorecards reflect the reality on the ground. The other thing I want to do is make sure that those local authorities that are not looking beyond their boundaries and their neighbouring local authorities, to see what closer work that they can do together, can see where it is being effective. I know East Sussex and West Sussex is another example of that. Baroness Eaton: That would suggest to me that the issue is of size, because the authorities you have mentioned are all small. When you look at the tri-borough, that is no bigger than Leeds when the three authorities are together. Is it where you have a large authority there will be the availability of a larger pool automatically, or is it the nature of being insular being a single authority? Edward Timpson: It is certainly an “economies of scale” argument, and I was making a point before about having 152 separate adoption agencies in local authorities and about 33 voluntary adoption agencies, all recruiting potential adopters but doing it individually and only to meet their own needs. I am afraid to have to say that there are instances that I have come across myself in recent weeks talking to adopters, where they have approached a local authority, with the will and desire to want to be assessed as an adopter, to be told, “I am afraid we do not need any more adopters because we have met our quota within our local authority area”. The constraints of the current structure are preventing and disincentivising local authorities from looking further afield. The national adoption register is one way of trying to tackle that, and obviously we have a consultation out looking at how we can have more children, who have not been matched locally, brought on to that register so that there is a wider opportunity for them to find their permanent placement. There is more that we can do, whether it is through collaboration between local authorities, whether it is with the equalisation of the interagency fee, or whether it is looking at how voluntary adoption agencies can work more closely with local authorities as they do in Harrow. The Chairman: That is going to be the next question. On this particular question—clearly we have a lot of questions to ask you—I wonder if those behind you would be prepared to answer one or two further questions in writing that we have on this particular issue. Edward Timpson: I am sure they would be delighted. The Chairman: Thank you very much. I will ask Lady Morris to speak now. Q810 Baroness Morris of Bolton: Minister, good morning. You have already answered the second part of my question, which is how we could encourage local authorities and voluntary adoption agencies to work together more effectively. On the wider role of voluntary adoption agencies, what is your view on the role that they are going to play in the future, and how can we be sure that they are going to be resourced properly? Edward Timpson: I have had the privilege of seeing many of these voluntary adoption agencies out in the field. I was in Chester not long ago seeing Adoption Matters Northwest, who won an award at the National Adoption Awards that I was at a few weeks ago. They are a critical part of the adoption recruitment but also of the matching and support that is so vital. We need to be careful not to believe that they are the solution to the whole problem. I do not mean that in a derogatory term. It is simply because of their size and capacity. At the moment about 20% of

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Edward Timpson MP, Minister for Children and Families, Department for Education—Oral evidence (QQ 805–830) adoptions are done through the voluntary adoption agency route. I know in the last two years that they have increased their recruitment of adopters, I think, by 20% year-on-year, and they believe that they have greater capacity to do that in the future. Ultimately the bulk of the recruitment is still being done through local authorities, partly because of the sequential decision-making, which I was talking about earlier, and the difficulty for voluntary adoption agencies to be able to widen their potential recruitment because of them being at the lower end of the pecking order. How can we help them expand? A few months ago we provided local authorities with £8 million to help improve their adoption services, which would include recruitment and so on. In relation to voluntary adoption agencies, we have had a new round of VCS grants through a prospectus—£30 million grants, £30 million contracts—across a whole range of my portfolio area. Particularly in relation to voluntary adoption agencies, there are four potential grants for them to bid for around improving adopter recruitment, improving matching and also trying to improve the national profile of adoption. There is also a contract that we are looking to award as well, to help voluntary adoption agencies bring about the reforms that we are proposing and some that we have already introduced. I am also looking at some of the innovative ways that they are trying to increase their capacity and their effectiveness. I think you have already heard about the social impact bonds that are being developed through the CVAA and Jim Clifford of A Home for Maisie, I think from memory. Baroness Morris of Bolton: Yes. Edward Timpson: That is an interesting approach and one that seems to fit, in many respects, into the sort of adoption recruitment and processes that we are talking about. So I think voluntary adoption agencies do have the capacity to have a far greater role, both in terms of recruitment but all the way through to the post-adoption support. That does not mean we sit back and expect it to happen. We do need to crack on with trying to improve the performance of local authorities as well. Baroness Morris of Bolton: Do the local authorities share your view that voluntary adoption agencies have an increased role as well? Is there a cultural argument there? Edward Timpson: Certainly going back three or four years, there was still a strong sense that local authorities felt that the up-front cost to them of the voluntary adoption agency route— and the interagency fee that I was talking about earlier—meant that it was a less attractive proposition. We know that the research that Julie Selwyn from Bristol University did about three years ago demonstrates that it was a false premise on which they were making those judgments, because the actual cost to the local authority of recruiting in-house, as opposed to through a voluntary adoption agency, works out at approximately the same. What we do know from the voluntary adoption agencies is that, first of all, they tend to take children who have more complex needs, but also that their adoption breakdown rates are extremely low. Consequently, it is the “invest to save” argument, that by using voluntary adoption agencies there may be at the moment—unless we can reach a point where we can equalise the fee—a greater up-front cost, but the ultimate cost, both economically and also societal, is dramatic and that should never be underestimated. I hope that there is a sea change in how local authorities approach voluntary adoption agencies. There are examples of it around the country where it is happening but we need it to be far more widespread.

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Edward Timpson MP, Minister for Children and Families, Department for Education—Oral evidence (QQ 805–830) Q811 Baroness King of Bow: Just following up on the cost issue, I wonder to what extent the Government’s approach to reforming the adoption process is underpinned by an understanding of the financial impact of the different permanency options. What more do you think the Government could do to follow up the work of Iain Duncan Smith, for instance, around early intervention, so that we are putting money in at the right point rather than trying to spend money on a recurring catastrophe in the care system for these children that go around and around the system? Edward Timpson: The point you make is pretty much the principal reason why I made the— what my wife thinks is slightly odd—decision to go into politics. Having spent 10 years at the Bar practising in family law cases, particularly care cases, and the frustration of being at the back end, where a situation developed and you were often trying to make the very best of a very bad situation, made me start to think about whether I could have more influence much earlier in that whole process, of which early intervention is an absolutely key element. Baroness King of Bow: So here you are. Edward Timpson: So, yes, it is crucial. I think there is now a pretty strong consensus across the whole political spectrum that the earlier that you intervene, whether it is at a low level with a family, or whether it is through earlier diagnosis, whatever it may be, you are more likely to prevent a catastrophe—as you put it—further down the road. Be that as it may, unfortunately there will always be situations where children require the care of the state, and there will always be children who are going to need to have permanency elsewhere outside their birth family. We need to ensure that we tackle it at both ends, which is why we have the focus on adoption, trying to improve the timeliness and effectiveness of it. On your point about looking at the cost of those various routes, clearly no decision should be principally driven by costs where it is the child’s welfare that we are considering. For instance, what we do know—I mentioned earlier the 4,500 children who are currently in foster care whose plan is for adoption—is every year that those children remain in care is costing local authorities about £80 million a year. That in itself is a good reason to think about how we could spend that money better for those children, by ensuring that there are enough prospective adoptive placements that they can be matched to, so they can move out of foster care and have their plan implemented, which is for them to be adopted and have that stable family for the rest of their childhood. The Chairman: I think we are going to have to move on. Lady Hamwee. Q812 Baroness Hamwee: Thank you. Can we turn to social work culture and practice? We know what Eileen Munro said about freeing social workers so they could exercise their professional judgment. Indeed, I notice that Tina Stowell, when she answered a question at our end a couple of weeks ago, said, “We are supporting local agencies to free professionals from central prescription”. This of course is against the background of scorecards or even cattle prods. The question is: how can social workers be empowered to act as professionals, while at the same time local authorities are being held to account for timeliness of decisions? Edward Timpson: Firstly, the overriding principle with which you started your question, which Baroness Stowell has articulated in the other place, is very much the philosophy that the Government is driving forward, both whether it is in relation to teaching or social work, and to 512

Edward Timpson MP, Minister for Children and Families, Department for Education—Oral evidence (QQ 805–830) move away from a very prescriptive process-focused system to one where they are given more time to be able to exercise their professional judgment. One of my greatest irritations when I was practising was how little time social workers were able to have with the children they are there to look after and protect, even to the point where my anecdotal evidence is that on occasions they were missing their statutory reviews with the children, because they simply did not have the time to do it. We do need to move away from that. In relation to adoption, we have a system that has not been delivering for children for too long and on occasions—keeping the cattle-prodding analogy, and I am going to move on to pronging now—you do need a multi-pronged approach when it comes to adoption. That is not to tell social workers what to do every minute of every day but to contextualise through the adoption scorecards how they are performing, so they can monitor their own performance and see how they can improve and identify where there is delay in the system where there is unnecessary bureaucracy. It is not designed, and never has been, to be a simple naming and shaming exercise. It is to try and ensure local authorities know how well they are performing but how they can do better. I do not think it necessarily impacts on the Munro philosophy, but sometimes we have to think about what is practically effective in a particular area and on adoption that was what was decided would work best. Baroness Hamwee: That is an answer really about the balance between competing concerns, but do you have ideas about how you can encourage them to act as the professionals they were trained to be? I do not want to put words into your mouth, but are you saying that we should be looking at the scorecards as records of outcomes, not of output? It is the final result that is important rather than the detail of what goes in and bureaucratic detail of what comes out— the overall holistic outcome? Edward Timpson: When we first published the scorecards, I think there was an acceptance that they were not the finished article and that we wanted to improve their contextualisation as we went through. We have added elements to them as they have gone through and there will be more added in the future, particularly as we learn more about adoption breakdown, for instance. As I say, in many respects it is a learning tool for local authorities to see where they are performing well but also, perhaps, where they are falling short and can make improvements. It is not an attempt to beat them with a stick without providing them with any solutions; it is to be able to provide them with the information as to how they can—through peer challenge or through self-improvement—look at how they can have a better adoption service in the future. Q813 Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top: Local authorities are receiving more children into care since Baby P, so over the last few years there has been this increase in the number of children coming into care. How are you viewing your changes in adoption in relation to that, particularly given the pressures that are on authorities, on Cafcass and other organisations, the guardianship around resources, which are incredibly tough when we listen to local authorities, certainly? How do you see all of that developing? How are you going to make sure that the resources that are needed are focused on the children that need those resources? Edward Timpson: I think trying to take all that you said together— Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top: Yes. It is very long. I have not asked you the last bit of the question, either. It is a long, complicated question.

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Edward Timpson MP, Minister for Children and Families, Department for Education—Oral evidence (QQ 805–830) Edward Timpson: The important points that you make emphasise even more greatly why it is important that we bring the changes in that we are bringing in, to try and improve decisionmaking, the efficiency of the service and to try and take out unnecessary delay, which only adds to the cost. I gave an example of that earlier with the children whose plans are for adoption, who are still in foster care and the cost of that to the local authorities. I think you heard evidence last week from some of our eminent judges from the Family Division, particularly Mr Justice Ryder, who has been charged with improving the performance of the Family Courts and through them the care monitoring system and other new innovations. Certainly, having spoken to him myself, it is encouraging to hear that the courts, Cafcass and local authorities are working much better together. The quality assurance is improving both before and during proceedings and we have seen that through the tri-borough, where I think 42 out of the 46 cases have been completed under the 26 weeks that we have and suggest is the time in which cases should be completed. That closer work is—and I think the phrase you used—“a significant improvement”. For instance, we know that Cafcass are now allocating 99.8% of their cases and they are doing them within a day, which certainly from my own experience, going back seven or eight years, was not what I was necessarily finding on the ground. Of course we need to make sure that, in order for them to continue to make that progress, they have the capacity to do that. What I hope is that local authorities will see the benefit of making sure that they keep the high quality that they require before, during and after care proceedings. Ultimately it is a false economy not to do it because you pay the price further down the line. Therefore they should be prioritising—as many of them do—the resources that are going to have the biggest impact. We are seeing that it is most effective where they are working closely with the court and with Cafcass, to enable them to come up with the right decision for a child sooner rather than later. Q814 Lord Warner: I have been around the public service a very long time, and have seen the way the public sector and Ministers are very good at concentrating on one bit of a system without realising what the impact is of another part of the system. I have been guilty of that myself, so mea culpa as a Minister. You referred to the evidence given to us by the judges the other day. I do not think it is any great secret, because it was on the public record, that they described to us the very significant increase in resources that in fact the Family Division are putting into the court system, to respond to what has been a major surge in care proceedings—they said 50% in the last four years. How confident are you that the local authority side of that equation will also be able to cope with this gearing up of the Family Division and the training of the judges, under Ernest Ryder, to cope with this as well? Or are we going to find that we have an unbalanced system with the local authorities struggling to do their bit of the job, because they simply do not have the resources to do it? Edward Timpson: I think the rise in care proceedings of 20,000 to 30,000 over a four-year period has had a significant impact on both local authorities and the Family Courts, as we have heard. I think the evidence was they have had to find 8,000 extra sitting days in order to meet that demand. I am under no illusions as to what pressures that has placed on the court system as well as local authorities but, as far as you can be comforted by the response, it has led to— 514

Edward Timpson MP, Minister for Children and Families, Department for Education—Oral evidence (QQ 805–830) as I was articulating earlier—an improvement into how they are working more closely together to ensure that they reduce duplication of assessments; that the process is more streamlined; and that they resolve issues much earlier so they do not create unnecessary cost in the future. In terms of how local authorities are geared up to be able to cope for whether it be a continuation of the current level of care proceedings or potentially a rise, although we also have to consider that there may be a fall, we just do not know. That is something clearly that is going to be exercising their minds as well as mine. That is why I think the care monitoring system is going to be important, both in terms of the care proceedings themselves but also of how much we can improve the quality of the social work that is done at a much earlier stage. For instance, we have seen the influence of family group conferences—if they are managed properly at an earlier period of a child being in the local authority’s care—how that can help resolve the future of that child much earlier than would otherwise have been the case. As I say, I am not shying away from the fact that local authorities are going to find it difficult and have been finding it difficult. That is something that I will—within my own Department, as well as across Government—continue to make noises about, to make sure that I am not the only Minister who understands the need to ensure that the resources necessary to make the right decisions for children to go into care are available for local authorities, Cafcass, the courts and others to be able to do that. Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top: We have had some evidence that guardians, for example, are a bit under pressure with increasing caseloads, some stories of them not seeing the children before they talk to the court. Have you seen any evidence of that? In relation to your previous answer to Lord Warner, is there any evidence from what you have seen of authorities having to put more money into care proceedings and, therefore, pulling money away from early intervention? Edward Timpson: With respect to your second question, I do not have any evidence but it is a good observation that you make and one where—on the back of what you have said—I will ask some questions to see if we can establish whether there is any evidence to that effect. It is not something that I have personally seen. In relation to guardians, again going back three or four years, I know there was a real concern about the guardian service and the delays in allocation of guardians to cases. Children were being taken into care and were not being allocated a guardian, and also the ability of guardians to perform their role and function to the best of their ability, both inside the court and outside the court arena. The answer I gave earlier about how that performance has improved in the last three years is an important point, but clearly we need to make sure that guardians, who continue to play an important role within care proceedings, are able to do that without being hamstrung by either the level of caseload that they have or their inability to allocate enough time to each individual case. I know Cafcass have been working hard at this and I know that they have made improvements in doing that. This was a problem that was identified even before the upsurge in the number of care cases. In retrospect, it was a blessing that that was identified much earlier because otherwise the situation would be much worse as a consequence, but it is something that we need to keep a very close eye on. Although Cafcass will in time move to the Ministry of Justice it still falls into my camp, so that is why I will be monitoring the situation very closely. Ultimately, if you do not have a guardian involved with a child right from the very start

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Edward Timpson MP, Minister for Children and Families, Department for Education—Oral evidence (QQ 805–830) then, again, all you are doing is building delay in terms of decision-making on behalf of that child, and that is something we want to avoid. Q815 Baroness Knight of Collingtree: I am going to move on slightly from that, but before we do I want to say that we have heard evidence on this Committee several times now that the local authorities differ widely in their quality of how they deal with cases and when they deal with cases. Therefore, we know that we cannot look at the local authorities as one universal force because some will work in one way and some another. I just wanted to leave that point with the Minister—that you yourself made reference to the changes that the Government have made to adopt and the placement processes of various kinds. Could you tell us how you see those impacting on reducing the time taken for a child to be adopted? It seems to us, and indeed probably all those who have anything to do with adoption, that one of the main difficulties is that it is rather like watching sand go through a timer, because you get past the stage where the child will have the benefit of adoption and past the stage where it is likely to happen because it will not be a success. How do you see the changes that you have put in place impacting on that? Edward Timpson: There are a number of elements in the changes that we are bringing that will impact, and that is why we are bringing them in, on the delay that currently exists. I just preface that by saying that the current statutory position means that the maximum time that the adoption process should take is 14 months. On the adoption scorecards we have set that at 21 months, but with an intention over the next four-year period to bring that back down to the 14-month period. The scorecards are one way of trying to reduce that delay. As I am sure—I know—that the Committee has been considering carefully, we then have the Fostering for Adoption draft clauses that we have for the Children and Families Bill. That is very much designed, where a decision has been made that a child’s future is adoption, so that they are able to be placed sooner rather than later with their prospective adopters, albeit as temporarily approved foster carers, which will help reduce the delay for the child. We know for every month that goes by, that is 2% of a child’s childhood that they do not get back, and we know all the evidence is abundantly clear that the sooner a child can form a secure attachment with their carers the more likely it is that they are going to have a stable and happy childhood and into adulthood. Fostering for Adoption is one way of ensuring they get the ability to do that at a much earlier stage. Over and above that we have the 26-week time limit that we are bringing in, in relation to care proceedings, which will also help reduce delay significantly and we have heard about the triborough work that they have been piloting on that and the success that they have had in bringing that about. There are local authorities, Lincolnshire for example, who are already very close to that 26-week time limit. We also have the clause in relation to ethnic matching. I am afraid you can still go on some local authority websites and find them suggesting that they only want to have prospective adopters to meet a certain ethnic match that they are requiring at that particular time. What we need is to move away from an overemphasis on that factor so that children can start to be matched and placed much earlier. I think there are a number of features that we are bringing in that are going to help reduce delay across the whole of the process, and ultimately that is only going to benefit the child and I am sure that is what we are all here to try and bring about.

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Edward Timpson MP, Minister for Children and Families, Department for Education—Oral evidence (QQ 805–830) Baroness Knight of Collingtree: Thank you. Could I just press you for another answer on the question of how long it takes to get a child into the adoptive placement? You said you measured it in months. We understand that it is two and a half years. If you put your name in as possibly adopting a child the length of time it takes to go through all the hoops and questions and so on is two and a half years, which puts a lot of would-be adopters off, and they come off the list. Which scale is true? When you said it was a short time I think you were speaking of the child settling in, was it? Edward Timpson: What I was talking about is the maximum it should take, which is 14 months for the whole process. You will see on the scorecards when we go through you have different measures: A1, which is the average time between a council receiving court approval to place a child, and the council deciding on a match from an adoptive family; and A2, the average time between a child entering care—I think this is the one that you are talking about, Baroness Knight—and moving in with an adoptive family. The average of that is still over two and a half years and in some cases over three years. I know from meeting some adopters only a few weeks ago in Chester that that was one of their major concerns about going forward as an adopter—that the process would take so long, both in terms of them being approved as an adopter but also for the match and the eventual placement of the child with them, and that it would fall outside their own timescales as a family in order to be able to adopt. We need to first of all get away from that level of concern but by doing that we need to demonstrate that that time limit is being reduced to be commensurate with the needs of the child rather than have so much inbuilt delay. I know my predecessor, Tim Loughton, told you about his brown paper on his wall in his office which I have inherited and it is clear that there are a number of points during that process where we can remove delay which will bring that two and a half to three years down closer to the 14 months, which is what should be achievable. Q816 Baroness Morris of Bolton: I am aware that we still have lots of questions to ask you, but one of the things we have heard about is that delay is often caused by a wider member of the family coming forward late in the proceedings. In the earlier answer you mentioned family group conferencing. Not all local authorities have family group conferencing, so I wonder if it should be a mandatory part of the process. Edward Timpson: In my experience, where a family group conference is well organised and timely it can be extremely effective. I have also seen instances where literally at the door of the court before a final order is about to be made someone’s name suddenly pops up and we have to adjourn the case while further inquiries and assessments are made. It may be a legitimate inquiry or it may not but that is not the best way of trying to approach the case that is going to be best managed for the child. Some family group conferences do not necessarily result in any change to the plan but it is important that that process is done at the earliest opportunity. Whether you should mandate it in every situation is something that I will be looking forward to hearing the Committee’s views on, but I think there is a lot of merit in an effective family group conference at as early a point as possible. I say that if for no other reason than to ensure that the permanency decision can be made that is commensurate with the best interests of the child and so we do not end up in a situation like I have seen myself where a family group conference is called at the 11th hour and ends up causing in some instances another six-month delay which can be ill afforded.

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Edward Timpson MP, Minister for Children and Families, Department for Education—Oral evidence (QQ 805–830) The Chairman: I wonder whether I could ask your Department through you if it could supply us with a list of local authorities with websites that ask for adoption of a specific ethnicity. We have not looked at this yet and I think it would be rather helpful, if there is any evidence of that sort, if they could let us have it. Edward Timpson: I think they have nodded in recognition that they will be trawling the internet for precise information. The Chairman: We would rather they did it than we did it. Edward Timpson: I have heard it from a number of people—including Martin Narey, the Ministerial Adviser on Adoption—that this is still something that exists, even after all the efforts that we have made to try and move the argument on. Q817 Lord Morris of Handsworth: Based upon the evidence we have heard so far, I think it is true to say that recruitment of adopters is still a challenge to be addressed. What role would the adoption gateway play in increasing the available pool of prospective adopters? What plans do you have to open up the currently fragmented and localised markets for adopters to ensure that children have every opportunity of finding an adoptive placement, no matter which local authority they live in? How could the national adoption register be used more effectively to address the problem? Edward Timpson: I will take the gateway and the register first. In relation to the national gateway, we have now signed a contract with Coram and Adoption UK to provide the gateway. The idea behind the national gateway is to answer the concerns of many of those who make that often brave decision to put themselves forward as prospective adopters, only to be frustrated by the response that they get when making an inquiry. We know that about onethird of those who make that inquiry have no follow-up information meeting for over three months. Yet I have been to other adoption agencies which have a strong and strict protocol that within a week of someone phoning them someone visits them at their house to discuss with them exactly what adoption means and to find out whether it would work so that they can move on to the next stage. The adoption gateway is designed to try to address that problem, by providing anyone who is interested in adoption with information. The good news is we have had an increase in those showing an interest. During National Adoption Week in particular, we have had a real surge in interest. They have a single point of reference where they can get information and guidance as to what adoption is and how the process of getting approved as an adopter works. They can also reference where they can go to get that support and guidance, as well as having explained to them what their entitlements as an adopter would be, so they are left under no illusions as to what exactly they are letting themselves in for. Also, it means that they have a contact very soon after triggering that often painstakingly long thought process as to whether it is something that they would ever anticipate doing. We do not want to lose these people. In relation to the national adoption register, from memory—there are lots of statistics that I have been trying to hold in my head and I do not always come up trumps—I think about 10% of adoption matches are currently made through the national adoption register. Someone will knee me in the back in a moment if I have that way out of kilter, but I think I am right. Of course there are many children who are not currently being matched locally who do not find themselves on the national adoption register. Therefore, what we are doing and what we are 518

Edward Timpson MP, Minister for Children and Families, Department for Education—Oral evidence (QQ 805–830) wanting to bring in and consulting around is if after a period of three months a child has not been matched locally and there is no current potential of that happening, they would then be put on the national adoption register to widen the prospects of them finding a match, so it does not just fall within their local authority area. I think that will be a good way of improving the statistic that I gave earlier about the number of children whose plan is for adoption who are still in foster care, currently around 4,500. On your wider point about how we can improve around recruitment, it starts to impinge on the conversation we were having earlier about the structure of adoption services. Clearly around recruitment we have a national shortage because we are not matching supply with demand, yet we know, in the words of local authorities, that they have a “latent capacity” to increase their recruitment and we know from conversations that we have had with voluntary adoption agencies that they can continue to increase their own capacity and have the ability to do so, and have done for 20% over the last two years. The point is how we unlock that capacity and whether it is done within the current structure, or whether we need to find other ways of making sure that we are maximising the opportunities for children to get a placement and a match as soon as possible. The interagency fee is one way of helping do that, but I want to continue to look at all ways that we can open up adoption recruitment so that it is not just being confined to what each local authority needs to recruit within its own boundaries, but that they have an incentive to over-recruit and to collaborate and look more widely as to how they can benefit children from right across the country in trying to find a permanent placement through adoption. Q818 The Chairman: I have not entirely understood through the evidence that we have been hearing whether the adoption register is being used for prospective adopters as well as children. If you get a local authority which may be discouraging to prospective adopters, or just do not come back to them, what can they do to have their name up-front as prospective adopters? Can they go on to the register? Edward Timpson: I think I am right in saying that they can, but they have to be approved to go on to the register. They do not have carte blanche to sign up. The Chairman: How are you going to encourage people who come forward and go to a local authority which failed to take sufficient interest in them? What is your national gateway going to do for them? How will they know where to go next? Edward Timpson: The gateway will provide information about all the other adoption agencies that are out there and also the local authority they can go to. At the moment, there is a lack of awareness, perhaps understandably, for a lot of those people who are looking at adoption that they can only look to their own local authority. That is not the case and I have heard firsthand stories of prospective adopters who have gone to their local authority, got nowhere, and then on the grapevine, by word of mouth, have heard of a voluntary adoption agency which they have then gone to see and they have gone through the approval process with them and have been matched and had a child or children placed with them. So the point of the gateway is to make all that information available in one central point, so that they do not have to rely on the grapevine or word of mouth to get that information. Q819 Lord Warner: Do you have any feel or data within your Department that gives you some idea of the pool of adopters that a local authority ought to have, relative to its annual rate 519

Edward Timpson MP, Minister for Children and Families, Department for Education—Oral evidence (QQ 805–830) of placement? If for example, a local authority has been doing 20 to 25 adoptions a year, what is the pool? What would good practice suggest is the pool it ought to have available to it in order to deliver that year in and year out? It seems to me that one of the problems is we do not have a feel for the number you need to have in the pool to ensure that you can deliver the changes that the Government are rightly seeking to produce. If they do not know how many they need to have spare in order to get good matches, they will not recruit to that number. Edward Timpson: We are getting to the chicken and egg argument about the 4,500 children who are in foster care, planned for adoption and that they have not been matched. How can we anticipate the level of adopter recruitment required in order to make sure that we manage to find the right match for each of those individual children? That is a very difficult challenge. Of course one of the other elements that I would add into your conundrum is understanding what motivates people to want to adopt in the first place, and are we reaching out to a wide enough pool of people to enable us to feel confident that we have a wide enough group of people to be able to match each child or children appropriately? We have commissioned some market research that is currently ongoing to try and understand more about who is coming forward to adopt, why they are coming forward, what is motivating them? Are we missing out on potentially great adopters who would help provide local authorities with a wider pool and diversity than they perhaps currently can rely upon? I would not want local authorities, and I think this is where we get back to the current difficulties, just to think about how many adopters we need to recruit for the number of children we need to adopt in our local authority. They should be looking at just trying to recruit adopters, because there will be other local authorities and other children outside of their local authority who will be looking for a match. My answer would be I would not want local authorities necessarily to define a number saying, “That is the maximum that we need in order to meet the demand within our own local authority area”. I just want them to recruit people who are going to be great adopters. Q820 Viscount Eccles: My question really is to agree with your last statement. Would it seem to you that it is worth worrying too much about the balance between adoptive parents and children that could be adopted? At the moment, it would be much better to have some disappointed adoptive parents rather than a disappointed child. Edward Timpson: Certainly the mismatch that we currently have between the number of children whose plan is for adoption and those who are being successfully matched and adopted would very much suggest that that is the case. We also need to understand, and going back to Lord Warner’s point and I think this is part of it as well, why it is that we have such a huge drop-off rate from the point that people show an interest in adoption to the point of going through the assessment process. That is where the biggest drop-off is. I think that about one in eight ends up going through the assessment process. Once they start the assessment process the retention rate is quite high, so we need to understand better why there is such a drop-off. Part of it is because they do not hear from local authorities for too long, having made that initial inquiry. Also their concern that some of the myths around adoption are true, that if you are overweight or if you smoke or you are gay you cannot adopt. We need to understand much better why we have such a huge drop-off, because there is not a lack of interest but there is a lack of delivery. Viscount Eccles: Can we move on to a rather technical question about legislation or proposed legislation?

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Edward Timpson MP, Minister for Children and Families, Department for Education—Oral evidence (QQ 805–830) Edward Timpson: If you must. Viscount Eccles: This one is about the weight that should be given to ethnicity. We are quite concerned that the removal of Section 1(5) will send out a message to social workers that a child’s religion, race, language and culture are not such important considerations when placing a child for adoption. If this is a message which has to be got right, might it not be better to amend Section 1(4) of the Adoption and Children Act 2002 to include religion, race, culture and language as specific factors relating to a child’s background under Section 1(4)(d)? Edward Timpson: Without getting too much into the technicalities around the specific clauses, although I can do that if necessary, the overarching principle here is that we want every decision that is made about placing and matching a child to be based, as it should be in law, on what is in the child’s best interest and a good quality social worker, with the assistance of the court, I am sure will come to that decision correctly. What we do see, and I have mentioned the websites that I have already spoken about, but also the fact that it takes on average a year longer for a black child to be adopted than a white child, why that is. Since the 2002 Act brought in the specific reference it has resulted, not everywhere but in too many cases, with an overemphasis on getting the perfect ethnic match over and above what is going to provide that child with a safe, stable, loving family environment. What we are not suggesting and I think it is important that this is made clear, is that this is no longer a consideration. Of course it is a consideration and that is clear in the welfare checklist in Section 1(4) and in the welfare checklist where the characteristics of a child also have to be taken into account when coming to that view. It is making sure that it does not become an overprominent and overarching feature of a decision that prevents a child having the opportunity to be placed and matched in a perfectly good and hopefully outstanding adoptive placement at the earliest opportunity. The evidence suggests that that is still being frustrated by the undue consideration of the need to find an ethnic match. Q821 The Chairman: Can I pick you up on that? I can see exactly why taking out Section 1(5) out takes out something that is standing on its own and, therefore, may be given a disproportionate amount of attention. We have been hearing quite a lot of evidence that to take it out altogether may for some social workers mean that they ought to be disregarding it. That is because having taken it out you are making a point that they would assume ethnicity no longer matters. “Characteristics” under Section 1(4)(d) is not really quite broad enough to encompass the loss of Section 1(5). We have come around to the tentative view, which is what we are putting to you, that if you put it in under Section 1(4)(d) you are putting it in proportion to everything else that both the court and the adoption agency need to have regard to. What is wrong with that? Edward Timpson: I will have to go away and cogitate on the tentative view that the Committee has on this particular issue, but I do not think it is any secret to social workers that “characteristics” is going to include their ethnicity, their religious background, and other features of them that form part of their overall character. So I am not sure— The Chairman: It is the evidence that we have been getting, Minister, which is from various sources, that has made us really rather worried about taking it out altogether. Anyway, maybe you would have a thought about it.

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Edward Timpson MP, Minister for Children and Families, Department for Education—Oral evidence (QQ 805–830) Edward Timpson: I am happy to look at the evidence that you have received and particularly who the evidence has come from. I know it has been available to my officials so it is something that we will look at closely. I do not see why the removal of the explicit reference in Section 1(5) should have any bearing on a good social worker taking into account all the characteristics of each individual child as part of their assessment. Q822 Lord Morris of Handsworth: Do you think there should be a little bit of consultation before a decision is reached? Edward Timpson: We are going through pre-legislative scrutiny at this stage and we have had, as far as I am aware, a consultation, so this is very much part of listening to the— Lord Morris of Handsworth: Which constituency was consulted? Was the adoptive constituency consulted? I understood you to say that there was some consultation and I am just seeking to find out who was consulted. Edward Timpson: I can certainly provide you with information of all the interested parties who were consulted as part of this, but of course the pre-legislative scrutiny which we are currently doing is very much part of that exercise, and hence I have said I am happy to look at the evidence that you have received. Q823 Baroness King of Bow: Following on from that, it would be so useful if you and your officials could reflect on the fact that we do not want to go from one extreme to the other. Although all of us here and those behind you share the same view that we want to avoid those extremes, the evidence we have received tells us that at the moment what you are proposing does risk us taking it out altogether. I cannot understand why the Government could have any objection whatever to inserting it into Section 1(4)(d). Correct to take it out of Section 1(5) but it really should be given equal weight with all the other listed features. Edward Timpson: As I have said, Baroness King, I am very happy to look at some of the evidence that you have received on this. It is crucial that we get this right and consider the tentative view that you have come to and look at it. Baroness King of Bow: Thank you. Q824 Viscount Eccles: Can I just ask that when doing that you tell us about any perceived changes in behaviour? There is quite a strong view among some of the Members of the Committee, anyway, that it is not the legislation that is the problem, it is the way that people behave within the legislation that may be the problem. If you are getting changes in behaviour, because this subject is getting a lot of publicity, then it is very interesting to know what those changes, if any, are. Edward Timpson: I think I have tried to identify and articulate what the current problem is and if you want to couch it in terms of behaviour there is still too much undue emphasis on getting the perfect ethnic match. This is a way of recalibrating the terms on which those decisions should be made, so that it is still an important feature. However, it is not the overarching or overriding consideration, hence the removal of Section 1(5) with the hope and anticipation that that will make sure that the decision-making is going to be based on that premise, rather than the one that in too many circumstances is existing, which is preventing children from being placed much earlier in their stable adoptive placement.

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Edward Timpson MP, Minister for Children and Families, Department for Education—Oral evidence (QQ 805–830) Q825 The Chairman: I am afraid we are going to be running rather late with you, Minister, but I have two rather practical questions that I need to ask you on the amendments to Section 22C of the Children Act 1989; that is, Fostering for Adoption. If I give them all to you and then you can work them out. Edward Timpson: I will do my best. The Chairman: Clearly your primary objective, if I may say so, with which this Committee is entirely in accord—we think it is admirable that the Government want to do this—is: are your changes going to deliver? You obviously want to encourage more local authorities to consider fostering for adoption, but we are concerned about whether the amendments are going to achieve that objective. We have heard quite a lot of evidence to the contrary. Given the practical difficulties in getting prospective adopters who are prepared to take a risk—it may not be a big risk but certainly a risk—that the child goes home, will it really mean more than a small number of cases? The third point, which again we have had a considerable amount of evidence about, is that the time lapse between the decision made prior to the court hearing that this child should be placed for adoption, and the court hearing, particularly with Mr Justice Ryder’s modernisation, is likely to be two, at most three, months. So you are not going to have a very long period that you are putting the child with a prospective adopter, not perhaps as long as the Government would like. We are wondering therefore why on earth you are not looking at the concurrent planning system where you would be able to place a child, and not necessarily just a baby, at a very much earlier stage if you could get the decision-maker to say in particular cases, “This child is not going back”. There has been the family conferencing before the child is taken into care; this is a child where the prospects of ever going back to the family are virtually nil; why do you wait the four months? Why can you not place the child almost even before the care application is made? That is concurrent planning. It is not fostering for adoption in the wording of your 9A, B and C? Edward Timpson: I will do my very best to unravel those very pertinent questions. I think the first thing it is probably right to mention is the difference between concurrent planning and fostering for adoption, because it is not necessarily always obvious. Concurrent planning, by the very word suggests there are two plans. So you have the plan that you are considering on one parallel, which is rehabilitation to the birth family, and the other plan, which is a permanency decision that is outside the birth family. So they are quite specific circumstances. Concurrent planning is something that I remember being bandied about seven or eight years ago when I was practising up in the North Wales coast. It sounded great in principle but did not accord with many of the cases that we were involved in in the courts. However, as regards fostering for adoption, there is one plan. The decision has been made that the right long-term placement for that child is adoption, so the circumstances are very different. Concurrent planning tends to be a very young child, hence the efforts to try to rehabilitate the child back to the birth family. Fostering for adoption does take place now. When I was in East Sussex about seven or eight weeks ago, I was speaking to the Director of Children’s Services about how they have fostering for adoption happening in their local authority area and I met a couple who were going through the process of fostering for adoption. You mentioned the lack of benefit that you would get from the two to three months—or more likely four months on your evidence.

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Edward Timpson MP, Minister for Children and Families, Department for Education—Oral evidence (QQ 805–830) The Chairman: Well, three to four months before the decision is made, and then only two, at most three, months that the child is placed before the court makes the order. Edward Timpson: Yes. I think we are getting close to the months that we are apart. That of course is the average and you will get some cases where it is considerably more than that. Nevertheless, the earlier the child can be placed the better, and I think we are all agreed on that point. Three to four months for them may be a considerable period of time, particularly if they are very much in their early years. I would not want to downplay the importance of getting that placement sooner rather than later. In terms of whether it is always going to remain small scale, I think fostering for adoption has a wider application than concurrent planning because of the particular circumstances of concurrent planning. I think fostering for adoption can be for a wider range, although I take Baroness King’s point that every year a child ages the less likely it is that they will be adopted. In terms of the likelihood of potential adopters wanting to go down the fostering for adoption route, clearly all the risk is with them, because they take on the role of foster carers with a view to adoption. However, I know you have heard evidence about the number of placement orders that are not made where the plan is for adoption is very unusual. That is highly unusual, and I never remember coming across a case where a placement order did not follow on from a care order where the plan was for adoption. So although there is a minimal risk, in many respects there is the risk that those parents take on. When I met the couple in East Sussex, I was struck by how that risk was something that they knew, that they understood, but it did not prevent them wanting to care for the little girl that they had placed with them, with a view to adoption. I doubt whether they are alone in having that attitude. I never cease to be amazed at how resilient people are who come forward to adopt. They need support and they need it before, during and after a placement. I would be hopeful that if fostering for adoption is applied more widely—and there is still a perception among local authorities that they cannot do it because it is illegal—it could be done. The Chairman: The judges say they see no problem with it. Edward Timpson: No, but make it abundantly clear that it is legal and this is how you do it and this is what we expect to happen, but it will provide many more children with an opportunity to be placed with their prospective adopters at a much earlier stage. That is why, although I cannot give any guarantee as to how much more widely it is going to be used, it will be much more widely used. The Chairman: I have a few more questions on this issue, as you might imagine, but perhaps we will write to you with them because I am getting concerned about time. We will move on to Lady Knight. We are going to have to keep our questions short and our answers short. Q826 Baroness Knight of Collingtree: I will try to make it short. It is about the work of the IROs. Do you think, Minister, there should be some mechanism in primary legislation to review the case where a specific period of time has gone by with the children still unplaced? If there is to be responsibility for reviewing, is it to be left with the independent reviewing officers and how will Government ensure that they are being sufficiently proactive? Edward Timpson: We have recently strengthened the guidance around independent reviewing officers and the scope that they have to ensure that care plans are being properly carried out.

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Edward Timpson MP, Minister for Children and Families, Department for Education—Oral evidence (QQ 805–830) On your point about primary legislation, there are, from memory, already regulations that set out the review process of the plan. If after three months there is a review and then every six months after that, and if after the second review the child still has not been placed, then there is the opportunity for it to be reconsidered as the plan. So the independent reviewing officers already have a number of regulatory points on which they will be reviewing and challenging the local authority about why that plan has not been implemented. In relation to IROs, there are some excellent ones and I think you have had examples provided to the Committee through the evidence that you have received. I am conscious that we want IROs to feel that they have the clout in order to change local authorities, right across all councils. We have asked Ofsted to do a thematic review of the impact of IROs, and we have asked them to report by March or April next year. We also have some research being done by the MCB into IROs, and whether they need strengthening in any other areas to make sure that they perform exactly the function that you set out. Q827 Baroness Eaton: We have heard quite a lot about post-adoption support from various people from whom we have taken evidence, and I would say that there is a clamour to make it a statutory responsibility of local authorities. It obviously helps prospective adopters and also makes a more successful adoption process. Do the Government support such a move of a statutory duty, and should a duty extend to support birth parents as well as those adoptive parents? That is the next part of the question. The final part is whether there is any rationale in distinguishing between adoptive parents and special guardians, and those caring for former looked-after children under a residence order. There are three parts to the question: statutory responsibility and then the other two parts that I mentioned. Edward Timpson: On your first point about post-adoption support, I am a huge supporter of it. I think it is a vital component of the package that adopters should have to be sure that we prevent any unnecessary breakdown of adoptions. Julie Selwyn is also doing some work on adoption breakdowns, and we know that there is still a huge lack of awareness among adopters, first, as to even the fact that they have a right to request an assessment of what their adoption support should be. There is also some misunderstanding by local authorities as to what their responsibilities are around providing adoption support, particularly after a three-year period. We need to raise the profile and the prospect of adoption support. I know that my predecessor, Tim Loughton, through his ministerial advisory group, brought out the adoption action plan. One of the recommendations of that group was around what was termed an “adoption passport”, so effectively an adopter has at their fingertips a suite of support that they know should be available, and they can access it when they need it. That is quite an attractive and easily understood mechanism for trying to trigger adoption support. We know that where adoption support is good there are huge benefits. The downside of not doing it is the worst possible scenario for any child, which is an adoption breakdown. It also means that those adopters are highly unlikely ever to adopt again, so we have lost them as well. As to whether there should be a duty on local authorities to provide the adoption support that is deemed to be needed through an assessment, clearly that is something that has implications beyond my Department. It is something that I am still looking at and considering, having received all the evidence as to the impact that it will have elsewhere—both financially and in terms of human resources—as to how far we can take the post-adoption support that would

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Edward Timpson MP, Minister for Children and Families, Department for Education—Oral evidence (QQ 805–830) be available to adopters. I think that it is a key component of a successful adoption and we can do much better than we are currently doing. On birth parents, clearly it would be wrong for any parent, having gone through the traumatic permanent separation from their own child, to assume that they can just get on with their life and cope with that loss. There are ways that birth parents can access assessments, request those assessments and get that support. Again, that is something I want to look at, to see whether, by not providing that support post-separation, we are setting them up for future failure. On your last point about special guardianship orders, I mentioned earlier the exponential rise of such orders over the last four years, since their introduction seven years ago. We still do not fully understand their impact. They have ended up being made in a far wider range of circumstances than I think was originally anticipated. The University of York is doing some research for the Department on getting a better understanding of special guardianship orders and why some of those break down. At this stage there is no reason to suggest that they have not been appropriate in all circumstance. We want to understand what role they are playing within the range of permanency options for the courts and for children. So we need to understand better, and hopefully we will do so with this research. We have an interim report next year that will set out in more detail than we have ever had before, how special guardianship orders have manifested themselves and what we can learn from that, particularly around what support may be required once that order has been made. The Chairman: The very last question. Baroness Eaton: There are a couple of things that I would like to follow on from that, but we do not have time. The Chairman: I do not think we have. What we will do is put together a small pack of questions. Baroness Eaton: Yes, thank you. The Chairman: We will send that to your Department. Q828 Baroness King of Bow: Can I ask if the Minister supports it or not? I did not understand that. You support it in principle, I understood that, but I was not clear if you support in practice the introduction of statutory support for post-adoption. Edward Timpson: I am considering very carefully whether having a duty would be the right approach, what impact it would have and how it could be sustainable in the long term. The Chairman: Lord Warner, the very last question. Q829 Lord Warner: I do not want to detain the Minister any longer. We had a very good canter around the course earlier on, on monitoring the performance of local authorities. I would just like to be clear what your position is on the existing powers for Ministers to robustly manage performance of local authorities and, in effect, take action where there is persistent under-performance by a particular local authority. Do you think your powers are adequate or do you think they need to be strengthened? If you want time to think about it, do write to us about it, but can you answer it now?

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Edward Timpson MP, Minister for Children and Families, Department for Education—Oral evidence (QQ 805–830) Edward Timpson: My view—subject to me writing to you—is that they are adequate. To take Hackney and its education service as a parallel example that was taken into a trust, which is in the process of being turned back to local authority control. There are similar powers available to Ministers, both in terms of notices to improve, which I have sent to a number of local authorities relating to their adoption services, but also more severe statutory intervention that ultimately has the capacity to outsource the service away from that local authority, either to another local authority or to a third party. So there are quite strong sanctions that are available in trying to bring about the improvements necessary. Clearly they are always some things that we consider, not just in adoption but also in safeguarding and in other parts of the children’s services. Q830 The Chairman: Minister, in all fairness, we have kept you a long time. We started late with you—which was not very polite—and we have kept you a very long time. We are extremely grateful to you, particularly for the openness of your answers to the questions we have asked you. I think we are all on the same side. The only question is how you achieve it. What we would very much like to do is ask a few additional questions, probably not on the two pre-legislative scrutiny issues, because we have to get that in the bag, if possible, by the end of next week in order to provide our first report by 21 December. The other questions will not be quite so urgent, so we would be grateful to your team for some answers on those. But to you, thank you very much indeed. Edward Timpson: I would say in closing that, as you know, I have two adopted brothers myself. When I was at Crewe Family Proceedings Court in the late 1980s, for my youngest brother’s adoption, little did I think that I would be sitting in this room drawing from that experience, so thank you for giving me the opportunity to vent my spleen on some of these important issues. The Chairman: Thank you very much indeed.

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Evangelical Alliance and Care for the Family—Written evidence

Evangelical Alliance and Care for the Family—Written evidence The Evangelical Alliance and Care for the Family offer this evidence as we are partnering to explore the possibility of working with the church nationwide to increase the profile of adoption and fostering, and encourage churches as they provide support to adoptive parents and foster carers. Care for the Family and the Evangelical Alliance are trusted partners with the church, across many denominations, and recognised by approximately 15,000 churches across the UK. The Evangelical Alliance is a charity networking local churches across the UK, and the member of staff overseeing this campaign, Krish Kandiah, is an adoptive father and a foster carer working with Oxfordshire Social Services. Care for the Family is a national charity supporting families and seeking to strengthen family life. In June 2012 we held consultation events in six cities around the UK, to meet with and listen to social work professionals and foster and adoptive carers. These events were attended by a total of 466 people. We have also invited feedback via an online survey which has been completed so far by 306 professionals and foster/adoptive carers, sharing their experiences and views. This evidence draws upon the feedback gathered from the consultation events and survey responses, plus Krish’s personal experiences. Background a) Do we have the right structure for adoption? 1. In Krish’s experience of adopting his foster daughter, he found this to be a very helpful approach although this was not a planned for outcome. We would recommend that the concurrent planning pilot programme that CORAM have been trialling should be rolled out across the UK. b) Should we be concerned about the falling number of adoptions? Why are the numbers falling? 2. There is a public perception that the process is very long, invasive and complicated. One respondent wrote, “The application process is unbelievably intrusive and very emotive often leaving you feeling very drained. It doesn’t feel like a positive experience and would be quite easy to pull out.” Whilst recognising that proper safeguarding procedures need to be in place and all appropriate checks meticulously carried out, it would also seem wise to reduce the amount of unnecessary waiting in the process. 3. We also heard that many long-term foster carers are holding off from adopting the children in their care, because if they do the provision of services for those children changes. For example a child in care who receives additional learning support, counselling or medical

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Evangelical Alliance and Care for the Family—Written evidence treatment, is put to the top of the waiting list, whereas if they are adopted they lose this right. There is also a financial challenge; many foster carers rely on the allowance they receive for their children, but once they are adopted in many cases this ceases. As a result, some foster carers cannot afford to adopt their children, and so may use other routes such as long term foster care or special guardianship. 4. We have spoken to many people who have been told by their local authorities in the initial phone call that they would not be able to adopt, or were treated with suspicion, instead of being welcomed during that first contact and their situation properly assessed. Time taken in placing children a) Is excessive time taken in placing children? Do some groups of children take a disproportionate length of time? 5. In their experience as foster carers, Krish and his wife have observed that it does take a long time to place the children in their care. Although finding a long term placement has ranged from 3 weeks to 3 years, the average has been 1-2 years. Consulting with other foster carers this also seems to be true. They have noticed in the last few months greater urgency from their local authority to try and place children more quickly. 6. Several foster and adoptive carers who completed our surveys expressed frustration at the length of time that the placement of children in their care took. c) Do the various parts of the system – local authorities, adoption agencies, courts and others – work effectively together? 7. From Krish’s experience there are obstacles due to communication. For example when placing his disabled foster child, his local authority only had access to potential adopters they had assessed, not to the whole database of adopters locally, and certainly not nationally. When she was eventually adopted by a family in another local authority, there were different expectations in protocol that made it difficult for him as a foster carer to manage expectations of all the children involved. d) Could the adoption process be speeded up, whilst ensuring that necessary safeguards are preserved? 8. Yes. By concurrent planning, by giving birth families time-specific contracts to prove suitability, and by recognising the 26 week limit. f) What are the reasons for the variations in time taken to place children by different local authorities? 9. There seems to be a large regional discrepancy in the way that local authorities operate. Prospective adoptive carers at our consultation event in Belfast told us that there seems to be a 529

Evangelical Alliance and Care for the Family—Written evidence long waiting time for applicants to be processed, with the adoption training course being only run once a year, while in Oxfordshire this is run once a month. This has created a bottle-neck for potential adopters in certain areas. The number of potential adopters a) Are there enough potential adopters coming forward? Are there shortages in particular ethnic groups? 10. Talking with churches and individual Christians, there does seem to be a culture of fear developing so that Christians are nervous they will be singled out as inappropriate carers because of their faith. Some social work professionals have agreed that Christians do have ‘a harder time’ on adoption panels. We think this is due to a lack of faith literacy within the social work profession. Another adoption social worker admitted, “We know about as much about the church as we do about the mosque… not a lot.” We think that partnership with the church and other faith groups will provide an effective route for recruitment and also ongoing support for adoptive carers. 11. We have been told that adoption disruption is often caused by a lack of support for adopters. We are working on a campaign towards the church to increase the profile of adoption and fostering and the support that the local church can provide to adoptive parents and foster carers. The campaign will also seek to develop closer working relationships with local authorities to assist in faith literacy. Through the church in the UK we have access to most ethnic groups and the campaign will encourage BME families to come forward. b) How do we ensure the best “fit” for a child, and is trans-racial adoption relevant to this issue? 12. As someone who has adopted transracially into a mixed race marriage, Krish is sympathetic with the need to match prospective placements as appropriately as possible. In the past ‘racial matching’ seemed to trump all other factors in a placement, and we do not believe this is appropriate in today’s multicultural Britain. Ethnic matching should be one of a range of factors in child placement but should not be the sole deciding factor. Young boys from African and Caribbean backgrounds are the most difficult to place group of children in the country. Rather than leave these children waiting in the system because an ethnic match has not been found, allow other factors to influence their placement. Post-adoption support a) How, if at all, has the 2002 Act impacted upon the provision of post-adoption contacts and support? 13. Krish and his wife have been very pleased with the amount of support available to them from their local authority in terms of financial help and ongoing training opportunities.

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Evangelical Alliance and Care for the Family—Written evidence b) Are measures needed to enhance post-adoption financial and other support for (i) adopted children; (ii) adoptive parents, (iii) birth families? 14. In our recent consultations with adoptive and foster carers, many indicated that additional support would be valued and is needed. A significant number felt that they did not receive enough help from their social worker, especially when challenges arose. One parent said, “Support for when things go wrong needs to be more readily available, it shouldn’t have to be a fight with a local authority to get help at a time when you are most desperate and vulnerable.” 40% of the survey respondents said they had looked for other forms of support. 15. The two areas most mentioned were: Firstly the need for help related to handling difficult behaviour and attachment issues, and/or specialised therapy, and also stressing the value of detailed ‘signposting’ to local services. 16. Secondly, parents emphasised the value of knowing and meeting with other adoptive parents, so support could include signposting adoptive parents to existing groups, or helping them to network with each other. One parent said, “Our support group is invaluable – it gives us the open-ness to talk about issues that are different to having birth children. Eg effects of trauma, letter box contact with birth family and life stories.” Another parent reported, “It can be a very lonely experience – more effort needs to be made by agencies to give opportunity for adopters/foster carers to meet each other.” 17. We would like to see at least one annual counselling session offered to all three groups with trained professionals able to discern where serious problems may be developing. Notes Care for the Family is a national charity which aims to strengthen family life throughout the UK and help those facing family difficulties. Over the past 21 years, over 350,000 people have attended the charity’s events, workshops and family-building breaks. Many more families find support through its resources and other initiatives – including stepfamilies, bereaved parents, families where children have additional needs, those parenting alone and those widowed young. For more information please visit www.careforthefamily.org.uk The Evangelical Alliance, formed in 1846, is the largest body serving evangelical Christians in the UK, and has a membership including denominations, churches, organisations and individuals. The mission of the Evangelical Alliance is to unite evangelicals to present Christ credibly as good news for spiritual and social transformation. According to a Tearfund survey (Churchgoing in the UK, 2007), there are approximately 2 million evangelical Christians in the UK. For more information, go to www.eauk.org. 16 July 2012

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Family Justice Council—Written evidence

Family Justice Council—Written evidence 1. Introduction: This document is prepared on behalf of the Family Justice Council (FJC) in response to the Call for Evidence from the House of Lords Committee chaired by Baroness Butler-Sloss. The FJC apologises for missing the deadline for submissions and hopes this late submission may still be of some use to the Committee.

2. The response of the FJC is circumscribed by the limited evidence available in respect of the issues of particular interest to the committee (set out below) and which are therefore difficult to quantify. The FJC, which is interdisciplinary in composition, will be better able to respond in detail to any recommendations that may result of the deliberations of the Select Committee in due course. The FJC would recommend that changes in legislation should occur only where there is evidence to support such a change.

3. The strategic thinking, public policy and purpose of change should be clearly identified so that all disciplines working in the field are aware of the aims behind modification in the law, practice and the implementation of Government policy. This document does not set out to answer all 40 questions. The FJC’s response will reflect the lack of quantitative evidence available in respect of adoption generally; and the impact of the Adoption and Children Act 2002 specifically.

4. Background. a) Whether or not England and Wales have the right structure begs the question of the purpose behind the structures in place. Primarily adoption should serve the best interests of the child and provide for her welfare throughout her life; adoption being a life-long change in social and legal status. 41

5. However the secondary consideration is the purpose of adoption itself as a social construct. Is it to provide long-term family and home for children who are in need and who are often damaged or disturbed as a result of the care they received at the beginning of their lives? If so the emphasis should be on identifying and supporting adoptive carers who are willing to undertake an altruistic social function.

The “paramountcy principle” central to all legislation concerning the residence, placement and care of children Cf. s 1 ACA 2002. 41

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Family Justice Council—Written evidence

6. If it is to provide for “family building” for childless couples and others the prospective adopters will be largely self-selecting. The two groups, whilst not mutually exclusive, do not produce prospective adopters with the same motivation; the ensuing differences in expectation, experience and the ability to parent children – some of whom may be perceived as “difficult to place”- will reduce the availability of adopters for many of the children currently in the care system. The plan for concurrent planning and placement with foster-carers approved for adoption has high expectations of those families and will require specialist support and additional funding. 42

7. Background. b) In respect of falling numbers of adoptions, and the data for the source of this observation is not identified, whether or not this is a cause for concern depends on the desirability of more children being adopted or, for example, remaining with birth families or other carers under Special Guardianship. 43Adoption will not be the best option for all children removed from their birth or original family and cannot be considered a panacea.44 It is not possible to say why the numbers are falling without closer consideration of the “numbers” or children involved. Local authority evidence will be of greater assistance.

8. The Select Committee identified “Issues of particular interest to the Committee [which] are expected to include:”      

The impact of legislation on the adoption process; (See below). What causes delays in placing children with adoptive parents? (See below). How can the government increase the number of potential adopters? (See above). Is post-adoption support adequate? Can more be done to support adoptive parents? (See below). inter-country adoptions; and (not dealt with in this document) How the adoption process is monitored. (See above and below)

9. The impact of legislation on the adoption process. See also the questions under Legislation. The ACA 2002 contained changes that required the court to consider the prospective adopted child’s welfare throughout her life45 (which is additional to the welfare considerations under the CA 1989) and replaced freeing orders with placement orders46. Re: the Call of Evidence “The number of potential adopters”. Pursuant to Children Act 1989 s14A (1). The table in Hershman & McFarlane Children Law and Practice at B [1025] provides a comprehensive description of the differences between SGOs and Adoption. 44 See also the responses of the Kinship Care Alliance to this call for evidence dated 18 th July 2012; and the commentary of Charles Geekie QC dated 19th July. 45 As set out in s1 (1) and (4) ACA 2002. 46 Section 21 of the Act. 42 43

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10. What causes delays in placing children with adoptive parents? Delay is neither inherent to, nor sanctioned by, statute. The fact that placement order applications can take place immediately at the conclusion of care proceedings (under CA 1989) is precisely to avoid delay.47 The jurisprudence contained in European case law supports that principle.48

11. There is no requirement in law as to the race, culture or religion of prospective adopters only that the adoption agency must give “due consideration” to the “racial origin, cultural and linguistic background of the child.” The only requirement of adoptive parents is that they are sufficiently sensitive to assist the child to understand and to take pride in all elements of her background.49 It is hard to sustain an argument that legislation or case law sets the bar too high.

12. Assuming that most children “available” or waiting to be adopted are there because they have been in court proceeding and their parent’s consent has been dispensed with; this is the tension at the centre of adoption procedure and is peculiar to this jurisdiction. As observed by the authors of the Family Justice Review adoption without consent is not common to most jurisdictions. It is the most far reaching and “draconian” order that can be made by the courts affecting both the child’s and the parents’ rights therefore any legal process will need to reflect this and give proper time for consideration of the complex, conflicting issues and the changes in legal status involved in a manner that is proportionate to the needs and rights of all parties.

13. Is post-adoption support adequate? Can more be done to support adoptive parents? The current provision is often inadequate and more should be done to support adoptive parents. Adoption creates a legal fiction where the original family cease to be the family of the child. Children older than infants are likely retain memories of their birth or original family not all of which will be negative even if they have suffered harm prior to their removal from their family. In addition children may have behavioural or other difficulties and will require continued professional help and support, including CA 1989 expressly states that the general principle that any delay in respect of any decision of regarding the upbringing of any child is likely to prejudice the welfare of the child; s 1(2). 48 Delay is antipathetic to convention rights, in Jevremović v Serbia (Application No 3150/05) [2008] 1 FLR 550; which concerned protracted private law proceedings involving the child of a celebrity, the ECtHR finding violations of Art 6, Art 8 and Art 13 (together with Art 6) of the Convention; the reasonableness of the length of proceedings must be assessed in the light of the circumstances of the case and having regard to the criteria laid down in case law, the complexity of the case, the conduct of the applicant, the relevant authorities, as well as the importance of what was at stake for the applicant. A backlog of cases and repeated re-examination of a case were not valid explanations for excessive delay. Particular diligence was required in cases concerning civil status and capacity (CF. [79], [80]). 49 Re C (Adoption: Religious Observance) [2002] 1 FLR 1119. 47

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Family Justice Council—Written evidence therapeutic input. It is both unrealistic and unreasonable to expect adopters to manage to successfully parent such children without the provision of such assistance, as of right. Foster carers may be put off by considerations such as the loss of support services provided under a long-term fostering arrangement. This is particularly so in the case of children with special needs who will require access to specialist services. The improvement of support for adoptive parents could contribute to a rise in the number of potential adopters.50

14. Family Group Conferences. The FJC recommended that there should be FGC in respect of children in all s31 proceedings; 51to help to identify alternative placements. 27 July 2012

50 51

Re: the Call for Evidence: “The number of potential adopters” See the FJC response to the Family Justice Review (attached).

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Family Rights Group—Written evidence

Family Rights Group—Written evidence 1.

Family Rights Group is the charity in England and Wales that advises families whose children are involved with or need local authority children’s services because of welfare needs or concerns. We provide direct advice to 7000 such parents and wider family members per year, so that they understand their situation, including their rights, and the options available to them. We also promote policies and practices that help children to be raised safely and thrive within their families wherever possible, for example we:  campaign for effective support to assist family and friends carers, including grandparents who are raising children who cannot live at home;  run the national Family Group Conference network and have developed national standards and are now trialing an accreditation system for family group conferences services. Family group conferences are an approach which are proven to help families engage in making safe plans for their children when the local authority is concerned about their welfare.

Submission supplements that made on behalf of the Kinship Care Alliance 2.

This submission supplements that drafted on behalf of the Kinship Care Alliance. We have deliberately not repeated the points that we made in that joint submission, but focus specifically here on points which fall outside the Kinship Care Alliance’s remit.

3.

We have responded to the questions listed in the call for evidence under themes rather than by reference to specific questions, as many of these cover similar issues.

Placing children for adoption without court approval 4.

There are few more drastic steps that the State can take than to sever the legal relationship between a child and their parents forever, which is the effect of an adoption order. It is therefore essential that the process by which this happens is fair and does not breach the human rights of the child and their parents and any other involved adults who have a relationship with the child.

5.

Under current legislation there is a clear division of responsibility whereby local authorities identify and provide the details of the child’s permanence plan and placement, but the final decision as to whether a child should be placed for adoption52 and thereafter be adopted is made by the court. When the Adoption and Children Act 2002 was debated in Parliament prior to enactment, it was clearly decided that no placement for adoption should take place unless the parent had formally agreed53 or the court had given specific authority by making a

A Placement order is required before a child can be placed by an adoption agency for adoption unless the parents with parental responsibility have given their formal consent to the adoption placement under s.19 ACA 2002. 53 S.19 ACA 2002 52

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Family Rights Group—Written evidence placement order54. This was intended to ensure that a parent wishing to challenge a placement for adoption had the opportunity to do so before their child was placed with adopters. This is based on a recognition that parents had little chance of making a successful challenge to a plan for adoption after their child had settled and formed a relationship with the prospective adopters as any move thereafter would be very disruptive and potentially damaging for them. 6.

As mentioned in the Kinship Care Alliance submission, we are concerned that the reality of the government’s ‘foster first before adoption’ policy55, and the proposed regulations associated with it, means that children may be moved to potential adoptive parents, in their role as foster carers, at an early stage, without proper consideration by the court of/for the care/adoption plan.

7.

We therefore consider that safeguards should be put in place, or the proposed regulations amended, to ensure that local authorities cannot effectively revert to the pre ACA position and ‘place’ a child in an adoptive placement without a placement order made by the court. Moreover, we consider that if the foster first proposals proceed as announced there will be successful challenges by parents, wider family members and on behalf of children under the Human Rights Act 1998.

Reviewing placement orders if the child is not placed for adoption after 1 year 8.

he recent case of A and S (Children) v Lancashire CC56 highlights the problems that arise when a child is authorised but is never actually placed for adoption. Although this case concerned children freed for adoption under the old law, it is possible that children who are authorised to be placed for adoption by a freeing order could be subject to similar drift in the system. In order to guard against this we propose that there should be a new legal requirement for the case to return to court if a child is authorised to be placed for adoption under a placement order but is then not placed within one year of the order being made.

Inadequacy of post adoption support for birth families 9.

Family Rights Group is aware from its advice work that birth parents and relatives often lack support during and after the adoption proceedings. Particular examples are  lack of a key worker for birth parents;  lack of support to promote links which meet their child’s long term identity needs;  lack of legal aid for family members who have important relationships with the adopted child to apply for a contact order after adoption, especially older siblings who have not been adopted but want to remain in touch with their brother or sister who has been adopted;  little support for birth parents to adjust to losing their child, which can be very problematic when those parents go on to have more children, and then face their new 54

S.21 ACA 2002

55http://www.education.gov.uk/inthenews/inthenews/a00211426/more-babies-in-care-to-receive-a-stable-home-more-swiftly56

[2012] EWHC 1689 (Fam)

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Family Rights Group—Written evidence

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baby being removed because they have not been able to resolve their problems with support. After Adoption provides an excellent support service to meet the needs of such parents with very positive results; lack of support when a sibling is in touch with or is seeking contact with their adopted brother or sister.

Post adoption support for contact 10.

We are also aware that there is a need for more effective adoption support especially in relation to contact. We are aware of a case, for example, where a birth sibling sought contact with his adopted sister. The case was referred to mediation and it resulted in the adult sibling and the adopters meeting regularly, exchanging information and creating a channel of communication which established a shared understanding and basis for future links even though no direct contact with the child took place.

11.

We are also concerned that the issue of links and identity for inter-country adopted children may not have been given adequate attention. Just as children adopted in the 1950s and 1960s expressed their desire to know their roots (as expressed in the Houghton Committee Report 1975 and subsequently addressed in the Children Act 1976 which gave them the right to trace their birth parents) we believe it is only a matter of time before children adopted from abroad express the same needs yet it may be much harder to find the relevant information to trace their birth family. There is no easy solution to this but it is surely an issue which practitioners working in inter-country adoption cases must be particularly vigilant about. July 2012

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Family Rights Group, Grandparents Plus, and The Who Cares? Trust—Oral evidence (QQ 668693)

Family Rights Group, Grandparents Plus, and The Who Cares? Trust— Oral evidence (QQ 668-693) Evidence Session No. 11

Heard in Public

Questions 668-693

TUESDAY 13 NOVEMBER 2012 Members present Baroness Butler-Sloss (The Chairman) Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top Baroness Eaton Baroness Hamwee Baroness Knight of Collingtree Baroness Morris of Bolton Lord Morris of Handsworth Baroness Walmsley Lord Warner ________________ Examination of Witnesses Cathy Ashley, Chief Executive Officer, Family Rights Group, Bridget Lindley, Deputy Chief Executive Officer and Principal Legal Advisor, Family Rights Group, Sarah Wellard, Policy and Research Manager, Grandparents Plus, and Natasha Finlayson, Chief Executive Officer, The Who Cares? Trust. The Chairman: May I welcome the team? We are delighted to see you. You will have heard a certain amount of what the lawyers were saying. The first thing I need to do is declare an interest. I am President of the Grandparents’ Association. I am particularly glad to see that they are represented in your group. I just wanted to make two short points. We have read with great interest the written evidence that you sent us. We found it extremely helpful. I want you to know that we are arranging, with Dr Roger Morgan, to meet children who have been adopted and also to meet children who are in care. Some of us will meet the children and other members of our Committee are going to meet the parents and the foster parents, so we will get a bit of on-the-ground information. You were making the points, quite rightly, about other routes to permanence. We are very well aware that adoption is not the only way to deal with children who go into care. That has been made abundantly clear to us by a lot of evidence that has come already. With that, Lady Knight is going to ask the first question.

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Family Rights Group, Grandparents Plus, and The Who Cares? Trust—Oral evidence (QQ 668693) Q668 Baroness Knight of Collingtree: Good morning. I would like to ask a very basic question. Do you think the right balance is being struck between the rights of the child and the rights of the birth family in what is happening in current social work practice? What is the best way of balancing those rights within a timescale that respects the needs of the child? Do you think that the needs and the wishes are about level in importance, because the wishes of the child seem to me not always to be given enough weight? I would very much like to know your views on this. Are there sufficient communication arrangements between the birth families throughout the process of preparing the care proceedings? Bridget Lindley: We feel that there are three parts to this. The first is obviously thinking about the child’s short and long-term needs, so that is going to be their need for immediate safety. There is the need for an early permanent placement that will give them the ability to form attachments and develop the ability to form attachments that will then serve them well through life. There are also the longer-term needs around a sense of identity and their need to be given the chance to be raised by their family, where it is safe for them to do so and where they are going to thrive. I think those needs need to be put up front. It is not just about the short-term need for an immediate placement because, particularly for older children who come into the care system, the speed is not going to be everything. There is obviously a slight difference between older children and babies in relation to the forming of attachments, but needs are complex and one should look at the full range, including the need for identity. Next to that is their right to respect for family life, which is a legal right that applies to the child. They ought to have the opportunity to have that fully explored in a thorough way before it ceases to be an option for them. The third is to look at how parents and relatives are engaged in the proceedings to maximise the chances of the child being able to live within their family network. We have quite a lot to say about evidence-based models of how you can maximise family engagement. I have to stress that it needs to be as early as possible. In this context it needs to be in the pre-proceedings stage because, with the way things are moving in terms of the timescales and regulation of court proceedings, they are going to find that there is not enough time to do it once the court proceedings start. We want to flag up the best ways of maximising family engagement in the pre-proceedings stage. We certainly have some suggestions around how that can be developed without it costing anything in terms of time for the child because, obviously, one of the key things one wants to balance is how to maximise family engagement and explore those options for the child without it taking longer and causing potentially harmful delay. In terms of proposals around how that can work, I can give a brief summary now. We may well talk about it during the rest of the session as well, but I think the first thing is to understand that parents and relatives, particularly parents, find it very difficult to hear what the concerns are because of fear and mistrust. It needs to be communicated to them in such a way that they can digest it and address it properly. The letter before proceedings that is currently sent in relation to care proceedings often happens far too late. Many authorities will send the letter a week before proceedings start so there is no time for engaging a family in any kind of constructive work and getting to grips with what the problem is and what they need to address it. Other authorities, by contrast, will make sure that it goes a good three months before and then use that time to work effectively and in an intensive way with the family in order to try and maximise the options.

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Family Rights Group, Grandparents Plus, and The Who Cares? Trust—Oral evidence (QQ 668693) Once that early letter has been sent, the key thing that can be done, first of all, is to help families to get access to independent legal advice, because having an independent person— someone who is not going to be the person who comes along and takes their child—go through it with them can help the penny to drop as to what the problem is and what they need to do about it. Getting access to independent legal advice is key for the parents. Then having a family group conference to explore how the wider family can, first, support the parents to address their problems, but, second, provide both short and long-term care if the child is not able to remain with the parents on a short or long-term basis. It will identify those early kinship placements. There are many examples of cases not even going into proceedings. What happens is the relative comes forward, takes on the child and then will apply for a residence or a special guardianship order, and so it never goes into care proceedings at all. Those are a few of the ideas that we have about how you can work effectively. However, in that period of time, it does not prevent the local authority thinking about what should happen if there is a chance that the child will need to be removed. In a neglect case––and a substantial number of such cases go into care proceedings—it can be thinking about alternative plans without having to remove the child. It can be thinking about what kind of placements may be appropriate. That may well be adoption. But one could even have a three-track planning system where you have what needs to happen to support the parents, what needs to happen to explore wider family, and then what would be the alternative if the child has to become looked after and potentially placed for adoption. That would be our quick summary of how to balance those things. Cathy Ashley: Can I just add one further thing? In relation to the new draft safeguarding guidance, we are concerned that it is moving away from effective open partnership, working with families at that much earlier stage. We know from Family Rights Group’s advice line that the number of calls we are getting has gone up by 50% in the past year. We know from that, the difference that it can make in terms of parents getting real about their situation and the significant variation between local authorities in terms of what is done with parents and engaging parents at that child protection stage. I want to flag up the fact that we do have real concerns in relation to the fact that the safeguarding guidance seems to be going in the opposite direction. Q669 Baroness Morris of Bolton: Is there always a family group conference? Bridget Lindley: Is there one, did you say? Baroness Morris of Bolton: Is there always one? Is it normal practice? Bridget Lindley: Basically, there is no requirement to offer all families a family group conference. At the moment it is a curious situation where you have some authorities that can see the power of a family group conference and are investing in it. It is really an invest-to-save model, where they can see that, by putting money into a model, it is going to engage the family and potentially unlock that family support and a potential kinship placement. They are boosting the family group conference service that they have at their disposal. Other authorities are closing them because they are not mandatory. Q670 Baroness Morris of Bolton: Should they be mandatory?

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Family Rights Group, Grandparents Plus, and The Who Cares? Trust—Oral evidence (QQ 668693) Bridget Lindley: That is what we would want to see. We would like a duty on local authorities to offer a family group conference where there is the possibility that a child may be removed, and it is a possibility— Q671 The Chairman: Before they start the care proceedings? Bridget Lindley: Yes. The Chairman: That is what I thought you said. Bridget Lindley: Whenever there is a possibility that the child may be removed. Q672 The Chairman: Yes. It would be prior to legal proceedings. You think there should be a mandatory requirement for this? Bridget Lindley: Even as part and parcel of the child protection planning, where it has got past the first child protection review and things are not working out, I think that is the kind of time. There is this complication that child protection is becoming deregulated at a time when court proceedings are becoming very regulated, and pre-proceedings in the middle is not regulated at all. It is down to practice. Q673 Baroness Knight of Collingtree: You have told us that there is quite a wide variation in the chances of a successful arrangement being made because of the different ways in which local authorities work. Bridget Lindley: In relation to the offer of a family group conference, certainly, and I think we see huge variations across local authorities in how they approach working with families. Baroness Knight of Collingtree: Thank you. Q674 Baroness Eaton: My question is about social workers and their role in keeping families together. Do you find in your experience that social workers try too hard, or maybe some try not hard enough, to keep families together? Do you think that the intervention from social workers—it really ties in partly with some of the things you have already said—takes place early enough to allow families to address their circumstances that are the problem? Bridget Lindley: I think we would end up reiterating the solutions we have already talked about. A recent Cafcass report has shown that the number of cases where there has been no support for the family has increased in the last year. That in itself is quite interesting. I do think we come up against this problem of the wide variety in practice pre-proceedings because of the lack of regulation, and obviously in child protection, because of the way the new safeguarding guidance is being developed. We do not know what the final version looks like as yet but, as a result of the Munro inquiry, there is a strong move supported by social workers to give them far more discretion in how they do things. That may work in lots of ways but, in terms of work with families, it leaves a lot more to chance. The more regulated it is then the more families can be sure about what they can ask for. The other aspect to it is that the work that goes on with families, pre-proceedings, does not always tap into what works. I think social workers should think about what works for the family, and not what works for them or their resources or what they have at their disposal. They should look at what works when you are on the receiving end, “Is that going to help this

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Family Rights Group, Grandparents Plus, and The Who Cares? Trust—Oral evidence (QQ 668693) family to sort things?” A lot of assessment goes on with rather less actual tangible support. Another aspect to that is that many parents, who we advise on our advice line, do find it more difficult to receive support from the person who they basically perceive as trying to take their child away than engaging with voluntary-sector support from the third sector. Having other people engaged in providing support can make a real difference. Aside from that, I would reiterate the points we made earlier around early legal advice for parents. We would say it should be linked to the letter of concerns, which we think is a slightly different creature from the letter before proceedings, which is what the current model is. If it was a letter of concerns at an earlier stage and access to free legal advice was linked to the letter of concerns, then parents would get early advice and that would help them to understand. What we do on the Family Rights Group advice line is talk through those kinds of issues, but we only advise 7,000 callers a year. We do not get to reach everyone. Obviously we would like to, but that is not possible. If people are without our advice and are not able to get to a solicitor, they are on their own, dealing with changes in social worker, feeling unable to hear what they are being told, not knowing what to do and panicking. If people do not hear then they panic. Q675 Baroness Eaton: Do you think social workers, generally, will be so optimistic about improving circumstances that they will always go to the nth degree to keep families together? Bridget Lindley: There is a lot of social work practice out there and we cannot comment on all of it, but from our experience on the advice line we hear from the families who feel that they are not being heard. They are not being given things that work for them and they are feeling that they have not had the dialogue that they want to have. Often our involvement can lead to unlocking that dialogue and getting a better understanding, and then they begin to work in partnership better. To be honest, our involvement—I say “our involvement”, it can be anyone giving legal advice—can help the social worker to crystallise what it is that they are saying as well. That is one of the advantages of a family group conference because that is part of the process. Cathy Ashley: Can I just add to that? I think part of it is the question of clarity, from the social worker’s perspective, about what needs to change. Family group conferences are effective in doing that but a letter of concerns could do that. Often there is a lack of understanding by the family as to what it is that is at the heart of the local authority’s concerns. The second is that the key factor, as to whether a case ends up going into proceedings and the local authority goes in that direction or not, is about where they feel there is a lack of cooperation between themselves and the family. It is not necessarily discovery of abuse. It is about whether the relationship between the parents and the local authority has broken down. In terms of thinking what is effective in engaging parents in that manner, in terms of advice advocacy, family group conferences, and so on, that is where you can see again that it is about changing the dynamic. The third point I want to make is that a very large proportion of the calls to our advice line are in relation to parents with mental health difficulties and domestic violence. Domestic violence is increasing significantly as a factor on our advice line and it is a constant presence in relation to child protection cases. In relation to the impact of support services’ early intervention, I would emphasise that financial constraints, which are causing domestic violence services and

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Family Rights Group, Grandparents Plus, and The Who Cares? Trust—Oral evidence (QQ 668693) perpetrator programmes to close, are going to feed into increases in relation to children ending up in the care system. If there was one area that I would plead, in a sense, as to where you can see the clearest link, it is particularly around domestic violence. Q676 The Chairman: The lawyers were saying to us—I think some of you were probably sitting in—that a very large percentage of people whose children were likely to go into care had not only mental health problems but probably drug or drink problems and difficulties in understanding because some of them had low IQs and so on. Is that your experience on your help line? Cathy Ashley: There often does need to be extra support. We run a very small scale advocacy service for parents in child protection conferences and reviews and, again, it can make a significant difference in terms of families understanding exactly what it is that is going on. People are completely bewildered by the system, and it is not surprising because the system is complex for most of us involved in it 24/7. But for the families involved, it is very hard to negotiate the system and there are often different competing pressures on them. They will be told that they should be doing this, doing that and doing the other, by different professionals, and they will be judged as to whether they meet those expectations and that can be extremely hard. The other point I want to raise—going back to the question that was asked initially—concerns fathers. We have done a lot of work in terms of research and engagement with fathers. It is a relatively consistent pattern that fathers are often not assessed as a risk or as a resource. That is particularly the case in relation to non-resident fathers. That then has an impact in relation to the paternal family. When you are then looking at the wider family as a potential placement for a child, often it is the paternal family who are not in the frame when the social workers are initially working. The research from Farmer and Moyers was that in only 4% of cases was that wider family placement initiated by the social worker. In the main it ends up being initiated by the wider family, but if the paternal family have been excluded early on, if they do not know what is going on—and often the case is that wider families do not know there are problems; parents can often be, for various reasons, very protective; and mother may not be disclosing all that is happening—then it is very difficult for them to put themselves forward until late on, which, in relation to the six months, is going to be too late. Q677 Lord Morris of Handsworth: Can you tell us please what concerns you have about the six-month time limit for care proceedings? What will be the impact on family and friends care placements? Natasha Finlayson: Can I share with you, initially, some of the things that young people in care have told us about their feelings about the six-month time limit? We ran a consultation with over 100 young people—surveys and in-depth personal interviews with them—about their views of the time limit as part of our response to the Family Justice Review. Broadly speaking, the young people thought that a year was far too long and that six months sounded about right. However, on a few key issues they had very serious concerns about what any compression of the timescale might mean. Those were particularly around the ability of the system to procure their views and to understand their wishes and feelings on what they wanted to happen to them. There was scepticism around the ability of social workers and Independent Reviewing Officers, and particularly court guardians, to have enough time to enable a child to share what 544

Family Rights Group, Grandparents Plus, and The Who Cares? Trust—Oral evidence (QQ 668693) they wanted to happen and to be able properly to listen. As a result of that, we would have a concern that Cafcass guardians do not have a performance indicator on them, in terms of how often they meet with the child, where they meet with the child, whether it is a child-friendly situation where the child will feel relaxed, and for how long they meet with the child. We would like to see that changed as a result of that input from young people. They were also concerned that a compression of timescale might lead to more separation from their siblings, where care proceedings were looking at multiple siblings from one family, and they were also concerned—and I am sure this will be reflected in the Family Rights Group’s experience—that it might not allow for late consideration of other family members or family friends who might, after long reflection, come forward and say, “I am willing to consider looking after this child”; and if you are at 5½ months, there might not be time for further assessment. The last issue that they were particularly concerned that the six-month timescale could affect would be where the birth parents were having an intervention to try and support them, particularly around drug and alcohol problems, domestic violence, perpetrator schemes and those sorts of things; having enough time to allow that to have an effect to see whether the parents could be in a position to still have parental responsibility for the child. Broadly speaking, young people agree that care proceedings take far too long; they think that six months sounds right; but they have some significant concerns, particularly about their wishes and feelings being heard. Bridget Lindley: Could I come in and just perhaps reiterate some points around family and friends care? There are two concerns that we have around the 26 weeks. One is obviously that parents are not going to get sufficient time to demonstrate their parenting abilities and to address their difficulties. We have already talked about the pre-proceedings work that is absolutely critical. I personally do not think it is going to happen without some primary legislation creating duties on the local authority, first, to consider wider family before they consider removing a child, second, to offer a family group conference, and, third, having the mechanisms in place to send the letter of concerns and access to legal advice. Those things have to be cast in stone, and to augment that, we need a pre-proceedings protocol of what works. That would be a very useful practice document. I know that Mr Justice Ryder is looking at what the court will expect to have been done by the time proceedings start. It is known as the Expectations document, which is in draft and we expect to see it in March. That looks at what the court will have to do. What we need is something that will apply to local authorities––a revamped version of Volume 1 Statutory Guidance, setting out how local authorities need to work more effectively with families in the early period––and we have made our suggestions about how that could happen. If you get to proceedings and wider family members still have not come forward, then there is going to be a real problem, basically, because there probably will not be enough time for them to be assessed. Some will hang back until there is a finding of fact against the parents, effectively, because they will not want to undermine their own son or daughter. That is a problem, but I have to say that the evidence is that a family group conference does help with that because it addresses contingency planning. It does not mean to say that they have to agree that the parents have or have not done something. They can make plan A and plan B, and plan A is around supporting the parents and plan B is what they will do in relation to stepping in if they

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Family Rights Group, Grandparents Plus, and The Who Cares? Trust—Oral evidence (QQ 668693) need to step. It is a non-judgmental way of engaging the wider family, without them then waiting until proceedings, until the finding of fact, and then they say, “Now I want to be assessed”, which would cause difficulties in terms of delay. I think the early FGC is the solution and I hope that people will— The Chairman: I think we have that point. We do have to move on otherwise we are going to be in some difficulties in finishing this. Q678 Baroness Walmsley: We now move on to a group of questions about permanency. Could you outline for us what are the benefits of the wider family and friends care in comparison to a foster carer or an adoptive parent who has no relation to the child? Could you tell us what are the risks and challenges of those kinds of placement and also how robust they are? What evidence is there that they break down less frequently or more frequently or maybe there is no difference? Perhaps you could tell us about that. Cathy Ashley: In terms of family and friends care, there are about 300,000 children living in family and friends care arrangements in the UK. What they offer is some of the same elements as fostering and adoption, in terms of love, security, safety and permanence for a child, but I also want to add two other factors. One is around the identity and the sense of identity so that children know where they come from. The second is that often family and friends carers, in a sense, provide contingency planning and that continuity without the state’s involvement. The very thing that the state is trying to deliver, through fostering or adoption and so on, is in effect continuity for young children but at the same time enabling them to have the chance to live with their birth parents. Wider relatives often do that already, grandparents taking on the role at the very early stage while at the same time working with their daughter or son, in the hope that their daughter or son will eventually be able to take on the full-time parenting role. I think it offers many of the same, but some added. The other thing I would say is that, in terms of the research out there, in terms of outcomes, what it shows is that it offers very much the same that you would expect in terms of long-term fostering, in terms of how children do in family and friends care, but they do better in terms of self-esteem, in terms of developing personal relationships, in terms of children’s academic performance. There is some research that is currently being undertaken by the University of Bristol with Buttle UK, which is specifically looking at children’s longer-term outcomes and their perceptions. That has not yet been published, but I think it is fair to say that what it shows is that these children are doing significantly better than you would expect if they were in foster care, but often with the carer taking the pain, because these placements are in the main significantly less supported than those in the foster care system. It is often the carer who has lost their job who ends up in significant financial hardship in terms of ill health, but basically they are enduring that for the sake of the children involved. That is why—in answer to your last question—there could be more research in this arena, but the research that there is, in terms of placement stability, shows that family and friends care tends to offer more robust placements in the main because the carer will put up with more than most people would be able to out of a sense of love.

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Family Rights Group, Grandparents Plus, and The Who Cares? Trust—Oral evidence (QQ 668693) Q679 The Chairman: In terms of research, you have obviously seen it, have you? Is it out yet? Cathy Ashley: They have not yet published, even initially, but I am on the advisory group, so we have had early indications. It is not out until the spring, but it is Julie Selwyn and Elaine Farmer who are the academics involved and you might want to talk to them in relation to— The Chairman: That is okay, because Julie Selwyn is coming to us next week. Cathy Ashley: That will be timely then. Sarah Wellard: I have a couple of points to add, if I may. One is to bear in mind that when children are in family and friends and kinship care, they are very often usually living with people who they already have close loving relationships with. Very often it is the child’s choice. They want to live with grandmother. They want to live with auntie. It is a choice they are actively making. We know that placing children with strangers can be very traumatic. I know it is something Julie Selwyn’s research has highlighted. The impact on children’s mental health of those placement moves is minimised in family and friends care. The children may be very damaged and vulnerable by what they have experienced with their birth parents, but that subsequent impact of moves is then minimised for them. Another point I want to add is that research from Joan Hunt—which was done for the Family Rights Group earlier this year—shows a very high level of problems that children often have at placement but how they settle down very rapidly, and improve, despite the lack of support often that their carers have, as Cathy has said. Q680 Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top: I want to ask whether you think the current emphasis on adoption is undermining the push for alternative placements that also offer permanency. Do you think that we should be looking for adoption for those who we know cannot return to their birth family? Are we in danger of creating this false hierarchy? Natasha Finlayson: There is definitely a big danger of creating a false hierarchy. That is implicit in a lot of the policy-making, a lot of the public discourse and rhetoric that is around at the moment. I think even the draft legislation implies a hierarchy of sorts, because in the permanence provisions it sets out, first, the child to live with any parent or the child to live with any other member or friend of the child’s family; secondly, adoption; and, thirdly, longterm care. Adoption is the placement of preference. That is made very clear in the draft legislation. I think we would be concerned if it were to remain like that. In policy-making there has been less emphasis on sorting out the issues around fostering and around children’s homes. There was a lot of activity in the last few months, which my charity were very much involved with, around children’s homes, and that is very welcome. The issues around children’s homes are profound, deep-seated, interlinked and complex, and they need a huge amount of policy attention and resource, and looking at who that workforce is, how they are remunerated and how we get lots more fantastic people working in children’s homes. I worry that the attention that has been focused on adoption is taking away from sorting out those other placement types, which will be where the majority of children in care are placed. The vast majority of children in care will be in fostering and then around about 20% will be in children’s homes. Adoption is only ever going to be the answer for a small minority of children in care. I do not think that is going to change, and 75% of children in care are over the age of five and of those over the age of five, over half are over the age of 10. I know that you will know these figures about the care 547

Family Rights Group, Grandparents Plus, and The Who Cares? Trust—Oral evidence (QQ 668693) population but I think the public is not being helped to understand that. I think that the public still have an image of adoption as being of tiny voluntarily relinquished babies, and they do not understand the complexity of who these children from the care population are. Cathy Ashley: Can I very quickly throw in two other points? One is that the research that we have undertaken with the University of Oxford has shown that, in terms of children in family and friends care, the adversities they experience are no less than those who are in the care population and yet the support they receive is significantly less. The second is around reunification. I know, in terms of return to parents, considerably less attention has been paid to that and yet a child is much more likely to be returned to their parents from the care system than ending up being adopted. We do think that there is scope for regulation, in terms of ensuring that local authorities do put in place proper support planning and monitoring when children return home. We know that is particularly poor in relation to voluntary accommodated children. The third is that there is a care inquiry that a number of voluntary organisations have set up specifically to look at the evidence around each different form of permanence. There will be a meeting with parliamentarians in December to report on findings to date. What needs to be considered is the right solution for each child. There is a real danger of assuming that one is more preferable than the other, when it is entirely dependent on the individual child’s circumstances. Q681 The Chairman: Let me just move you on to the proposed legislation. There are two bits of legislation. The one I want to ask you about is what is called nowadays “fostering for adoption”. Of course the Government has produced three subsections, which they seem to think are going to compel the local authority to place more frequently with respect to foster parents who will be prospective adopters. If you read them, they do not have any compelling element at all as far as I can see. What is your view about the Government policy and whether they are likely to be implementing it from this proposed legislation? Bridget Lindley: We have policy concerns and then legal concerns about the actual drafting. I will start with the policy concerns. First of all, it is not the same thing as concurrent planning, as practised by Coram and with the evidence that comes from that. It is due to apply once a decision has been made that the child should be adopted. That is a decision from the local authority. It is not a decision from the court. The work of the local authorities to return the child home simply will not be happening in the same way, so the focus is different. Secondly, the support that is involved in the Coram concurrent planning model is very intensive and very effective. Effectively adopters are being asked to do an extremely difficult job, which is to support a return home when they are privately hoping that they will adopt the child. It is a virtually impossible task, and to do it without intensive support would be completely unrealistic. I do not think this is a model that is in any way looking to return children home. It is simply about trying to achieve an early placement with adopters without going through the court process. That seems to me how it is addressed. I think in policy terms it is flawed, because there are already insufficient adopters to adopt the children who are already subject to a placement order. With record levels of care proceedings and the increase in the number of looked-after children, if this policy is going to produce more

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Family Rights Group, Grandparents Plus, and The Who Cares? Trust—Oral evidence (QQ 668693) children waiting for adoption there simply are not the adopters available. It is going to leave more children in limbo, so I think that is complicated. It is also going to deter adopters as a policy, because they are being asked to do something very difficult. Without intensive support it will be very hard, particularly if they have their own children. What are the expectations within that family if this child is joining, is not joining, may go back or may not? It is difficult and it will be a deterrent. It will be extremely difficult for them to manage the contact arrangements, where the child should still be having contact with their birth family because, in theory, they could still return, because, in theory, there is still a court process to go through so that contact should still be happening. The foster care/adoptive parent is being asked to support that, again, with the same conflict in their own minds about whether or not this child is here to stay as part of the family long-term. It is probably going to be vulnerable to challenge under the Human Rights Act, because it appears to pre-empt the court’s decision. We need to go back to the history of the Adoption and Children Act—when that was in draft Bill stage and out for consultation—and look at what it was trying to achieve. The point of the placement order, which was a new provision in that Bill, which was subsequently enacted, was to ensure that the real contest between the birth parent or the birth family and the local authority about whether or not the child was going to return home, or should go for adoption, was going to be had before the child was placed. That was the point of the placement order. What was happening prior to that was that children had been placed for adoption because specific authority from the court to place was not required. Children were placed and, by the time the adoption hearing came along, they had been living with their adopter for a year or two. It was recognised that it was totally unfair on the birth family to be arguing against an adoption where in their own minds they probably had dilemmas because they knew the child had been placed for some time. The placement order was meant to be a much more honest, upfront opportunity to challenge the issues before the placement took place. That came into force in December 2005. It has not even been in for seven years, and what is now happening is a total unravelling, but without it being acknowledged that that is what is happening. There is now a proposal that the local authority should make a decision that a child ought to be adopted without any external scrutiny whatsoever. That could be for any looked-after child. It will include children who are voluntarily accommodated and children who have a temporary EPO or an ICO on them or possibly a full care order––but that is unlikely the way it is phrased. If there has been a decision by the agency decision-maker—who will have looked at the social work permanence report and perhaps a couple of other professional reports only—that adoption is the plan, then they can place those children according to the way clauses 9A, B and C are drafted. That is very worrying, in terms of the long-term impact, because once placement happens the child naturally forms attachments. They are becoming established in that family. The chances of a court ever unravelling that are later virtually nil and that is exactly why the placement order was brought in in the first place, to try to have a more honest challenge. We now appear to be reversing back to the old position. We have now lost the panel of scrutiny, because adoption panels used to look at whether or not a child ought to be placed for adoption, whether that was the right plan. That has gone from September of this year. Effectively, a child can be taken into care under an EPO, an interim care order or by voluntary accommodation. The local authority can make a

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Family Rights Group, Grandparents Plus, and The Who Cares? Trust—Oral evidence (QQ 668693) decision the child ought to be adopted, and place them, and then the court is meant to deal with it afterwards. Because of the way that the dispensing with consent is framed, in relation to the Adoption and Child Act, if the child’s welfare requires consent for the parents to be dispensed with, which will almost certainly be the case, because they will by then have formed attachments, the status quo argument will win. So I am really very concerned about it. It is putting adopters under a lot of pressure. It is extremely unfair on birth families and, above all, it is denying the child the right to have their family life looked at as to whether or not this is a realistic possibility. All we can say is there are things that need to be tightened up about this clause, and there are also those pre-proceedings bits that need to happen to make sure that the family work is done as early as possible. Nobody is asking to extend the time period to cause harmful delay. We all agree that early permanence should be achieved wherever possible, but I think there are real problems about how this is phrased. Not least there is the voluntary accommodation point–– that a child could be placed for adoption on the basis of a parent asking for the state to look after their child for a period of time. That is in England I have to say. In Wales it will not apply. Perhaps people should only place their child in voluntary accommodation in Wales? That might be one solution! Q682 Baroness Walmsley: Bridget, do you have similar concerns about the Coram model? Bridget Lindley: Less so, because in fact the theory behind the Coram model is that they will have explored all possible family options before the child is approved for a Coram placement and the Coram placement will still work towards rehabilitation with very extensive support for the adopters to make that more realistic and achievable. On the one hand, one would like to have clarity and have everything sorted through the court process, but I recognise that they do offer something. They have been very thorough about checking––I have spoken to them specifically about it––to make sure that their model is intact as I think it is. Firstly, they will have done the family work to check the options; and secondly, there is this intensive support to help the adopters to support a return home. I think they returned two out of a cohort of about 50. It is a very small number, but the reason for that is because in all cases they have taken them on only because it looks like there is no chance of the child returning home. The Chairman: I think we need to move on. Q683 Baroness Morris of Bolton: Can we move on to contact? I wonder how contact is typically managed in kinship placements. Does it pose particular challenges and how do they differ from foster placement and adoption contact? Sarah Wellard: First of all, one of the huge strengths of kinship care is that it enables children to remain in the heart of their family. Even if they have little or have difficult contact with birth parents, they will have contact with aunts and uncles, grandparents, cousins, so they are still very much in their family. In most cases kinship carers are left to manage contact on their own, with very little support from the local authority. We know that in about a third of cases where carers are in touch with either parent, the relationship is difficult, but in a similar proportion the relationship is good. There is just a massive range. On the one hand you have kinship carers who are actively supporting the parent. We particularly see that where the parent perhaps had mental health issues or learning difficulties. If

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Family Rights Group, Grandparents Plus, and The Who Cares? Trust—Oral evidence (QQ 668693) the carer who is raising the child is the grandparent they are supporting the adult child and they are raising the grandchild. They may also be doing that where the parent is on rehab. We also see cases where contact is extremely difficult and extremely stressful, where kinship carers need support from the local authority but do not get it. They may be expected to manage perhaps quite a violent parent without support. We have seen cases where grandparents have had to take injunctions out against their own children and social services are not interested in getting involved. There may also be cases where there are fears that the child is being abused when they are spending time with parents. There has been no expectation that the contact is supervised by the kinship carer, but the grandparent then feels that Children’s Services are not taking that seriously. It is a whole range, and the challenge is the need for more support, where it is problematic, which needs to be forthcoming from the local authority. Q684 Baroness Morris of Bolton: Given that they manage it themselves—and picking up on what Cathy said earlier that sometimes fathers in families when they are being considered and the wider family are excluded—is it sometimes one-sided? Do you tend to find with managing themselves that one side of the family will be excluded? Sarah Wellard: That is not really the issue, no. I think it is about where there has been a difficult history of relationships. It is not uncommon for us to see cases of where it is a paternal grandparent, who is working very hard to maintain the relationship with the mother of the child they are caring for. Cathy Ashley: Some of them seem to be better than the state in terms of getting that balance right. We did some research recently around contact, and they are more likely to have contact with the other side of the family in a kinship relationship than they are in relation to a state placement. Q685 Lord Warner: What do you consider are the relevant criteria for establishing and maintaining contact with birth families post-adoption? Is there a tension between the desire of the birth parents to maintain contact and the best interests of the child? Do you have any concerns about the role of social media in enabling unsolicited or unsupported contact? Cathy Ashley: I have spoken to Beth Neil, and again I do not know whether the Committee has looked at the work of the University of East Anglia, which has done a lot in relation to post-adoption contact. Again, it depends on the circumstances. It depends on the reasons why the birth relatives want to stay in contact. It depends on the child’s wishes and feelings. It depends on whether the adopters are in a state where they feel able to support that contact. It also depends on whether you are talking about contact with a birth relative who was responsible, for example, for abuse or whether what you are talking about is the wider network. The research that has taken place shows that it is certainly not detrimental to the children. It can be a positive experience, but it has to be dependent on the individual circumstances. There are good practice guidelines out there in relation to how to work with families on contact post-adoption. There is variation, but often very little support for birth parents post-adoption. Again I know you have had Lynn Charlton speaking to the Committee about this, but I would emphasise that I think when birth parents have not been supported to come to terms with what has happened: first, there is a chance that those birth parents, in terms of the emotional state they are in, will go on to have more children in order to fill that emotional gap rather than actually address the problems that led to the adoption in the first

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Family Rights Group, Grandparents Plus, and The Who Cares? Trust—Oral evidence (QQ 668693) place; and, secondly, their ability to support contact will be much harder. The other thing to raise is that we know that post box contact is extremely difficult. Again, there are issues around literacy, there are issues around support, particularly as time goes by, and I do think that more work could be taking place with birth parents to support how to facilitate that. In answer to your last question around social media, I know it was asked earlier and I agree with the response. It is going to happen, particularly if it has not been talked about and children have been told not to have contact with their birth families. It is natural curiosity; it is out there. We all do it. We all Google people we are interested in. How could you not in relation to members of your birth family? In some cases that is absolutely fine, in terms of children just doing it as an observation. Sometimes they never actually get in contact. Where it is particularly problematic is where they do it and it is unarranged. It tends to be rare—in terms of research—that it is prompted by the birth family rather than by the children, but— Natasha Finlayson: Can I add something? We did a large consultation. Again, we have looked into children and children who have been adopted and their experiences of contact. We were really shocked to find that 45% of the children had gone against the court ordered arrangements and had contact with the birth family without permission. By coincidence, around about 45% of birth families where there was no court ordered contact arrangements had contacted a young person directly as well. Obviously, you will not be surprised that a large proportion of that was done through social networking, because it is so easy to find people and to stay in touch with people. I think Cathy is absolutely right that if more very skilled work was done with both young people and birth families to understand why contact decisions have been made people would be able to accept them more. No one is ever going to accept it entirely. There will always be unsupervised contact, but you could minimise it, and therefore minimise the risks to young people of unsupervised contact, if people were helped to understand why those arrangements had been made and why it has been felt to be in the best interests of the child. Q686 Lord Warner: Is there any evidence, though, that that does any harm? You cited large numbers there, but what is the evidence that anything adverse happens to the children? Natasha Finlayson: No, I am not sure—well, there must be some. Cathy Ashley: Beth Neil’s research shows that if completely unplanned—and again sometimes it was with cousins; it was not necessarily birth parents that they were making contact—it could have a detrimental effect. Natasha Finlayson: If the court has ordered no contact with birth parents it has to be fairly sure that the birth parents are going to behave in a sexually, physically or emotionally abusive way to the young person that he or she would be at risk of serious harm. Yes, there are a lot of assumptions being made, but I think it is reasonable to assume that that would not be safe and in the child’s best interests. It would be interesting to know if there has been research about that. Cathy Ashley: It is not only about safety; it is also about the child being emotionally able to deal with the response. For example, the birth parent may not respond in the way that that child was hoping for. It is a number of factors, which is why we know that work on preparation for contact is important so that people are able to adjust to possible rejection. These children

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Family Rights Group, Grandparents Plus, and The Who Cares? Trust—Oral evidence (QQ 668693) in their own minds will have felt rejected once so they need to be prepared for the idea of being rejected again. The key thing is about openness, preparation and support so people are prepared. Q687 The Chairman: This is usually rather later on, is it not? It is not just after the child is adopted. It very often happens when the child is a teenager and then starts to find out, having perhaps been adopted five or 10 years before. Cathy Ashley: Yes. Q688 Baroness Hamwee: Can we turn to post-placement support? You have commented on quantity of support. I would like to understand about the kind of support you think is needed by both birth families after a child has been removed, and by kinship carers, and in their case how that differs from what adopted parents might need. Cathy Ashley: In terms of birth parents, if the support is very variable when the child is still with them then I do not think it takes much imagination to envisage what will happen when the child ceases to be with them. Obviously you have two or three scenarios in relation to whether the child is ever likely to come back with them. Whether there is contact or whether we are talking about an adoption situation, each is different. I would like to emphasise again the question of reunification, because many of these children will end up returning home at some point. If the work is not done, not just with the child—although that is important—but with the families, the very problems that led those children to enter into the care system in the first place are going to return. That is what the research is showing. It does need proper planning, it does need proper systems and it does need proper support. At the moment, particularly for section 20 children, that work is extremely patchy. In relation to family and friends care I am going to hand over. Sarah Wellard: The research indicates though that most kinship carers get little or no support from the local authority. Around a third get some financial help. There is no relationship between the support that a kinship care family receives and the children’s needs. Instead the support is generally linked to the legal order, so that children who are looked-after children, where the placement is a family or friend foster care placement, get the best support. Some of those with special guardianships may get support. Many of them do not. Those who have a residence order are the least likely to get support, as indeed are those who have no legal order. The statutory guidance from the Government says that support should be based on the children’s need, but that is very clearly not happening at the moment. Kinship carers have enormous support needs. We should bear in mind they are often looking after children who are more vulnerable than children who are adopted. They may move to the kinship carer as babies, but they often move later on in childhood having experienced multiple difficulties at home. They are vulnerable, quite damaged children. It means that kinship carers are likely to need benefits advice as well as legal advice at placement, which 70% do not get. They may need emotional support and they may need support around employment. A very high proportion give up work when they take on the care of a child. They have no entitlement to leave, unlike adoptive parents. They need help with looking after the children, because of the children’s high level of emotional and behavioural difficulties, and they may need help with managing contact.

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Family Rights Group, Grandparents Plus, and The Who Cares? Trust—Oral evidence (QQ 668693) Very regrettably, in most cases that help is not forthcoming. We asked a sample of kinship carers whether they had asked for help. We found that 68% of those who had asked for help did not get what they needed. Q689 Baroness Hamwee: Are there any examples of good practice in this area that you can point us to or is it variable within each area? Cathy Ashley: It is variable in each area, and one of the requirements of the guidance, which applies only to England, is that local authorities produce a family and friends care policy. We are now 13 months after the deadline by which they should have produced a policy, and 36% still have not. With those that have, it varies. You do get some where they have a kinship care team, where there is effective training, and where there are support groups, not just for kinship foster carers, which are only a small minority of kinship carers. What I would say is that our child welfare systems are not set up to support children in family and friends care so you end up with a distortion. The other day we dealt with a case where the children had been sexually abused and the grandmother was taking on children she had not seen for 12 years. As she was dealing with them it became more and more clear that there had been serious sexual abuse. She had her own 11-year-old son. There was no support from the local authority taking place. How is an ordinary grandparent expected to deal with a severely traumatised child in that situation? The danger is that we are in a situation where—especially with the sense of the erosion of discretionary support—it is going to be harder to get legal aid. It is going to be harder to get welfare benefits. The benefits cap is going to apply to family and friends carers outside looked-after children. You are pushing family and friends carers into the care system as the only route that they can be guaranteed support and financial support for those children. We do need to step back and think, “What is the right framework for children in family and friends care, including both financial and practical support?” so that where children can live with their relatives they are not pushed into the care system, but they are given the opportunity to be able to thrive. Q690 Baroness Hamwee: Can I ask one final question on that? Are you aware of occasions when social workers have taken a decision as to which direction to go influenced by knowing what support might be available? Sarah Wellard: That happens all the time. It seems that the primary thing often driving the decisions is avoidance of long-term financial commitment to carers. I would not like to say there is no good practice out there––clearly there is––where social workers recognise that families are going to need a high level of support. Time and time again we see cases where families have high support needs, they may have an expectation, and they may have been led to believe that they would get support, but they end up with a residence order and no support. Cathy Ashley: The truth is that the least able, the most vulnerable and the least articulate are the least likely to be the ones to get the help they need. The Chairman: We are coming up to 12.30 and both Lady Knight and Lord Warner want to ask questions, so perhaps both the questions and the answers could be short. Q691 Baroness Knight of Collingtree: Very briefly, you mentioned the sexual abuse of children, which occasionally happens. Is there some way in which a child can complain to

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Family Rights Group, Grandparents Plus, and The Who Cares? Trust—Oral evidence (QQ 668693) anyone if that is happening? When you talk about the needs of children—we are dealing with older children here—are their wants also part of what you call the needs? Cathy Ashley: Have we heard anything about children’s wants and needs? The answer is yes. Baroness Knight of Collingtree: An assessment of their needs should include— Cathy Ashley: Do you mean sexual abuse within kinship care? Baroness Knight of Collingtree: Yes. Cathy Ashley: This was a case of sexual abuse when the child was living with the parents. It had not been properly explored and disclosed. It came out when the child was in a safe placement; that is, with their grandparents. In terms of children feeling safe to disclose, they need to feel, first, that action will be taken, and, secondly, that they will be believed. Q692 The Chairman: Across the country, in almost every organisation, is there not now a protocol of helping children to know who it is they can speak to and that they will be listened to and so on? This is a regular thing. Sarah Wellard: In terms of your point about children’s wants and needs, I am talking about children who are emotionally damaged where some of the needs may be around counselling support. They may be around help for the grandparents or other family relative who is raising them and dealing with a very difficult child. They may have a wealth of parenting experience, but they have not raised a child before who has been sexually abused by parents, who has been neglected by drug abusing parents, or who is in some other way damaged. We are talking about those kinds of needs. Natasha Finlayson: When you consider it relative to the support and training that foster carers would get in order to be able to manage the complex and challenging behaviour that some of these young people have as a result of what happened to them before care, or to support them on the educational journey, there is no comparison at all with the support and advice that family and friends carers are getting. Cathy Ashley: One of the really essential things that all local authorities could do would be at least to have support groups for all family and friends carers, regardless of legal status. When you speak to local authorities they offer something for family and friends foster carers but, as soon as you start talking about the wider group, it just does not fall within their orbit. They are thinking through in relation to legal orders and not thinking in relation to the children’s needs in the wider sense. Q693 Lord Warner: I am just a bit puzzled. A quick question. If you have three to four times the number of people in kinship care as you have looked-after children, and the kinship carers are badly supported, you would expect as a hypothesis that a significant number of those arrangements would break down and the children would come back into care. What is the evidence on that? Cathy Ashley: The answer is that we do not know. As I say, the research that was done by Farmer and Moyers, and to some extent by Joan Hunt, is that those carers will go far beyond where you would expect a human to go to try to keep those children safe and with them. In some cases they do break down but they go to other family members. There are no official

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Family Rights Group, Grandparents Plus, and The Who Cares? Trust—Oral evidence (QQ 668693) statistics recording which children are in family and friends care, or tracking their progress. There is the recent analysis of census data for 2001 of family carers, that was recently published but there is no other detailed official data. What we know is that those children could be doing better. The research out there shows that in the main their outcomes are better than those in unrelated foster care, but it is not because of state support but because carers are going well beyond what you could expect. The Chairman: We are going to have to stop it there. We have put you through the mill for well over an hour, and we are extremely grateful to you. There were three points that I thought you might like to send us some additional written evidence on. One of them is on your pre-court proceedings protocol. In fact you have given us quite a lot about the family group conferences, but if you have anything else that you want to tell us about––indeed, what you think a protocol should be. Cathy Ashley: The contents, perhaps. The Chairman: Exactly, the contents of a pre-court proceedings protocol. The second is anything that any of you would like to say about how you see local authorities providing some sort of support group for kinship carers. The third is if there is a local authority out there, or several, which is doing a good job in helping with these groups then perhaps you would let us know, because we might then go to it and say, “What is it that you are providing that we might encourage other local authorities to follow?” If you have local authorities doing good work, will you let us know? For the moment, we have to bring this to a close and we are extremely grateful to you all for your help.

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Family Rights Group—Supplementary written evidence

Family Rights Group—Supplementary written evidence Proposal for a pre-proceedings protocol 1. Introduction: Following an oral evidence session on 13th November 2012, the House of Lords Select Committee on Adoption asked Family Rights Group to provide further details of a proposed pre-proceedings protocol. The intention of such a protocol is to ensure families are effectively engaged prior to care proceedings, in order to avert unnecessary proceedings, and to identify wider family members who may wish to care for a child much earlier in the process. 2. Why is a pre-proceedings protocol needed? 2.1 The record rise in the number of child protection referrals, care proceedings and looked after children combined with an increasing shortage of foster carers and adopters means that safe family placements are essential to achieving permanence for a large proportion of children at risk of harm. Such placements include: a. return home to either of the parents where the safeguarding concerns have been addressed and/or b. placement with relatives or friends who may be willing to offer short or long term/permanent care. 2.2 Enabling children to live safely within their family network is consistent with the child’s right to respect for family57 and also results in positive outcomes for the children involved. Research58 shows, for example, that in comparison to children in unrelated foster care, children in family and friends care are as safe59, and are doing as well if not better in relation to their health, school attendance and performance, self-esteem and social and personal relationships. Moreover, there is a marked improvement in their emotional health and behaviour following placement and their carers are more likely to match their ethnicity and be highly committed to them, leading to more stable placements. This is despite these children suffering from similar adversities to children in the care system and their carers often having multiple problems of their own including severe financial hardship and isolation yet receiving little or no support.60

European Convention on Human Rights (Article 8). Farmer E and Moyers S (2008) Kinship Care: Fostering Effective Family and Friends Placements (Jessica Kingsley); and Hunt, J., Waterhouse, S., and Lutman, E (2008) Keeping them in the Family: Outcomes for children placed in kinship care through care proceedings. London: BAAF 59 This research shows that only 6% of family and friends carers failed to protect the children in their care which is the same figure as for unrelated foster carers 60 Family and friends care arrangements for children who would otherwise be in the care system also result in huge cost savings to the State: it is estimated that the average costs of a child being in care are over £25,000 per year and the average costs to the State of care proceedings are a further £25,000 or more. 57 58

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Family Rights Group—Supplementary written evidence 2.3 However, the introduction of a 26 week time restriction on care proceedings may reduce the chances of children being placed within their family network because time constraints will means that there will be little time to identify and have assessed alternative family placements once care proceedings have started. Moreover the proposed foster for adoption clauses in the Children and Families Bill61 will mean that unless family-based solutions are explored and supported early, there is a serious possibility the child will be settled outside their family network. 2.4 It is therefore essential that families are effectively engaged and supported to address the concerns and draw upon their strengths to identify safe family placements as soon as it becomes clear that their child may be removed from the family. Yet working with families in the pre-proceedings context can be challenging because: 2.4.1

2.4.2

Parents whose children are subject to child protection enquiries are often frightened, angry and overwhelmed by continuous assessments and meetings in which they are under the spot light of a large numbers of professionals. They are often unclear about the totality of the concerns and the reasons for them and many fear that their child may be removed by the local authority and therefore find it difficult to work with the social worker. Many potential family and friends’ carers refrain from offering to care for the child whilst there is still a chance that the parents may be able to raise the child long term. In some cases, this is because they are unaware of the depth or totality of concerns; in others it is because they don’t want to undermine the parents or are fearful of reprisals from the parents if they step forward. Therefore, many wait until there is a finding of fact against the parent(s), before putting themselves forward as alternative carers. Moreover, social workers often focus exclusively on the mother, and do not routinely seek our potential carers in the wider family, particularly paternal relatives, before proceedings start.62

2.5 Current statutory guidance on working with families before care proceedings start can be found in Children Act 1989 Regulations and Guidance Volume 1 Court Orders issued in April 2008, but it is inadequate, outdated and no longer fit for purpose in the context of the forthcoming reforms. The proposed pre-proceedings protocol would replace such guidance and would support local authorities to effectively engage the family before proceedings start by drawing on evidence based practice of what works for families. We suggest that this protocol should be issued under s.7 LASSA which requires local authorities to comply with statutory guidance unless local circumstances indicate exceptional reasons which justify a variation. 2.6 The need for this protocol is particularly acute because the revised safeguarding guidance,63 which is currently being finalised following consultation, proposes to drastically reduce the amount of guidance and regulation supporting child protection practice when there are s.47

These clauses will require local authorities to place children, whom they have decided ought to be placed for adoption, with adopters who are approved as temporary foster carers even though no placement order has yet been made 62 Ibid 63 DfE (2012) Revised Statutory Safeguarding Guidance 61

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Family Rights Group—Supplementary written evidence enquiries, leaving far more to social work discretion. This will result in even wider variations in practice in working with families pre-proceedings. 2.7 It is anticipated that the Modernisation of family justice team under the leadership of Mr Justice Ryder will produce practice guidance for courts on what they should check has been done by local authorities in terms of exploring safe family options for the child before proceedings start. The pre-proceedings protocol would dovetail with, and mirror, this ‘Expectations’ document. 3. Proposed contents of the pre-proceedings protocol for local authorities to maximise family engagement: The following is a suggested list of contents. We would be more than willing to develop this further with relevant stakeholders, following feedback and discussion. a) Context and status of protocol b) Research evidence on the importance of partnership working to support the protocol c) Legal and practice framework including working with families during the child protection and pre-proceedings processes d) Approaches to engaging families to work in partnership including having a voice in planning pre proceedings including: i. Independent specialist advice for all families ii. Independent specialist advocacy from section 47 (child protection) enquiries iii. Family group conferences including offering all families a family group conference before a child become looked after (except in emergencies) iv. Family mediation v. Other good practice innovations e.g. Cafcass pre proceedings pilot e) Good practice in service delivery for families e.g. Westminster’s family recovery project, Hackney’s reclaiming social work model, Strengthening families/signs of safety, Multisystemic Therapy, Family Intervention Projects, intensive family support for children on the edge of care as being offered in Wales, implementation of recommendations from Family Rights Group’s Fathers Matter research on working with fathers & paternal family, f) Family and friends care including: i. Assessment approaches suitable for family members ii. Policies, practice and support (summarising statutory family and friends care guidance requirements) g) Working with parents who may lack mental capacity Best practice examples from local authorities The Department for Education’s Family and Friends Care: Statutory Guidance for Local Authorities issued in 2011 sets out Government expectations for local authorities in terms of working with, and supporting family and friends carers. All authorities should comply with this Guidance, it is regrettable that 14 months after the deadline, over 33% of English local authorities still don’t have a policy as required in Chapter 4: The Local Policy Requirement. However, the following is a

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Family Rights Group—Supplementary written evidence non exhaustive list of examples, drawn from local authorities’ family and friends care policies, which illustrate good practice: Accessible information for family and friends carers It is intended that carers should be able to refer to their local policies, for information about their situation and the options open to them. However, many policies are difficult to locate on council websites, and are written in the style of procedural manuals for staff. Blackburn with Darwen has produced a policy document which is attractively illustrated, and written and laid out so as to make the information in it accessible to non-professionals, and it includes clear information about different legal arrangements for family and friends care: http://www.blackburn.gov.uk/Lists/DownloadableDocuments/Family%20and%20Friends%20Care %20Policy.pdf Consultation It is intended that policies should be based on local consultations with children and young people, family and friends carers and parents. While only a minority of local authorities carried out meaningful consultations, Sunderland City Council’s policy describes a significant consultation exercise: In order to understand first hand the issues facing family and friends carers, two consultation exercises were held on 13 and 19 July 2011. The first was an informal discussion with Sunderland Area Parents Support, and the second was a formal consultation with family and friends carers known to Children’s Social Work Service by way of the specific orders they hold. The formal consultation was also attended by representatives of Sunderland Carers Centre, First Contact Clinical, and representatives from Sunderland City Council who were facilitating the event. Also: In order to incorporate the views of young people a consultation session was carried out on 17 August 2011 with members of the Change Council. The Change Council is Sunderland’s children and young people’s care council and is made up of young people who are in the care of or are leaving the care of the local authority. Some of the members have first hand experience of being cared for by family and friends carers. Management While most councils have identified a manager who will be responsible for family and friends care policy and practice, Bristol’s policy lists important activities that the manager will be responsible for ensuring are carried out: An area services manager has responsibility for this policy to ensure that it is publicised, to monitor its implementation and make sure relevant staff are trained appropriately. In Bristol, there are carers receiving special guardianship, residence order, private fostering, adoption and children in care support and services. The number of these carers and the

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Family Rights Group—Supplementary written evidence children they are caring for is collated regularly and used to inform and plan policies, priorities and the delivery of services to meet their needs. A series of workshops, e-learning tools and information is provided to council staff to ensure the policy is applied across the service. Local partners will be made aware of their responsibilities towards children living in family and friends care and to being proactive in meeting those needs. A quality assurance group, including an area team manager, will be set up and meet regularly, to monitor the implementation of this policy. We will publicise this policy to people considering becoming a family and friends carer so they are aware of its content, and are clear about how to contact the council and other agencies for further information. Information about contacting a social worker is in Appendix Two. Social workers who implement the policy will have appropriate training and understand the issues faced by family and friends carers and their obligations, powers and responsibilities, including the content of this policy, and be competent in this area of work. Positive attitude towards carers’ requests for support Kensington and Chelsea’s policy insists that: Where families do ask for support, the local authority will respond to this positively. Each family is unique and different and an expert on themselves, therefore they need individual support to fit their circumstances. Clarity about financial support Policies are supposed to assist carers with making an informed choice about the legal status they would prefer for them and the children, by informing carers, among other things, about the level of financial support available. A number of policies confirm that local authorities will comply with the legal requirement to pay family and friends carers the same level of fostering allowance that is paid to unrelated foster carers (e.g. Northampton’s policy states: Kinship carers will receive the same relevant payments as any other carers including all the additional allowances). Bristol’s policy provides considerable detail about payments that can be made to children living with family and friends carers outside the care system, i.e. where they are children in need who can be financially supported using section 17 funds: Where a child is cared for informally or in a private fostering arrangement, the council can make ‘Child In Need’ payments under section 17 of the Children Act 1989, providing appropriate assessments indicate this will meet the child’s needs and including an assessment of the financial circumstances of the family. The status of the placement will determine the nature and amount of the financial support and who authorises it. This is a discretionary

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Family Rights Group—Supplementary written evidence payment which will only be considered following the assessment by a social worker. A manager can authorise payments up to an agreed financial limit for a specified time and will confirm this in writing. The payments will be reviewed on a twelve weekly basis. There are three categories of payment: • one-off expenditure such as school uniform or bedroom furniture, if the carer’s financial position requires this, although a full assessment is not carried out. There may be certain conditions e.g. repayment • short term financial support e.g. if a carer takes unpaid time off work or a career break to support children into their new environment. An employer should provide information about any relevant parental leave entitlements • regular payments to enable carers to make adjustments or to continue to care for a child in the longer term. This will be a short term measure for an agreed number of weeks while more permanent arrangements are made These criteria are applied to all payments made under section 17: • the payment is made to safeguard and promote the welfare of the child • a worker is actively involved with the family at least for the duration of the payments • there are no other legitimate sources of finance • payments are paid to the carer, not the parents • the payment would not place any person in a fraudulent position. Support with housing needs Many families become overcrowded when an additional child or children move in with them, as a result of a family and friends care arrangement. Local policies should describe how councils might be able to help carers to address overcrowding by ensuring that housing and social care services work in partnership. Brighton and Hove’s policy addresses this requirement: Family and friends carers may need support with accommodation, as their homes may not be of sufficient capacity to suddenly take on the care of a child or possibly a sibling group of children. Brighton and Hove Council’s Housing Policies recognise the importance of the role performed by family and friends carers. Existing council tenants can be nominated by the children’s social worker to move into Band A, which gives the highest priority to tenants, enabling them to bid for a transfer to larger accommodation. There are set terms and conditions to this process which must be adhered to and cannot be varied. Families who are existing tenants, or eligible for re-housing, are also able to apply for privately rented housing, made available to the council by social landlords. In Brighton and Hove, a Housing Options group made up of social care services and housing staff meets regularly to ensure that the departments work in partnership to support the housing needs which may face family and friends carers across a range of legal circumstances. The child’s social worker or a family’s supervising social worker can refer to this group. Families can be nominated to a priority allocation system of housing.

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Family Rights Group—Supplementary written evidence

Brighton and Hove has the authority under section 17 of the 1989 Children Act to financial support towards accommodation costs where they assess this as the most appropriate way to safeguard and promote a child’s welfare. For housing advice at Brighton & Hove city council you can either email [email protected] or telephone: (01273) 294400 Advice on housing issues can also be provided by the Brighton Housing Trust (contact details provided). Contact Research has consistently showed that children’s contact with their parents and others can be the single most difficult issue facing family and friends care arrangements. It is essential that policies should recognise the potential problems as well as the benefits, and describe how the local authority can promote contact. Durham County Council’s policy describes the council’s approach to contact: Contact with their immediate families is generally a positive experience for children who are not living with their parents, as it can help them to maintain a sense of belonging and identity. Contact arrangements must always be determined by the extent to which they meet the needs of the child. But management of contact may often produce emotional and practical strains on all the parties involved. The placement of the child will, by itself, have altered the dynamics of the family the child has left and the family with whom the child is placed. It can be confusing for the child. The Council has a duty to promote contact for all children in need. If the child is not looked after by the Council there is a duty to promote contact where it is necessary to do so in order to safeguard and promote the child’s welfare. If the child is a looked after child, the Council is under a duty to promote contact unless it is not practicable or consistent with the child’s welfare. The Council will provide information to family and friends carers about local contact centres and family mediation services and how to make the best use of their services. The Council may need to be more actively involved if there may be safeguarding concerns surrounding contact, with support provided for safe contact arrangements. Support based on need not legal status One of the key principles introduced by the Statutory Guidance, which should underpin all family and friends policies, is that support should be provided on the basis of the needs of the child, and not determined merely by legal status. This principle was of significance because of the different levels of entitlement to support that are conferred by differing legal statuses. It means that local authorities should not provide the minimum level of support that a particular

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Family Rights Group—Supplementary written evidence legal status requires them to, but instead should assess what the child needs. The East Riding of Yorkshire’s policy make this statement: We will provide support for any such arrangements based on the assessed needs of the child, not simply on his or her legal status, and will seek to ensure that family and friends carers are provided with support to ensure that children do not become looked after by the local authority, or do not have to remain looked after longer than is needed. November 2012

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Fostering Network—Written evidence

Fostering Network—Written evidence The Fostering Network is the UK’s leading charity for everyone involved in foster care. Our membership comprises over 56,000 foster carers and 379 fostering services. As the voice of foster care we are committed to making life better for fostered children and the families that care for them. We do this by working with our members to share knowledge and best practice, providing services, support and resources, and campaigning for positive changes in foster care at the highest level. The range of permanent care options for looked-after children who cannot remain with their birth families should be reviewed and strengthened at the same time as proposals are considered to speed up and increase adoptions 1. In its white paper An Action Plan for Adoption: Tackling Delay the Department for Education states that “The best possible care involves giving children security, stability and love through their childhood and beyond. There are a range of permanent care options which can do this“.64 The document also states that “The Government is determined to improve services and outcomes for looked after children in all these types of permanent care and we have already made progress”. 65 2. The Fostering Network welcomes these statements, and other similar views expressed by the Government. However, we are concerned that by developing proposals for adoption in isolation from other options for permanent care, the Government is, albeit unintentionally, at risk of conveying the impression that adoption is the most important of the options. We believe that this is potentially damaging to public support for the care system, it is demoralizing for children who remain within it, and does not address the range of their individual needs. 3. Over the past year, a significant amount of general comment has given the impression that adoption is a better option for looked-after children in general. The Fostering Network considers that adoption can be the best option for some children, particularly for some very young children who cannot be reunited with their parents and where their wider family cannot offer them the care they need, and we support efforts to ensure that the process works well. However, we also recognize that adoption will continue to be the preferred option only for a small minority of children in the care system who require permanent care, however successful the Government’s efforts to increase the pool of adopters, facilitate successful matching, and reduce delays. In the year ending 31 March 2011there were 65,520 children in care in England, of whom 3,050 were adopted (or 4.7 per cent).66 Over two thirds of these children were aged between 1 and 4.67 While the low percentage of children adopted might be slightly increased by the targeted actions proposed by the Government, for the vast majority of Department for Education, 2011, An Action Plan for Adoption: Tackling Delay, page 5 para. 3. Ibid. page 6, para. 7 66 Department for Education, 2011, National Statistics on Children Looked-after in England, year ending 31 March 2011. 67 The United Nations Population Division estimated that across the UK in 2005 only 6.6 per cent of children in care were adopted. See United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division, 2009, Child Adoption: Trends and Policies, p.122, Table VII.4 64 65

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Fostering Network—Written evidence looked after children adoption will not be appropriate even if the numbers of adoptive parents were substantially increased. 4. Other options for alternative care within a family setting for children who cannot return to their birth family are residence orders and special guardianship orders (usually involving carers connected to the child), and long-term foster care. The majority of children who cannot return home, and who need stable, long-term carers, remain in foster care.68 In 2011, 60% of children were five or over when they started to be looked after and 43% were 10 or over. A very small proportion of such children might be adopted but the overwhelming majority will neither need nor want to be adopted although they might need a family placement where their foster carers or special guardians can offer permanency. The Government should be concerned with increasing the numbers children who have a permanent placement rather that simply focusing on increasing adoptions. It is important to add that where suitable permanent placement with family and friends carers can be established, this should be the priority, and this may take place under any of the alternative permanency options. 5. Outcomes for children in different types of well-functioning permanent care placements do not appear to differ significantly when the age on placement and pre-care experience of the child is taken into account. Adoptions, like other permanent care arrangements, can and do fail. More research is needed on adoption breakdown. All permanent care options (adoption, long-term fostering, special guardianship, residency orders) can offer a high degree of stability and permanence but none can guarantee it. It is now recognised that adoptive parents, like other families providing permanent care, require additional support. For all options the provision of support, whether financial or professional, is a critical factor. The convergence between the nature of the different permanent care options and resources provided to sustain them does not justify putting such a high priority on adoption. 6. One of the main differences between the permanent care options in terms of their impact on children results from the legal transfer of parental authority and its impact on the possibility of contact with the birth family. Clearly, if contact with particular members of the birth family is damaging to the child then this must be restricted in the child’s best interests. Other than in these circumstances, we believe that the presumption of contact with the birth family is extremely important. Whilst the transfer of parental authority through adoption may make this principle more difficult to enforce, this is not true for the other permanent care options. One drawback relating to the use of the national adoption register is that placements far from the location of the child’s birth family make this more difficult. 69 7. The Government has promised that “We are continuing to look at new ways to improve services for all looked after children including each of the permanent care We recognize that for a small minority of children, placement in families will not be in their best interests and residential care will be the preferred option, where strong attachments may be formed. However, family placement is the focus of this submission. 69 For a discussion of this issue and its relationship to children’s rights please see Nigel Cantwell,2011, Adoption and Children, a human rights perspective, Issue paper, Council of Europe, Part III. 68

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Fostering Network—Written evidence options, and will set out how we intend to tackle these wider issues in a further publication in the summer”. 70 We are looking forward to the publication of these proposals in the coming months. The Fostering Network’s main concerns are as follows: a) That the quality and efficacy of all options for permanent care should be reviewed. We would particularly welcome improvements in long-term foster care. This is essential for achieving better outcomes for the children concerned. b) Legislation and policy impacting on options other than adoption should be considered at the same time to ensure a “joined up” approach. What is more, it is likely that there will be one window only for legislation in the foreseeable future (the proposed Children and Families Bill). c) We fear that a singular emphasis on adoption will inevitably skew the efforts of social work professionals towards adoption at the expense of children for whom this is not the right option. This is particularly likely in the light of the “adoption scorecard”. If there is to be a scorecard we suggest that this should be a permanency scorecard so that local authority actions are measured with the aim of improving performance of all types of long term/permanent care. Long-term foster care 8. We agree with the Government that “For many children, particularly older children with a link to their birth parents, long-term foster care, often with family or friends, is the best permanent care option”.71 Ideally such children should be matched with appropriate long-term foster carers who will make a commitment to the child until the child leaves care (and in many cases the relationship will continue beyond), as a full participant in family life. Yet there is ample evidence that this receives low priority in too many authorities. Despite all that is understood about the importance of stability, the movement of children from one foster carer to another continues to blight the lives of many children in long-term care. The pertinent policy options need to be debated, ranging from the recruitment of suitable long-term foster carers and the support and training they need, to increasing the delegated authority of such carers. The optimal period of reviews of long-term placements should be considered, and whether the system of Independent Reviewing Officers is adequately resourced to support children in such placements. 9. Although a permanence plan should be in place by the time of the child’s second review, our members tell us that for older children, there is often les effort and focus on securing a permanent placement. 10. Currently a significant difficulty exists in the inconsistency with which long term foster care and permanent foster care are defined and how this impacts on the care planning process. Gillian Schofield and Emma Ward in research published in 2008 found that 70 71

Ibid. page 6, para. 8 Ibid. page 5, para.3

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Fostering Network—Written evidence “The most striking finding to emerge from the study was the development across England and Wales of two quite different models or systems for providing permanence in foster care. The majority of local authorities have a single system of foster care described as either long-term foster care (53%) or permanent foster care (8%). But a significant minority (39%) have a dual system of both long-term and permanent foster care, with different policies and planning procedures for each.” 72 These different terminologies come with different sets of expectations and assumptions for different actors, not simply local authorities, and need to be clarified. Because there is no legal change of parental responsibility, and because different local authorities have different definitions and practices under the care planning system, long-term foster care lacks a distinct status. This needs to be resolved. The Fostering Network is calling for the development of a recognised status for permanent foster carers with more authority automatically delegated to them and consideration of whether further changes to regulations and guidance are required to support these permanency arrangements. 11. If long-term foster care is to be a permanent care option, the arrangements for foster carers to continue their relationship with the young person beyond the age of 18 need to be strengthened. The Staying Put scheme is a positive step forward but our members are advising us that in the current economic climate, funding for young people to be able to remain with their foster carers after they are eighteen remains very difficult. Increasingly children in the UK are living longer with their parents. It cannot be right for young people in care, who are often amongst the most vulnerable of young people, to have to leave foster care at an age when many young people are still living with and being supported by their parents. Urgent consideration needs to be given to continuing to support foster carers in circumstances when the young person in care wishes to continue living with their foster carers, at least until they are ready to become independent. Other care options 12. Residence orders and special guardianship have a very important role to play, particularly in relation to family and friends care, but also to foster care. We are aware that major research into special guardianship is underway, and we think it is timely to conduct a thorough review this option which was enacted in 2002. 13. The Fostering Network is aware that a growing number of foster carers apply for special guardianship, but not as many as we would expect or hope for. We believe it can work well, especially as applications for orders occur when children and carers already have an established relationship – either through kinship networks or because the child’s foster carer applies for such an order. For many children this could offer an increased level of stability, and the need for social work intervention is reduced. We believe there are issues of support which need to be resolved. For foster carers, a key step facilitating special guardianship would be the continued payment of foster carers who take on this level of parental responsibility. At present foster carers who obtain special guardianship

Gillian Schofield and Emma Ward, 2008, Permanence in foster care: A study of care planning and practice in England and Wales, BAAF, the Fostering Network, the University of East Anglia, p.17 72

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Fostering Network—Written evidence are not guaranteed, and often do not receive, financial support to care for the child up to the age of 18. 14. There should be more active encouragement for foster carers who may wish to adopt particular looked-after children living with them, where this is in the best interests of the child, and we support proposals to make this process more straightforward. 15. It should be noted that it is very difficult to recruit sufficient foster carers for the most challenging children, as it is with prospective adopters. The main shortages apply to foster carers and adoptive parents for similar groups of children – for example children with severe disabilities, children in large sibling groups, teenagers with severe emotional problems. The emphasis should be on attracting sufficient carers for such children – whether they be in long-term foster care or adoption – and should not be focused on attracting adopters per se. Matching with an appropriate family able to provide longterm care must be the priority, rather than the parental status. Legal proceedings 16. The proposal to reduce care proceedings to 6 months will have a massive impact on children’s services. We believe it is in the interests of all children subject to care proceedings that the timescale should be as short as possible. However, we have doubts about making placement orders simultaneously, because a higher threshold of evidence is required. We are concerned that many children’s services departments may be inadequately resourced to work to the proposed timescale. To make it function well, more information may have to be processed before care proceedings are commenced. We urge the Government to review the resourcing of children’s services departments, and to increase funding if necessary, to meet this challenge. The quality of decisionmaking must be a priority. 17. In its document “An action plan for adoption: tackling delay” the complexities of intervention and decision-making are minimised, particularly before the decision is reached that the child should be adopted. For example, the social workers’ responsibility to aim to support the birth family to stay together will frequently involve interventions which need time to take effect. Similarly, if the child cannot remain with the birth parents, the search for family and friends carers again requires due process. The Government is right to challenge bureaucratic delays, slow court procedures, poor case management, poor training and supervision of social workers. It will take time for the Government’s efforts to tackle these issues to have significant impact. These avoidable delays should not be conflated with the importance of due process. 18. In Scotland a new legal disposal, a Permanence Order, was introduced in 2007, to apply in cases where there is no prospect of the child ever being retuned to the birth parents. This can be made with ancillary provisions such as adoption. In new proposals from the Scottish Government currently being consulted on, this Order is being retained and built on. It could be argued that in England and Wales there is no legal scrutiny of the decision that it will not be possible in the future to return the child to the care of the birth parents. Currently the decision that a child cannot be returned to the parents falls within care planning procedures, and must be addressed by the second review.

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Fostering Network—Written evidence However, the presumption that the child can never be returned home is not always clear in cases where the local authority retains full parental authority. Yet this decision is the gateway to consideration of all permanence options. The lack of clarity is reflected in the deficit of arrangements for long-term foster care, which were examined above. We suggest that the Scottish experience warrants further examination, although we do not have sufficient evidence to make specific recommendations in relation to England and Wales. Conclusion 19. In conclusion, the Fostering Network takes the view that decisions on the most appropriate permanent placement must be determined by the needs of the individual child and not by a preference for any specific type of the legal order. All of the lookedafter children who need a permanent care placement, in circumstances where there is no prospect of a return to their birth parents, should be matched with long-term carers with a minimum of delay. Where possible, care by family and friends should be a priority. Placement decisions are complex. We suggest consideration should be given to the experience of the Permanence Order in Scotland. 20. The majority of children who need a permanent family placement outside their birth families are in the care system and living with foster carers. This requires concerted action to develop an agreed status for permanent foster carers which will provide them and the children they foster with the support they need. Our aspiration is that the family relationships engendered by these placements should continue into adult life. 21. Arrangements for supporting special guardians need to be developed in tandem with arrangements for improving adoption support and there needs to be a consideration of the arrangements for financial support to such arrangements to increase take up from foster carers. July 2012

570

Charles Geekie QC—Written evidence

Charles Geekie QC—Written evidence This submission is prepared by Charles Geekie QC. I am a barrister practising family law at 1, Garden Court, Temple, London EC4. I also sit as a Family Recorder hearing public law and private law children’s cases. The comments below are my personal views. I wish to address three areas raised in the Call for Evidence questions: i) Special Guardianship; ii) Time taken in placing children; iii) Placement orders Special Guardianship 1. I believe that the way in which special guardianship has worked in practice has proved to be a lost opportunity. It was intended that special guardianship orders (SGOs) should, in appropriate cases, be a strong alternative to adoption. They have not proved to be so. The scheme of SGOs is capable of being redeemed to full use by amending legislation. 2. I propose to look at the history of SGOs, the case law dealing with the implementation of the legislation and to suggest how the law could be amended. 3. Special guardianship was first introduced as a concept by the White Paper published in December 2000, Adoption: A New Approach, Cm 5017. The paper recognised that there would be cases where adoption may not be appropriate for a child that could not return home. Specific examples of possible cases were given: an older child who did not want to be legally separated from his parents, children being adopted by the wider birth family and children from ethnic minority communities with religious or cultural objections to adoption. Special guardianship was intended, as stated by the White Paper, to secure permanence, to bring clarity to the exercise of parental responsibility and to provide a firm foundation on which to build a lifelong permanent relationship between the carer and the child. 4. Centre place in the legal provisions intended to secure the outcomes explained in the White Paper were, what were to become, sections 14C(1)(b) and 14D(5) of the Children Act 1989. The first of these provided that the special guardian was vested with a “trump” parental responsibility: the special guardian could exercise parental responsibility “to the exclusion of” other PR holders. The second provision required that any parent or former carer seeking to set aside the special guardianship order would require the leave of the court to do so, such leave not to be given unless the parent could show “a significant change in circumstances” since the making of the order. 5. One of the first reported cases on these new provisions was the decision of Hedley J in S v B and Newport City Council; Re K [2007] 1 FLR 1116. In this case the judge made a 571

Charles Geekie QC—Written evidence SGO in favour of the grandparents of a six year old child. He expressed his concern that an adoption order would “significantly skew otherwise perfectly comprehensible and not unusual family relationships and structures”. He considered the case to be one for which special guardianship was “specifically designed”. 6. On 6th February 2007 the Court of Appeal gave judgment in two different cases: Re AJ (Adoption Order or Special Guardianship Order) [2007] EWCA Civ 55, [2007] 1 FLR 507 and Re S (Adoption Order or Special Guardianship Order) [2007] EWCA Civ 54, [2007] 1 FLR 819. Between them, these two cases took a far more restrictive approach to special guardianship. As the lead Court of Appeal authorities on the subject they have set the tone for the adoption v SGO debate (so far as court proceedings are concerned) ever since. The cases set out the key legal differences between the two orders (see the schedule attached to the end of the first case). 7. The cases emphasised the insecurity of special guardianship, particularly that the change of circumstances provision applied only to applications to vary or discharge the order, not, for instance, to an application for contact. The court down played the “skewing of family relations” argument. Most surprisingly of all neither court said anything about the way in which the “significant change of circumstances” barrier should be applied. The contrast between the lack of value attributed to the word “significant” in SGO cases and in section 31 of the Children Act 1989 (“significant harm”) is striking. 8. In Re S the court analysed with care the provisions requiring a party to obtain the leave of the court before making an application for a section 8 order. The court concluded that, apart from in the case of a residence order, a natural parent did not require leave to apply for a section 8 order. As a result, the court concluded that “special guardianship does not always provide the same permanency of protection as adoption” (see paragraphs 62-68 of the judgment). 9. I suggest that it is clear from the White Paper that it was intended that SGOs should be used to secure placements for children in the type of case (and other, as appropriate) identified in the paper. Case law has revealed that there are weaknesses in the statutory scheme. This has resulted in adoption being selected as the appropriate order in cases in which it might have been hoped special guardianship should be used. The SGO scheme is capable of being strengthened by imposing further limits upon section 8 applications. The courts have chosen not to imbue the word “significant” in the change of circumstances test with any particular strength. This could be re-visited by amending the statutory formulation. Time taken to place children 10. In September this year, following the recommendations of the Family Justice Review, amendments to the functions of adoption panels will come into effect. The changed arrangements will remove the need for the local authority to take cases to panel before issuing placement orders. These amendments are to be welcomed. The panel process

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Charles Geekie QC—Written evidence had become cumbersome and caused delay in proceedings. The amendments are a good example of streamlining procedures in order to make the legal process more efficient and child focused. Placement Orders 11. I wish to make brief comment about placement orders. 12. I believe that placement orders have made a valuable contribution to the adoption process. In many cases the placement order application is heard immediately following the care proceedings. (Very often, if it is not, it is a result of the problems identified in the heading above.) For parents, this means that they only have to face one difficult set of proceedings. For children, this means that all the important judicial decisions are being made as quickly as possible. For adopters, this means that they can be approached by family finder knowing that all the legal hurdles have been cleared. 13. The system works well when arrangements can be made for applications for placement orders to be heard immediately following the hearing of the care proceedings. 19 July 2012

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Grandparents Plus, Family Rights Group, and The Who Cares? Trust—Oral evidence (QQ 668693)

Grandparents Plus, Family Rights Group, and The Who Cares? Trust— Oral evidence (QQ 668-693) Transcript to be found under Family Rights Group

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Councillor Nicola Greene, Councillor Rita Krishna, and Councillor David Simmonds— Oral evidence (QQ 275–308)

Councillor Nicola Greene, Councillor Rita Krishna, and Councillor David Simmonds— Oral evidence (QQ 275–308) Transcript to be found under Councillor David Simmonds

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Her Honour Judge Hindley, Lord Justice McFarlane, Mr Justice Ryder, and Her Honour Judge Swindells—Oral evidence (QQ 770–804)

Her Honour Judge Hindley, Lord Justice McFarlane, Mr Justice Ryder, and Her Honour Judge Swindells—Oral evidence (QQ 770–804) Transcript to be found under Lord Justice McFarlane

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Collette Anne Ibbotson, Director of Yorkshire Adoption Agency—Written evidence

Collette Anne Ibbotson, Director of Yorkshire Adoption Agency— Written evidence Submitted on a Personal Basis Legislation a.

The implementation of the 2002 Act was beneficial as it simplified the position of non married couples who wish to adopt. Birth parents retaining some Parental Responsibility with the Local Authority and the Prospective Adopters has not been a significant problem.

d.

It would be beneficial for Adoption Agencies to complete background checks and obtain references on applicants, eg: in terms of health, offences, so that any potential difficulties are addressed before an application is accepted. This would give Agencies the opportunity to counsel out unsuitable applicants and to refuse to accept applications. This would save time, Agency resources and money as at present if an applicant is deemed to be unsuitable after an application is accepted he/she has recourse to the Independent Review Mechanism which for an Agency is both costly and time consuming.

Time taken in Placing Children b.

Care Proceedings can take an inordinate length of time as Courts focus heavily on Parental rights which can be at variance with a child’s right to have permanence. The extensive use of Expert Reports causes delay and often adds little to the information that the Professionals have who already know the child.

d.

All children should be referred immediately to the Adoption Register when an Agency Decision has been made that a child should be placed for adoption.

e.

Concurrent planning is not extensively used. Whilst it may be of benefit to a small number of children the majority of Prospective Adopters wish to be parents not Foster Carers who may/may not be able to adopt a child for whom they are caring. There is a concern that adoptive parents will be lost if they are expected to be carers in concurrent planning schemes. It should also be highlighted that small Voluntary Adoption Agencies do not have the resources and capacity to recruit Prospective Adopters who may wish to be involved in Concurrent Planning.

f.

Experience would suggest that there is a difference between Local Authorities in time taken to place children for adoption because: 

A lack of qualified Social Workers or frequent changes of Social Worker for a child.

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Collette Anne Ibbotson, Director of Yorkshire Adoption Agency—Written evidence    

Local Authorities experience a conflict in their priorities in that safeguarding children must take priority above a child’s need to have a permanent family. Some Local Authorities do not arrange enough Adoption Panels where ‘matches’ can be considered Some Local Authorities rely on ‘In House’ adopters or those in Local Consortia for too long before identifying a suitable adoptive family for a child. Some Local Authorities believe that VAA Placements are too expensive and also delay placing advertisements in Be My Parent and Adoption UK because of cost.

The number of Potential Adopters b.

The current approach appears to be appropriate as a lot of adopters can promote the needs of children with whom they do not share ethnicity. We have learned this through our experience of Inter Country Adoption.

c.

The majority of potential adopters drop out as a result of a change in their personal circumstances. It also must be accepted that some potential adopters are not suitable to adopt vulnerable children. The skills and experience of adoption agencies should be trusted and given the respect to make this professional important decision without being required to follow bureaucratic, time consuming and costly procedures.

d.

The changes to eligibility introduced by the 2002 Act have been positive.

e.

A faster Prospective Adopter’s assessment is welcome however this will only be possible to complete within timescales if a) it is safe to do so b) information can be obtained and checks completed before an application is accepted c) information required for the Prospective Adopters Report is streamlined and not repetitive as is currently our experience. This relates to both Domestic and Inter Country Adoption. The ‘Fast Track’ proposals for those who have adopted before and fosters carers who wish to adopt a child in their care, seem entirely appropriate. The concept of the ‘National Gateway to Adoption’ appears to be appropriate however should not restrict Agencies from doing their own recruitment.

f.

The number of Local Authorities involved in recruiting adopters is not helpful given their conflicting priorities.

g.

Given our understanding now about early child development and trauma a change in approach to early permanence for a child must be a priority. The further damage to a child caused by repeated rehabilitation plans, delay whilst further parental assessments are completed and contact which is not in a child’s best interests must be addressed.

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Collette Anne Ibbotson, Director of Yorkshire Adoption Agency—Written evidence

Inter Country Adoption

a.

The safeguards introduced by 2002 and 2006 Acts have been welcomed. There is however concern that children are still being brought to the United Kingdom without the Prospective Adopters completing the required assessments about their suitability and following the recognized procedures.

b.

The Central Authority should be involved in all Inter Country Adoptions. The same processes should apply to adopting from Hague and Non Hague countries. One system for all countries would make the process simpler but should not make Inter Country Adoption easier. It is of concern that some children come to the United Kingdom without anyone having Parental Responsibility for them. Experience has taught us that United Kingdom children being considered for adoption overseas experience significant delay. Some reasons for this are that a) assessments completed by overseas agencies about a potential adopters suitability are not sufficiently robust b) Local Authorities, CAFCASS and Courts are confused about the correct Procedures for placing United Kingdom children for adoption overseas.

c.

There are difficulties in adopting children from some countries as United Kingdom residents adopt a child in the child’s country of origin and it is difficult to ascertain if the legal consent to adoption has been appropriately obtained. Perhaps the United Kingdom should legislate on ‘whose written consent’ will be accepted and also how these documents should be validated. It is suggested that the Central Authority in the United Kingdom needs to work more closely with Central Authorities overseas (or other overseas Agencies where there is no Central Authority) and the United Kingdom Border Agency in an effort to address these and other difficulties. This evidence is submitted individually by Collette Anne Ibbotson as Director of Yorkshire Adoption Agency and Independent Chair of a Local Authority Adoption Panel.

17 July 2012

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Intercountry Adoption Centre (IAC)—Written evidence

Intercountry Adoption Centre (IAC)—Written evidence 1. Intercountry Adoption Centre (IAC), formerly Overseas Adoption Helpline (OAH) welcomes the opportunity to written give evidence to the Select Committee and to accept an invitation to give oral evidence in October 2012. 1.1 Intercountry Adoption Centre (IAC) is a registered Voluntary Adoption Agency specialising in the provision of intercountry adoption services. It is also accredited by the adoption central authority of India as an Authorised Foreign Adoption Agency, by the adoption central authority of The Philippines as a Foreign Adoption Partner Agency and by the adoption central authority of the People’s Republic of China, for the agency to offer a programme for intercountry adopters wishing to adopt a child with special needs from China. 1.2 IAC was established in 1997 to provide specialist information, advice and support services for prospective intercountry adopters, established adoptive families and adults who were adopted internationally as children. It was registered as an Adoption Support Agency in 2006, in accordance with the requirements of the Adoption & Children Act 2002. 1.3 It amended its Ofsted registration to that of a Voluntary Adoption Agency in 2008, exclusively for the provision of adoption agency service and adoption support service in respect of intercountry adoption. It has recently extended that registration to enable it to provide domestic adoption services to those prospective intercountry adopters, assessed and approved by IAC who, after approval, wish to be considered for the adoption of looked after or relinquished children in the UK. 1.4 As part of its adoption support activities, IAC provides an information, advice and other specialist services to adoption professionals in local authorities and voluntary adoption agencies, through agencies’ annual subscription (current 57 agencies in all) and to prospective and established adoptive families and adopted people living in their areas. 16 local authorities have a service level agreement with IAC to provide their intercountry adoption assessment and adoption agency services and the West London Consortium commissions IAC to provide adoption support workshops for its intercountry adopters. 2.Gill Haworth is Chief Executive of IAC. She holds a B.Sc (Sociology) London University, M. Sc in Social Work and Social Administration and Certificate of Qualification in Social Work London School of Economics and is a registered social worker. She began her career in social work in 1971, qualifying in 1975. From 1975 to 1977 she was a specialist adoption social worker in LB of Tower Hamlets, becoming Team Manager of that borough’s Adoption & Fostering Section in 1977. She moved to the voluntary sector in 1984 as Principal Consultant for the newly formed charity, The Bridge Child Care Development Service (The Bridge). Whilst at The Bridge, she founded the former Overseas Adoption Helpline, an experimental project funded by the Department of Health and hosted by The Bridge between 1992 and 1997. In March 1997 she formed Overseas Adoption Helpline as an independent body, which in 2005 changed its name to Intercountry Adoption Centre. She was involved in the consultation process in respect of the Adoption (Intercountry Aspects_ Act 1999, the 580

Intercountry Adoption Centre (IAC)—Written evidence Adoption and Children Act 2002 and the Children and Adoption Act 2006. She is Chair of the UK group for intercountry adoption Service Managers ( Adoption Agencies Consultation Group on Intercountry Adoption) and Vice Chair of the UK Network for Intercountry Adoption (NICA), 3. Naomi Angell is Legal Advisor to Intercountry Adoption Centre She is a solicitor in private practice, specialising in children’s law, including international and domestic adoption. For ten years she chaired the adoption panel of a national adoption agency which conducted both domestic and intercountry adoptions. She is currently co-chair of the Family Law Committee of the Law Society and was a member of the Lord Chancellor’s Advisory Board on Family Law and the Children’s Act Sub- committee of the Board. She was actively involved in the briefing of both Houses of Parliament on the Adoption (Intercountry) Aspects Act 1999 and on intercountry adoption issues in the Adoption and Children Act 2002 and Children and Adoption Act 2006 and was a member, with Gill Haworth, of the BAAF coordinated Nuffield Project, a stakeholder’s briefing group on the 2002 Act. 4.

Intercountry adoption

4.1 The UK ratified the Hague Convention on the Protection of Children and Co-operation in Respect of Intercountry Adoption 1993 on 1 June 2003. One tenet of the Convention is that there should be equivalent standards as between domestic and intercountry adoption. Contracting States are also expected to apply the provision of the Convention to their adoption arrangements with States which have not contracted to or implemented the Convention. 4.2 Intercountry adoption should be viewed, therefore, as one form of permanency placement for children, albeit by definition these children are habitually resident outside the UK when the matching is undertaken and the placement made. There is, therefore, considerable overlap between the English legislative framework as it applies to domestic and intercountry adoption. It cannot be said that there is an equivalent provision however, in all aspect of adoption services. 5. Have the inter-country adoption safeguards introduced by the 2002 and 2006 Acts proved successful? 5.1 The Adoption and Children Act 2002 built on the Adoption (Intercountry Aspects) Act 1999 in providing a legal framework for intercountry adoption in the UK and for the UK to ratify the Hague Convention which has brought tangible benefits to children. The Hague Convention (ratified or acceded by 88 States at the time of writing) has provided a structure for communication and co-operation between States that has greatly enhanced the process and safeguards for those adoptions which are carried out under Hague Convention regulations between the UK and other contracting States. 5.2 In IAC’s opinion, however, there are areas where the implementation of the 2002 Act has been less than wholly positive and there are concerns as well about aspects of the Children and Adoption Act 2006:

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Intercountry Adoption Centre (IAC)—Written evidence

5.3 Sponsoring a Child in Intercountry Adoption. The Hague Convention applies to adoption in circumstances where prospective adopters who are habitually resident in one State seek to adopt a child(ren) habitually resident in another. It is IAC’s understanding that in most, if not all, other receiving States the “habitual residence” of prospective intercountry adopters in the receiving State is sufficient qualification for them to sponsor a child in intercountry adoption. The UK immigration criteria applied on and after enactment have overlaid this with a requirement that all prospective adopters must also have settled status (i.e. indefinite leave to remain in the UK or permanent residence if an EEA national) to sponsor a child in intercountry adoption. (Without settled status, they could however adopt a child, looked after or relinquished in England.) This seriously disadvantages prospective adopters who are living and working in the UK as EEA nationals or on work permits, as they are unlikely to qualify to adopt even from their country of origin and here they need to have lived in this country for at least five years, a considerable period of time when because of previous unsuccessful infertility treatment it could the be too late for them to adopt. In the case of non British EEA nationals or where one of a couple is British and the other an EEA national, it is particularly difficult to understand why there should be this extra requirement for settled status as the Treaty of Rome guarantees freedom of movement and equality of treatment for all EEA nationals. 5.4 Relative or kinship adoption. The Adoption and Children Act 2002 provided for relatives to follow the same procedures and safeguards as unrelated prospective adopters. The prospective adopters and child, although related, may not necessarily know each other and in any event the existence of family ties is not an indicator of suitability to adopt or of the capacity to care safely for a child, as evidenced by the numbers of children who suffer neglect and abuse at the hands of family members. IAC would, therefore, argue that there must continue to be a rigorous test of suitability and thorough adoption preparation for the child’s placement in order to properly safeguard the child’s future wellbeing. Related prospective adopters are a particular and potentially vulnerable group, however. The reasons for their seeking to adopt will, of course, be diverse but they are often only contemplating adoption because difficulty has befallen their family overseas. There is a cost to any adoption but the fact that in intercountry adoption this is borne by the prospective adopters ( unlike in domestic adoption) is frequently a significant and inhibiting factor in their pursuing adoption plans which may be a clear placement of choice for the child concerned. In many other receiving States the homestudy assessment is seen as a statutory duty for which the prospective adopters are not charged. We would welcome consideration being given to the local authority meeting the cost of the homestudy assessment in these cases. We note that the Department for Education waives its casework fees in respect of applications from relative adopters. Where prospective adopters can fund their preparation, assessment and post approval services and are found suitable to adopt, they can find entry clearance for the child is refused. This can happen even when it appears to all concerned that the requirements for entry are met and this

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Intercountry Adoption Centre (IAC)—Written evidence is subsequently confirmed on appeal but not before the child has waited several months more before being placed with its relative. IAC appreciates that matters of immigration cannot be embraced under adoption legislation per se. Nonetheless, it will be recognised that immigration is key in intercountry adoption and IAC would recommend that a means be found for this to be settled on the facts of the case early in the process in order that the prospective adopters’ investment in the adoption process has a clear chance of success from the outset, so long as they are found suitable to adopt, and more importantly that the child overseas is not left waiting for a family placement that might never materialise. The risk currently is that adopters pay the fee for a home study report on their suitability which recommends them as suitable to adopt their family member overseas and when they apply for entry clearance are then refused, having already incurred the considerable expense of a home study report, that they cannot recoup. 5. 5 Parental Responsibility Throughout the period of consultation on the 2002 Act, consideration was given to intercountry adoptions being considered “agency” adoptions and this is reflected in much of the implementing regulations, principally the Adoption Agencies Regulations 2005 and the Adoption with a Foreign Element Regulations 2005. Ultimately, this did not transpire but had it done so there would have been the provision, as in domestic adoption, for the local authority to have parental responsibility for the child placed from overseas and for this to be shared with the intercountry adopters. Instead the resultant position is that, unless the child enters the UK the subject of a full and final recognised adoption, no person in the UK has parental responsibility for the child until English or foreign adoption order is made. In IAC’s view as a matter of principle it is wholly unacceptable that any child should be left without any body or person having parental responsibility for him or her. It also leads to the need for further recourse to the courts when the child requires medical treatment in anything other than an emergency ; and technically adopters are not in a position to consent to anything that requires a parent’s signature until such time as the final adoption order has either been made in the overseas country, in the case of adoptions subject to a probationary period, or is made in the UK if the child has been entrusted or placed for the purposes of adoption before the UK court. On a day to day level, it is not unknown for a child to be excluded from school activities and trips as the prospective adopter is unable to give parental consent. There is a pressing need for this situation to be remedied. In respect of adoptions processed under the Convention it may be that transfer of parental responsibility can be written into the Article 17c agreement. It is rather less clear how this might be addressed in adoptions outside the Convention. One possibility, however, might be that parental responsibility is conferred automatically on the prospective adopters and the local authority once the prospective adopter’s notice of intention to adopt, is received by the local authority. This could subsequently be discharged if an adoption order is not made. 5.6 Adoption without a Certificate of Eligibility

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Intercountry Adoption Centre (IAC)—Written evidence Section 83 (1) (b) of the 2002 Act as amended by section 14 (1) of the 2006 Act was, we understand, had in mind situations where UK nationals habitually resident in the UK but living and working in designated list countries may wish to adopt whilst abroad. It enabled them to do so without having to undergo an assessment of suitability and the issue of a Certificate of Eligibility without committing an offence, so long as the application for the child’s entry to the UK is not made within a year of the recognised adoption overseas having been made. However, this has enabled another pathway to intercountry adoption for prospective adopters living in the UK, who can adopt a child from a designated country, leave the child in that country for at least one year and then apply to bring the child into the UK without their suitability having been assessed at all, or there even being a requirement that they should have lived together with child before bringing the child back into this country. This is clearly not providing effective safeguards for the children concerned. We therefore welcome the fact that a review of the Designated List (for which there was provision in the 2002 Act) has been recently undertaken following consultation and that, as part of that review, there is some prospect of the current legal provisions that enable this practice being repealed. 5.7

Intercountry Adoptions subject to a Probationary Period, (Interim adoptions)

2005 Statutory Adoption Guidance: Adoption and Children Act 2001 (Chapter 5 Placement and Reviews para 58) states that in the case of a child who is the subject of an interim order, “the local authority should treat the child as a privately fostered child under sections 66 and 67 of the 1989 Act and carry out regular welfare visits until the full adoption has been made”. The outcome of this approach is that the child’s placement is subject to less monitoring and support than children placed for the purposes of adoption (where an application to the UK court will follow) and there is no requirement to hold a review of the child’s progress in that placement. Further, there is an evident tension between the reality that prospective adopters are parenting the child with a view to becoming their legal parent and the status ascribed to the child being equivalent to that of a private foster child. There is an added complication that, where the prospective adopters are related to the child who is the subject of the interim order, the Children (Private Arrangements for Fostering) Regulations 2005 cannot apply, thereby leaving the child’s status even more uncertain. The child’s welfare would be far more effectively safeguarded with a more coherent and consistent legal framework if a form of notice of intention to adopt was required to be given to the relevant local authority within fourteen days of the chld’s arrival in the UK. This should then place the local authority under a duty to visit and review the child’s placement with the adopters until the final adoption order is made in the child’s country of origin. This would apply to all children whether or not closely related to the adopters. 5.8 Adoptions which have not complied with the legal requirements Definition of an “external adoption” 5.8.1It is not apparent that the definition of external order as set out in 83 (3) includes interim orders made in the course of an application to a designated list country. If this is correct, it is problematic as such orders would not therefore be embraced by the restrictions set out at 83(1)(b).

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Intercountry Adoption Centre (IAC)—Written evidence

5.8.2 There may, therefore, be an anomaly here whereby prospective adopters do not commit an offence if they bring a child into the UK from a designated country under an interim order without having followed the FER procedures, and only do so when the adoption is finalised later in the State of origin. By this time, of course, the child will have entered the UK, will have had his/her home with the prospective adopter for some months and the adoption order will be recognised by the UK. Child to live with adopters before an application can be made to the English Court 5.8.3 The 2002 Act does not permit prospective adopters who have not complied with the legislative requirements to make an application to the court for an adoption order, until the child has had his or her home with them for 12 months. In Convention Adoption Order applications the qualifying period is 10 weeks and in non-convention compliant 6 months. 5.8.4 As non-compliant cases are those where the adoption process has not had the required official involvement and scrutiny, court decisions in these cases have stressed that it is these above all which should come into the court arena and under judicial management at the earliest time so that matters of parental consent or other areas where there is an absence of information or clarity can be identified swiftly and appropriately investigated and resolved. If an application for an adoption order cannot be issued until one year has passed from the time of placement, it is likely that the child will by then have formed an attachment to the prospective adopter which would make it difficult to move the child without causing him or her considerable trauma. 5.8.5 IAC would recommend that the necessary changes are made to allow for an application to be lodged with the court in such cases as soon as is practicable and no later, and arguably earlier, than the 6 month period that applies to compliant cases. 5.8.6 There is a miscellaneous category of adoptions with a foreign element where neither the six month nor twelve month qualifying periods apply. In these cases section 42 (5) of the 2002 Act requires that the child should have had their home with the adopters for not less than three years (whether continuous or not) during the period of five years immediately preceding the issue of the adoption application – in effect a minimum of three years. Section 42(6) of the Act enables an application to be made for leave of the court to issue an adoption application in a lesser period of time. In applications for leave case law has established that the best interests of the child are the first consideration of the court rather than the paramount concern of the court as is the case in virtually all other decisions to be made in respect of a child’s adoption under the Act. Section 44(4) of the Act states that the adopters cannot give notice of intention to adopt to the relevant local authority until the court has given leave for and adoption application to be issued earlier that the qualifying three year period. The adopters therefore have no alternative but to give notice that they are privately fostering the child, with the resulting more limited local authority monitoring and visiting duties. 5.8.7 The cases falling within this category include cases where ex patriates have adopted a child while living and working abroad but decide to return to this country and wish to secure

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Intercountry Adoption Centre (IAC)—Written evidence recognition of their foreign adoption her and British nationality for their child. They have not needed to comply with the section 83 requirements to obtain a certificate of eligibility as they are not habitually resident in the British Isles at the time that the child enters the UK for the purposes of adoption in this country. 5.8.8 In the case of the ex patriate adopters the child will often have been living with them for a some time in the country of their previous residence, before they return to this country and re-adopt here. There is no reason why they should have to wait for such a lengthy period to issue an adoption application without leave of the court or have to apply to the court for leave, an additional step in litigation, both increasing the expense for the adopters and the time that it will take to resolve the adoption application. It would seem more coherent for a six month qualifying period to apply in these cases. 5.8.9 Another typical case that falls within this miscellaneous category is where a child has entered this country for a purpose other than adoption, maybe on an educational, medical or visitors visa and the decision is subsequently taken by a British resident family, normally relatives, to adopt the child. In these case if the child is a close relative of the adopters there is no duty for them to give notice of private fostering and there will therefore be no local authority oversight of the child’s placement, until notice of intention to adopt can be given further to leave of the court for the issue of an adoption application. 5.8.10 In these cases immigration and/or adoption offences may have been committed and these are therefore cases that should come before the courts as speedily as possible and before the child has established a firm attachment with the adopters. We would therefore recommend that there should be a requirement for notice of intention to adopt to be given to the relevant local authority as soon as practical and in case no later than six months after the decision to adopt is made by the adopters. 5.9.

Restricted Countries

5.9.1 Special Restriction on Adoption Orders have been made following the implementation of the 2006 Act, restricting adoptions from Cambodia, Guatemala, Nepal and Haiti. None has been “de-restricted” and we make no comment as to whether this is, or is not, justified. However, the process for reviewing a country’s restricted status has not been made public nor has any timetable for regular or periodic review. Without such transparency there is a risk that the steps to restrict a country, taken originally to safeguard the welfare of children, may continue longer than may be necessary thereby denying a child or children adoptive family life. This is particularly relevant in the case of prospective adopters seeking to adopt for a second or subsequent time from a restricted country having had a child placed earlier from that country, either before the restriction was introduced or because their application was treated as an exception when the restriction was introduced. 5.9.2 IAC gave evidence at pre-legislative scrutiny of the 2006 Act on the above point, amongst others. We were concerned then, and are now, that a balance should be struck between the duty to consider a child’s needs as paramount and, at the same time, to maintain sensitivity towards the position of the adoptive parents where their application to adopt is at an advanced

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Intercountry Adoption Centre (IAC)—Written evidence stage. The emotional and financial investment involved and the high level of connection prospective adopters have already formed to the country to which they are applying cannot be over-estimated. IAC would continue to hope that as much notice as possible would be given to the prospective adopters if a restriction is contemplated. The “cut-off” point, in our view, should be as early as possible in the process, i.e. if the agency decision has been made concerning their suitability to adopt from the country the prospective adopters’ application should be permitted to proceed. 5. 10 The number of potential adopters 5.10.1 Prospective intercountry adopters who are approved and waiting for the placement of a child sometimes wish to explore the possibility of being matched with a looked after child or a relinquished child in the UK. This may not be the wish of the majority of intercountry adopters for whom intercountry adoption is either their first or only choice. However, for those who do wish to be considered, current practice and protocols are on the whole not facilitative of this move from an overseas to a domestic adoption application. This is the case even although many such adopters could provide a valuable adoptive placement for a child or children domestically, willing to consider children with special needs, able to accept the uncertainty that raising a child who has been abandoned overseas can bring and be of black and minority ethnic heritage. An agency will have found them suitable to adopt and eligible to adopt from the overseas country they have specified. They will also, most likely, have received adoption preparation and assessment with the focus of adopting a child transracailly 5.10.2 If they do express an interest, they frequently find that the matter of their suitability is revisited, with little or no value attached to the preparation and assessment they had completed in the context of their intercountry adoption application. There is no national register for approved and waiting intercountry adopters as a mechanism for a potential match to be identified with a child or children for whom a local authority is family finding. Current practice also requires that prospective adopters withdraw from the intercountry list before they have been successfully linked with a child domestically. There are some arguments in favour of this approach but understandably this is not something prospective adopters might readily contemplate especially if they have been waiting to be matched for one or more years, and will have met the cost of their preparation, assessment and suitability reviews up to that point. A change in practice in this regard might result very valuably in an increase in the pool of domestic adopters, already prepared, trained and assessed for the task 5.11 Post Adoption Support: Change to the Schools Admission Code and Framework 5.11.1 IAC was disappointed to find that the changes to the Schools Admission Code and Framework, recently introduced, which gave priority in schools admission to children who had been looked after immediately prior to their adoption, was not extended to embrace those children who were “looked after” in their State of origin, immediately prior to their adoption, even although their adoptions are arranged under the provisions of the 2002 Act.

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Intercountry Adoption Centre (IAC)—Written evidence 5.11.2 It will be appreciated that children adopted from overseas are amongst some of the world’s most vulnerable children and have crossed the world and exchanged one entire way of life for another in order to enjoy the permanency that adoption affords. Initially, at least, on arrival in the UK these children may be delayed in one or more areas of their development as a result of institutional care. Not uncommonly they will have been found abandoned, with the physical and emotional legacy that this brings. They will have to make enormous adjustments, one tangible element of which is the acquisition of a new language as, quite probably, English will not have been the language they spoke or heard around them. 5.11.3 The Adoption and Children Act 2002 gives a child adopted from overseas, their adoptive parents and adopted siblings the same right to an assessment from their local authority of support needs after adoption as is afforded their peers in domestic adoption. The local authorities must also act reasonably in deciding whether or not to provide a support service when this is adjudged to be needed. IAC is acutely aware of the critical role the school setting plays in any programme of post placement/post adoption support. It would be consistent therefore for schools to be required to give first priority to children adopted from overseas as well as to those adopted after having been looked after domestically. The number of children involved would be small (in England there are currently less than 150 applications per year received by the Department for Education); there would be minimal if any cost implications but the positive impact for the children and families concerned would be immeasurable. 5.12. Access to Information 5.12.1 In IAC’s experience, adopted adults whose adoption has an international element, which may also include those placed in domestic adoption, usually face even more challenges finding information about their birth family and the background to their adoption than does the general population of adopted people. One reason may be that there has not been an agency involved in making the arrangements. There is often no information available at all. Where it is, (either from the State of origin, the UK bodies involved or the authorities in the receiving State in cases where another country was involved) the Adoption and Children Act 2002, as interpreted in The Adoption: Access to Information and Intermediary Services Practice Guidance published by DCSF in 2008 , has made it more difficult for the adoption agencies and adoption support agencies who are providing a service to the adopted person. This has arisen principally from the application of the Data Protection Act 1998 to access to information in such cases which significantly restricts the information that can be disclosed to the adopted person. In particular it prevents agencies from divulging non-identifying and sensitive personal data (such as health information, or racial or ethnic origin) unless the birth parents have consented. It will be appreciated that in almost every case it will be impossible to obtain such consent, even were it lawful in the overseas country to do so. 5.12.2 In post commencement adoptions, the provision for an agreement at the time of placement in which the birth parent specifies which information can be shared with the adopted person is not usually available where the placement has been made overseas. The bar on the adopted person being able to access information on such key aspects of their heredity and identity is a profound loss. We can only hope that this is an unintended consequence of the legislation and that this can be remedied.

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Intercountry Adoption Centre (IAC)—Written evidence

5.13 Revision to Regulations and the review of guidance 5.13.1 The Adoption with a Foreign Element Regulations 2005 were amended in 2009. Otherwise there has been no amendment to regulations or Statutory Guidance as it relates to intercountry adoption since the implementation of the 2002 Act. This is long overdue as there are inconsistencies between the Act, the body of implementing regulations, and the Statutory guidance. It is also widely acknowledged that the regulations are, in places, difficult to operate in practice and, as they are heavily prescriptive, do not necessarily fit with the procedures of States of origin, even where they are contracting States to the Convention. IAC would urge that a systematic review of both regulations and guidance is given urgent consideration. 6. Would you recommend any change to the legislation to make inter-country adoption simpler? 6.1 Placement across two jurisdictions, involving matters of family placement/adoption, administrative/court processes, emigration, immigration and citizenship are inevitably and unavoidably complicated. There are however, in IAC’s view changes that can be made to simplify the process to some degree without compromising and, in some cases enhancing, safeguards for the child concerned, as outlined by us above. 6.2 UK as a State of Origin (Adoption and Children Act 2002 Sec. 84) The principle of subsidiarity, which is at the heart of the Convention, holds that children should first be placed in the State where they are habitually resident (for the most part also their country of origin) if suitable arrangements for their care can be made there. Only after that possibility has been exhausted should intercountry adoption be considered as a plan for a child. The Convention makes no distinction in this or other regard between the adoption of children by unrelated adopters and by those who are related or known to the child concerned. In practice, however, placements with relatives are sometimes a first choice for children who are permanently separated from their immediate birth family. 6.2.1 The framework provided under Sec 84 for children to be placed outside the UK for the purposes of adoption has provided hurdles which are all too often insurmountable for prospective adopters. The most evident challenge being the requirement that the prospective adopter(s), who are habitually resident overseas, be resident in the UK for 10 weeks before making an application to the Court for either a Convention Adoption Order, or for a Section 84, granting them parental responsibility prior to taking the child out of the jurisdiction with a view to his or her adoption in the receiving State, elsewhere. There is then an indeterminate wait for the Court Hearing and the making of the relevant order. Statutory Guidance was introduced in March 2010 attempting to address these issues in respect of proposed placements with relatives and “connected people” where adoption outside the jurisdiction is one possible permanent placement for the child. This and recent case law has provided flexibility enabling the “10 weeks” living together period to take place either in the UK or wholly or partly in the receiving State but only if living together period is for assessment and not a placement for adoption. In reality a placement abroad remains a complex process which

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Intercountry Adoption Centre (IAC)—Written evidence deters many social workers from actively considering it as an option for permanency for a child which may well be that which best meets the best interests of an individual child. 6.2.2 The placement of children from the UK with prospective adopters who are neither related nor known to the child has rarely or ever taken place so far as IAC is aware. Whilst IAC would not argue for this to be an established placement pattern, we would nonetheless argue that it might be a placement of choice for some children. In raising this we have in particular in mind the fact that Ireland has ratified the Hague Convention and traditionally has a large number of prospective adopters approved and waiting to adopt from overseas. IAC is frequently approached by families living in Ireland who wish to adopt a child from care in the UK, with whom there may be a shared heritage. We feel that the potential for such arrangements warrant further examination as they might be to the benefit of some, if only very few, looked after children. There are also occasions where prospective adopters approved in the UK move overseas or where UK nationals living overseas are approved as adopters whilst abroad and these too might offer a permanent placement to a child for whom the local authority is family finding. There are also cases where adopters who have already adopted a child from care and then emigrate abroad. If a sibling of their adopted child becomes available for adoption the adoptive family are very likely to be a permanent placement of choice for this younger child. 6. 2.3 On a related matter, it is an offence under section 85 of the 2002 Act for a person or organisation to place any child overseas for adoption, with the grant of a section 84 order. Regulations are explicit about how this might be achieved in a compliant, albeit extremely complex, manner. However, there is no route or procedures currently available for birth parents members who wish to relinquish their child, who is in their care and not accommodated or looked after by the local authority, and plan to place that child with family members overseas. This is a gap which leaves the birth family and their local authority of residence unclear as to their respective responsibilities and the legal steps they are required to take. 6.3 Accredited Bodies 6.3.1 The 2002 Act was drafted at a time when there were only UK bodies recognised by the authorities in the State of origin were the central authorities within the UK. Since then, IAC has been accredited in three States of origin as an accredited body as defined by the Hague Convention. This permits the agency to have direct communication with the central authority overseas and to take such steps as that State’s and the UK regulations allow. In relation to India, for example, prospective adopters resident in England, now have a choice as to whether their application is registered with the overseas authority by IAC or by the Department for Education and thereafter to receive social work support as their application progresses, including from IAC, when they are in the State of origin for introductions and placement. Reliance on accredited agencies in making intercountry adoption arrangements for children and supporting families is seen as the most child protective mode of operation and is commended by the Hague Permanent Bureau and others. Indeed, some States of origin will not readily place, or will not countenance placements of children at all, with prospective adopters from countries where there are no accredited bodies with which they can work directly. Any review of primary legislation and regulation should, in the view of IAC, include explicit reference to the

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Intercountry Adoption Centre (IAC)—Written evidence existence of accredited bodies and the extent to which activities currently undertaken by the central authority might be appropriately delegated to such bodies. 6.4 Post Placement and Post Adoption Reports 6.4.1 These are prescribed reports for the purposes of the Restriction on Report Writing Regulations 2005, meaning that they may only be written by a social worker as defined by the regulations. 6.4.2 IAC appreciates that this is not a straightforward matter. States of origin’s place an importance upon receiving reports on the child’s progress in placement and, in the case of many countries, after adoption often until the child is a young person or reaches the age of majority. They require these reports to be prepared by adoption agencies in the receiving country, and the agency’s undertaking to provide these reports is submitted with the prospective adopter’s application to the State of origin. From a UK perspective, however, once a child is adopted the adoption agency has no right to enter the home and prepare such reports unless invited to do so by the prospective adopters. Complex issues arise, of course, as the child grows older and may not wish personal information to be provided to the overseas authorities in this way. Nonetheless, reference in the Statutory Guidance to these reports being a “private arrangement” between the State of origin and the adopters gives the wrong message and can lead adopters to consider that these reports are “optional”. We would anticipate that this would not be acceptable to the UK authorities in cases where looked after children are being placed from the UK outside the jurisdiction for adoption. 6.4.3 The Russian authorities have, in the past, “barred” adoption agencies from which they had not received the required reports leaving UK adoption agencies and their prospective adopters vulnerable. The UK agency can be in contempt of the overseas court if these reports are not provided as ordered, as can the agency which was earlier caring for the child in the State of origin. China has made it clear in the past that it will consider the suspension of placements to a receiving State if that State does not ensure that reports are received in a thorough and timely manner. We would urge, therefore, that further consideration be given to how, where these reports are required by the State of origin, this requirement can be given some greater legal weight. 7 Are there any special challenges in adopting children from particular countries or regions? 7.1.In case of intercountry adoption from Convention countries there is more likelihood of good communication being achieved between the central authorities. Where the information on the child (Article 16 information) who is being referred is incomplete, or where queries arise these can be dealt with more readily. In addition, if the agency is not content with the child match, the adoption cannot proceed. Communicating with States of origin that have not contracted to the convention can be far more variable in its effectiveness. In some States there is no framework for adoption and this can pose particular challenges. Information about the child and the reasons for their availability for adoption may become available only when the prospective adopters visit the State of origin

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Intercountry Adoption Centre (IAC)—Written evidence (for example Pakistan) after they have found suitable to adopt and there may be no ready mechanism for obtaining anything more than the most basic information presented. At the same time, the UK adoption agency can only register whether or not all the proper procedures have been followed in the UK and otherwise cannot influence whether or not the adoption proceeds. 7.2 Visa applications and applications for British passports for children who are the subject of a Convention Adoption and who qualify for British nationality automatically on the making of that order have become increasingly problematic recent years. This is particularly so in Asia Pacific but problems are also faced by prospective adopters applying elsewhere, including for example to States in Africa, the Caribbean, Russia and Eastern Europe. 7.3 The various difficulties faced are numerous to itemise but in general it seems that since the “hub and spoke” system has been introduced for the provision of British passports and since visa processing has been outsourced from the diplomatic post to local service providers, applications in connection with intercountry adoption have lost all the previous priority they enjoyed. 7.4 Prospective adopters are advised that a passport can take up to 13 weeks or longer to be issued and visas up to 13 weeks. In reality they are often issued more quickly (but in a matter of weeks rather than days) but this does not enable adopters to plan their stay in the State of origin or their return to the UK. Where a couple are applying jointly one partner has usually returned to the UK whilst the other remains for an indefinite period with the child(ren) in an hotel room or other temporary accommodation. Such a disrupted or delayed start to adoptive family life, detrimental as it is to a child, would never be countenanced in domestic adoption introductions and placement. 7.5 IAC would recommend that adoption priority is re-instated and the UK Border Agency and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office give consideration to specialists being assigned to processing such applications. The numbers of visa and passport applications in the context of intercountry adoption are so few that this should not present insurmountable difficulties or be a drain on resources. 23 July 2012

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Intercountry Adoption Centre (IAC)—Oral evidence (QQ 412–436)

Intercountry Adoption Centre (IAC)—Oral evidence (QQ 412–436) Evidence Session No. 7.

Heard in Public.

Questions 412–436

TUESDAY 16 OCTOBER 2012 Members present Lord Warner (Chairman) Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top Baroness Eaton Viscount Eccles Baroness Hamwee Baroness King of Bow Baroness Knight of Collingtree Baroness Morris of Bolton Lord Morris of Handsworth Baroness Walmsley ________________ Examination of Witnesses Gill Haworth, Chief Executive, Intercountry Adoption Centre, and Naomi Angell, Legal Adviser to the Intercountry Adoption Centre

Q412 The Chairman: Good morning and welcome. I am Norman Warner. I am substituting for Baroness Butler-Sloss, who is out of the country at the moment. If you were expecting to see Elizabeth, I am afraid you will be disappointed and you will have to put up with me chairing the session this morning. Thank you very much for coming. A few points just before we start: this session will be webcast—sound only—just so you are aware that you are going live to an unsuspecting world out there during the course of this particular session. What we would like you to do when you start is to give your name and position, just for the record, so that it is on the tape. If you want to make any opening statements before we get down to the questions, you are welcome to do so. Without more ado, perhaps I could hand over to you to say who you are and make any opening statements that you might want to make. Gill Haworth: I am Gill Haworth and I am Chief Executive of the Intercountry Adoption Centre, which is the only voluntary adoption agency that focuses virtually exclusively on

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Intercountry Adoption Centre (IAC)—Oral evidence (QQ 412–436) intercountry adoption services. I really welcome the opportunity to speak to the Committee today. Intercountry adoption is a relatively small adoption provision, when compared with domestic adoption, and perhaps this year only 100 or so children will come into England in intercountry adoption. Therefore it is quite readily overlooked, particularly when there is rightly such emphasis on a domestic adoption agenda. It is a good opportunity for us to share with you our concerns about the provisions for children who are probably among the world’s most vulnerable. Naomi Angell: I am Naomi Angell. I am legal adviser to the Intercountry Adoption Centre. I am a solicitor specialising in children’s law. That includes child protection and domestic and international adoption. I am co-chair of the Family Law Committee of the Law Society, and I am an international adopter of three grown-up children. Q413 The Chairman: Thank you very much. Perhaps I can start with the questions. From your experience, could you tell the Committee what you think the main motivation is for couples wishing to adopt from abroad? In practice, could some of these families potentially provide an adoptive home for a looked-after child from England and Wales? If so, what more do you think could be done to encourage and support couples looking to adopt from abroad to consider domestic adoption? Gill Haworth: The first thing that I would like to say is there is a huge diversity of motivations and a diverse range of people who apply to adopt intercountry, just as probably there are in domestic adoption. One of the drivers is primary or secondary infertility, when people are looking to parent a child as young as they possibly can and they perceive that that would be more likely to be achieved through intercountry adoption. Some motivation—and these are often mixed—is through altruism. People might be very connected to a country overseas or they have lived and worked overseas or somehow become connected to a particular child, and therefore it is their first choice to apply to adopt from overseas. Some will have explored domestic adoption first. Others will not. At our agency we have a very large population—sometimes probably 60-plus % of our prospective adopters are not white British—that are coming from minority communities in the UK and they may want to adopt from their country or their family’s country of origin. Sometimes these applications are for children to whom they are related; oftentimes they are not. There are also families who have an international lifestyle, so adopting intercountry makes a lot of sense to them and it fits, as I say, with their lifestyle. For them, it can be particularly challenging, because moving around adds further complication to a very complicated process. You will see there is a huge range of reasons why people think of adopting from overseas, and only some of those would also think about domestic adoption. There is some overlap, but it is a distinct, different, legitimate other form of parenting. Naomi Angell: My perception is slightly different from that, in that I see people very early on who have just come to the end of infertility treatment and they are looking at various options for parenthood. At that stage, very typically, I will go through the various options open to them, which would be domestic, intercountry adoption, concurrent planning and surrogacy as well, which is becoming certainly a more attractive form of parenthood. It is then looking at the pros and cons of each with them, discussing with them which they feel most comfortable with, and

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Intercountry Adoption Centre (IAC)—Oral evidence (QQ 412–436) which they are going to feel most comfortable with not just now but as their child grows and they feel that they will be able to help that child into adulthood. So I think it is, for me, a placement option for permanence, a very valid one, which I think— particularly now with the focus on domestic adoption—can be seen to some extent as in competition with domestic adoption. It really is not. It is tiny numbers, and it is a question of people feeling that they are doing what is right for them because, in the end, they have to meet their child’s best interests and feel comfortable with their choice. Q414 The Chairman: On the last bit of my question, is there anything more that could be done to put in front of these people the option of domestic adoption? Gill Haworth: I think that is perhaps possible, but not necessarily when they first come through the door. Our experience is that once people have embarked on an intercountry adoption route, then they are less likely to move away unless those plans are thwarted, but they sometimes are thwarted. It may be that procedures and eligibility criteria change in the overseas country. At that point, it is actually not easy for people approved as suitable to adopt with a matching advice for an overseas country to then move to domestic adoption. Part of that is attitudinal. I regret to say that intercountry adoption is sometimes seen as a second-class adoption. If people are approved as intercountry adopters or have even parented through intercountry adoption, they have to start again and go through the whole process of assessment and preparation, which actually devalues their experiences and what they have to bring, so I would think there is something around that practice that could be changed. The move from one approval to another could be made smoother for people. It is also the case that adopters sometimes wait a very long time to be matched in intercountry adoption. Typically in China it is taking five to seven years; in Thailand three and a half. People are reluctant to come out of a waiting line, particularly when they have invested money, time and emotion in getting to that point, and so they may be less likely to consider a domestic child if they have to withdraw, which is the current advice and practice. Q415 Baroness King of Bow: Would you suggest something like concurrent adoption applications? Naomi Angell: Just being able to be on a register of adopters available for adoption as well, because the training that they have had is very, very relevant to the sort of children they are likely to be able to adopt in this country, particularly now transracial and trans-ethnicity placements are going to be more likely. The intercountry training has been in place for a long time now, and they have gained a lot of expertise in it. It should not be devalued by expecting people to start right from the beginning again, because domestic and intercountry adoption is very similar. The assessment process is very similar. It is equally rigorous and robust, including the safeguards. There are additional components for both types of adoption, but now the elements about preparing adopters for potential racism or adopting a child of a different ethnicity are going to be very relevant to both forms of adoption. Q416 Baroness Walmsley: Can I ask a supplementary? But first I must declare an interest, because my son—resident in Wales and in Beijing—has adopted a Chinese daughter, so happily I have a Chinese granddaughter. The question is based on some anecdotal information from some of their friends who said that, having received a very cool reception from their local 595

Intercountry Adoption Centre (IAC)—Oral evidence (QQ 412–436) authority, they concluded that they were too white and too middle class to adopt here and that was the reason why they went along the intercountry adoption route. I was quite surprised to hear what you said about China, because my son found that the UK processes of approval took a heck of a long time but, once approved, getting a baby allocated from China was very quick. Gill Haworth: That was indeed the case at one time. It has changed, and that has impacted on the numbers. Baroness Walmsley: That was about five years ago, so I should say that. Gill Haworth: Yes, so it is a recent change, whereas China’s emphasis now— Baroness Walmsley: Are you coming across people who take the intercountry adoption route because of the reason that I gave? Gill Haworth: Absolutely, yes. Naomi Angell: I certainly do with my clients. They come to me to talk about international adoption, and then I broaden it out and discuss all the potential avenues open to them, and their perception—and it is a real perception—very often is that the first telephone call they have made to local authorities has been a very unwelcoming one. It has taken a lot of courage for them to make that phone call and they need to have a much more positive welcome. Often they are turned away without really looking at what their abilities and capabilities are. I think a lot of people are lost to domestic adoption at that point, and I hope the new procedures will really address that. Q417 Baroness Morris of Bolton: I would like to declare an interest. That is exactly what happened to me and my husband. We went on to have our own children, but we were made to feel, “What gives you the right to think that you might be able to adopt a child?” so I very much support everything that Baroness Walmsley said. I just want to ask, where is the resistance, or do you think there would be resistance, to there being just one register so that you do not have to go through another process of preparing parents if they have already gone through it with intercountry adoption? Is it at the local authority level? Gill Haworth: I think it is not just the local authority. We have to be careful not to generalise across the board. The tendency is that that is there at the local authority level and at the adoption agency level, but it is also there at the governmental level, because the Department for Education is very clear at the moment that they do not want to see people considering domestic adoption without first removing themselves from the intercountry adoption pool. As I have said, that is a disincentive. There are arguments for that, but I do not think it is necessarily appropriate across the board for every intercountry adopter family, so at a policy level, as at a practice level there is actually quite a deterrent as well. Naomi Angell: I have to say that the attitudes of the professionals involved have moved on enormously since I became involved in this field, but if you scratch the surface I think there is still a negativity towards intercountry adoption. I had a client who was approved for adoption from China and they were waiting a long time. A baby then came up in the local authority that had approved them, which was a very good local authority, and they went for a reassessment and they were matched with that child. They said that the attitude of the professionals was

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Intercountry Adoption Centre (IAC)—Oral evidence (QQ 412–436) unbelievably different, when they were being supported to be the match and placement of a child domestically, from the support and attitudes that they received when they were waiting for an internationally adopted child. It was very different. The Chairman: Can I move this on to some questions about legislation and procedure? Q418 Baroness Walmsley: Do the current structures for dealing with intercountry adoption in England and Wales—which has extra layers of bureaucracy—operate effectively and, given the specialised nature of the work, do you think a national agency for intercountry adoption would provide a better mechanism for dealing with these cases? Gill Haworth: Obviously there have been tremendous improvements since we ratified the Hague Convention, and Naomi supported that perspective at an attitudinal level as well, but I think there can be no doubt that it really is an area of particular specialism; adoption itself is and intercountry adoption adds another layer to that. Local authorities, who are charged with the responsibility for both types of adoption, are tending more to outsource their services to voluntary adoption agencies that are developing a specialism in that area. I think that is helpful, because local authorities are challenged, particularly with a fall in numbers, both to keep focused on their domestic adoption agenda but also to keep alive an expertise when they may only receive one application a year, if that. So it is a challenge to currency of knowledge and it is an area of work that changes all the time because of the nature of the service. I think that specialism adds value for families and, therefore, ultimately for the children concerned. Whether or not one national agency would be an answer to that I wonder, because obviously there are issues with geography and resources and ultimately people do, I think, value having a choice, and of course, as a specialist agency, I would feel that it is important that an intercountry adoption service is well resourced in order to afford such choice. Baroness Walmsley: If, as you say, the local authorities are outsourcing things, like assessments, I presume to voluntary adoption agencies, could the national agency not do the same, thereby taking away the geographical problem that you identified, because presumably they are available all over the country? Gill Haworth: Yes, presumably that could be the case, but again they would not necessarily have the choice that perhaps adopters would like to have. Q419 Baroness Knight of Collingtree: I particularly welcome your presence here today, because—and I have to make a confession—I really did not know that there was such a thing as an intercountry adoption centre until I read about you coming. I am very interested in this because I have heard of several cases where people were so tired of waiting and being on the list to adopt a child in this country. One couple had had such a long time they had gone off to America and bought a baby. I was horrified to hear this, so I am very anxious to know a little more about the procedure that individuals or couples, who decide to take that route, actually link in with you, because when cases have been described it seems as if they just went over and got a child. Could you tell me a little more about the procedure and whether intercountry adopters—the ones who have decided to do that—actually do have the same kind of very rigorous preparation for taking a child? Do you have any concerns, either of you, from the legal side or the other side, about what is happening at the moment, or are the cases that have worried me so rare that they do not really matter? 597

Intercountry Adoption Centre (IAC)—Oral evidence (QQ 412–436) Gill Haworth: Sometimes when it is presented that people have gone away and bought a child, it is a way of talking about the fact that it is a very expensive service and it excludes people who cannot meet sometimes—particularly with the United States—some thousands of pounds of costs. Conducted properly, what happens is that the prospective adopters must go through the same route of information, thorough preparation and rigorous assessment, and be considered by an adoption panel in the same way as a domestic application would do. The additional layers come when you get to the government level, with the government department processing the documentation and, if it is a Hague Convention adoption, liaising with the government body in the other country, to enable the adoption to proceed and for the child to come into the UK through proper immigration processes, and then for reports to go back to the state of origin as required. There are additional elements. As far as England is concerned, there is the Department for Education’s involvement in transmitting and checking the documents, and the post-placement post-adoption reporting to the overseas country. These are different features. The United States is a Hague Convention country, so that is the sort of process that anyone would usually go through. There are worrying gaps in the safeguarding—and we have addressed some of these in our written evidence—one principally being the possibility at the moment of people adopting from a designated list country, a country on the designated list whose adoptions we recognise. There is a provision in the 2006 Act that enables those people to come into the UK after a year of having adopted the child, without necessarily having followed any of these steps at all. We are very pleased to know that there is some prospect of this designated list being redrawn and of that section of the 2006 Act being repealed. That is one loophole that we are concerned about, and I am sure you will wish to be aware of it. Naomi Angell: I would reinforce what Gill said, in that if you are adopting from a non-Hague Convention, non-designated list country, you have to comply with Section 83 of the Adoption and Children Act 2002. That says that you must comply with adoption regulations if you are habitually resident in this country, which means that you are living here, your life is here, your job is here. You must comply with adoption requirements that you get a home study report from an English/Welsh adoption agency and then the certification from the central government department. If you do not comply with that, you commit a criminal offence. I have to say that I am aware of police investigations, but I have not been aware of a prosecution at this stage through my experience. If you are doing a Hague Convention adoption and you do not comply with the requirements, then you just will not be able to achieve a Hague Convention adoption. In terms of people just going abroad and getting a baby, this does happen to an extent when British families who have families abroad go on holiday, their families know that they are having difficulties with having a baby and the family have found a baby for them. They then end up adopting the baby, or getting a guardianship order abroad. They then apply for the visa to bring the baby back into this country and they find that they have real problems, because they have not complied with Section 83 and they will not get a visa to bring that baby back in again. You end up then usually with the wife staying in the country, the husband coming back here to continue with his job and then the mother having to come back here for part of the home study report to be able to comply with Section 83. This is a question of information education,

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Intercountry Adoption Centre (IAC)—Oral evidence (QQ 412–436) because people just do not learn about the adoption requirements until they make the visa application. There are additional requirements as well—and you might ask about this later—where immigration law requirements interface with adoption law. That certainly puts another layer on to the many international families now in this country where you might have a British national married to a non-British national or an EEA national, and they have additional difficulties in even making the first step towards international adoption. I will happily explain this now, but if you prefer to leave it— The Chairman: Perhaps we could wait until a bit later on. Naomi Angell: Certainly, yes. Q420 Baroness Knight of Collingtree: Could I just ask one other question. Supposing a woman, who has not been successful in getting a child in this country, goes abroad and then claims that she had the child while she was away, how is that checked? If a couple who have not had a baby with them previously suddenly come back with a child, do immigration pick that up, and what happens? Naomi Angell: Some eastern European countries after an adoption will issue a new birth certificate, because it is a very different attitude towards adoption. Adoption law is very different—it is as if the child’s life starts again from the point of the adoption abroad and then there might be a birth certificate that puts the adopters’ names on it as the parents. Technically it may be possible for them to present themselves to a post overseas, but they have to fill in visa application forms and they probably will have committed an immigration offence at that point in providing incorrect information. It may be different for an EEA country where you do not have the border control. I do not know what you think, Gill. Gill Haworth: There are rigorous checks but, in the circumstance that Naomi has described, one cannot guarantee it would be picked up at immigration. We get calls to the advice line from health visitors and from others in the UK who pick up when a child arrives in the UK, and we would hope that our safeguarding framework would kick in and that would be picked up, but it is not always the case. There are risks, and it is very, very complicated. I would stress the need for public information, particularly for minority communities who do not necessarily feel that they need to go through a process here and quite understandably think it is a matter for their own country, as they are adopting from their family’s original country. It is going to be particularly important if there are changes to the designated list, because we know— Baroness Knight of Collingtree: Changes to— Gill Haworth: To the designated list. As I mentioned, this is about recognised orders and the countries where we recognise the adoption order, because we know at the moment from some countries there are significant numbers of children coming into the UK without any preparation or official oversight at all. Q421 Baroness King of Bow: I want to pick up on the element of Baroness Knight’s question about buying babies. There is always an element of cost and what you can afford. My experience, as a prospective intercountry adopter, was that we turned up but we were told, “If you want to go the intercountry route, you need to pay £3,000 now for the home study

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Intercountry Adoption Centre (IAC)—Oral evidence (QQ 412–436) assessment. If you want to do it domestically, you get that free”, so obviously people who cannot afford that amount of money cannot go down that route anyway. We were also told you can buy babies in America. Again, you are right, it referred to the expensive process. But we were told, “Black babies, however, are cheaper than white babies”. My first reaction was, “This is disgraceful, disgusting racism”, and my second reaction was, “How much cheaper? Could I afford it?” but instead of £30,000 it was £26,000, which was still way out of the range. I wonder, in your experience, how much does cost move people from intercountry adoption to domestic adoption? Gill Haworth: It is a significant factor. We have no quantitative research at the agency about that at the moment. We are just embarking on that because we feel that a lot of people inquire and then we do not know what happens. Unfortunately—well, I say “unfortunately”—a decision was taken in the early 1990s in response to the Romanian situation, where it was felt that this was going to be taxing on the local authorities who already had a statutory duty domestically, and therefore, to encourage local authorities to provide the service, they would be able to make a charge. That marks us out from many countries, many other receiving states where home studies are free for domestic and for intercountry adoption because it is seen as a statutory responsibility, and a duty to the overseas country and ultimately to the child. Anything that dissuaded people from having a proper assessment, not only just moving into domestic, is unwelcome, because there are people who have definitely tried to take an unethical if not an illegal route as they were not able to meet the fee. It is very unfortunate and it carries on having an impact throughout the entire intercountry adoption process. It is particularly challenging on relative adopters, who are usually responding to a family crisis in considering adopting a relative from overseas, but they still have to meet the fees. We are not arguing there should not be safeguards in place but those safeguards cost, because it is people intensive. The more regulation there is to safeguard the child—more appropriate regulation, obviously, there is the increased cost of actually delivering the service. Naomi Angell: Central Government, the DfE and their part of the process for relatives, have recognised the difficulty and they waive their fees in relation to relatives. But I have often suggested to my clients that they could ask local authorities whether they would reduce the cost of their home study reports, which are very considerable. I think you are looking at about £10,000 just to get to the first stage of intercountry adoption, and that is without all the foreign aspects of it. In my experience, when I am doing a statement in support of an adoption application, I will ask people to break down the costs that they have incurred, and the foreign costs are often far, far less than the British ones. Gill Haworth: It is hugely variable. In the States it can be tens of thousands. In Russia it will be tens of thousands. If somebody is adopting from the Philippines or from India, where things are more centrally governmentally provided and delivered, the fees are fairly nominal. So there is huge variation, but it impacts on the question of specialism because if you are looking to the voluntary sector to provide a specialism, which is the sector that is mostly doing that, then the local authority would need to fund the voluntary sector to do that work, unless fundraising could support this, and it is not a very easy provision to fundraise for. Naomi Angell: Previously, up until 1999, when the Adoption (Intercountry Aspects) Act came into force, many local authorities just did not do intercountry work at all, and families would find there was a postcode lottery in the provision of home study reports and they just would

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Intercountry Adoption Centre (IAC)—Oral evidence (QQ 412–436) not be able to get their assessment, and so it has been recognised as a valid service now. Unfortunately, in this climate, it is difficult to see a time when it would not incur the adopters having to make a payment, but I think we probably are the most expensive country in the world for international adoption. The Chairman: On that note, let me bring in Lord Morris to take us on. Q422 Lord Morris of Handsworth: In describing the process for intercountry adoption, you have made reference to additional elements and you have certainly left me with the impression that there is no alignment between adoption law and immigration law. I just put a marker on that, because I would like to ask you to address that point. To what extent do you consider the current legislative framework governing intercountry adoption to be effective? In particular, have the intercountry adoption safeguards introduced in 2002, and indeed 2006, proved effective? Naomi Angell: It has certainly taken things forward massively, because in many respects it is very similar to the regulation and protection of domestic adoption, but there are problems. One of those is if you do not have a final recognised adoption order by the time you bring your child into this country. This could either be if you have adopted from a Hague Convention country but the final adoption order is not made in the Hague Convention country, and the Hague Convention country entrusts the child to the British family to complete the adoption in this country, or it will be if they adopt from a non-Hague Convention country, non-designated list country, so it is completely not recognised in this country. The adopters come to this country with their child. They are effectively legal strangers to the child. They cannot consent technically to elective medical treatment. They cannot make a will appointing a testamentary guardian for their child. They cannot make any of the important decisions, such as whether a child can go on a school trip, which parents need to be able to make. They do not have parental responsibility for that child, and this is a big problem. They will not get parental responsibility until either the Hague Convention adoption order is made in the country or the English adoption order, which is the re-adoption that gives them recognition as adoptive parents here. This causes a lot of concern. Russia is one of the main countries that British families are adopting from currently. They have a pretty regulated system there. They are very concerned that when the children come over here, nobody—not the local authority and not the parents, the adoptive parents—has parental responsibility for them, and that is probably going to be for a year until the English legal proceedings are complete. Q423 Lord Morris of Handsworth: What change in the legislation do you think would make life more bearable? Naomi Angell: We certainly campaigned for international adoptions to be treated as agency adoptions, when the adopters would get parental responsibility in the same way that domestic adopters would. That has not been done. There are solutions, but to be able to complete a Hague Convention adoption something called the Article 17 agreement has to be drawn up. It is an agreement between two countries, the sending country and the receiving country, which finalises the international adoption so far as the Hague Convention is concerned. I think they could write into that that the parents get parental responsibility at that stage. For the nonconvention, non-designed list adoptions, when you come into this country you have to give 601

Intercountry Adoption Centre (IAC)—Oral evidence (QQ 412–436) notice of intention to adopt to the local authority within 14 days of arriving here. If you do not, it is a criminal offence. At that point I think they should get parental responsibility for the child and so should the local authority. Lord Morris of Handsworth: If the Committee were ever minded to make any suggestion in terms of legislative changes, could you give us a very short and brief note setting out what needs to be done and what are the statutes that we need to— Naomi Angell: That would be on my list. Q424 Baroness Hamwee: Can I declare an interest as a patron of the centre? What was the reason for not sorting out the legal limbo because, from the way you have described it, it sounds as if it was addressed and a decision taken to go—as you would see it—the wrong way. What was the thinking? Gill Haworth: When the 2002 Act was being consulted on, as Naomi was saying, it was clearly drawn up with the parallel duties as if this child would be a child subject of an agency placement. I believe that there was lobbying on costs and issues of resources as this would bring into the local authority orbit more children for whom they would have agency responsibility. I believe that was the case. I have not actually seen that recorded. Naomi Angell: There are other quite technical areas that we put in our written evidence. I do not know whether you would like me to— Q425 The Chairman: In order that we can move along, probably the most helpful thing would be, to follow up Lord Morris’s point, if there are some more issues on this particular area you could send us a note. That would be extremely helpful. Gill Haworth: That would be a pleasure. Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top: The problem is that is my question. The Chairman: Always trying to be helpful as a Chairman, moving us along. Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top: My question was this. You have identified things in your written statement. Which of those would be the priorities for legislative action? Naomi Angell: I think we would like to address you on some of the immigration issues. Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top: Okay, and you are going to do us a note anyway? Naomi Angell: Yes. Q426 The Chairman: The immigration issue is important, but it is extremely technical and we have a lot of ground still to cover, so if you could explore these issues in a written note it would be extremely helpful. Gill Haworth: Our priorities, if I may say, are all important, but some we would look at, in terms of really being key on a child safeguarding level and others in terms of perhaps broadening the potential pool of adopters for domestic children. There are a whole range of changes that we think would address different tensions and issues within the current framework.

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Intercountry Adoption Centre (IAC)—Oral evidence (QQ 412–436) The Chairman: Would you like to give us a quick burst on the two or three priority issues for you in this area? Gill Haworth: The first is the designated list, because that is a safeguard against potential trafficking and that is really important; the designated list alongside—the two bits together—the repealing of the 2006 provision. Naomi Angell: That is on the Government’s agenda already, because there has been a consultation document about it. There has not yet been a response. We are now just waiting to see what they are going to propose in terms of legislation. Gill Haworth: The parental responsibility issue is absolutely key. The immigration issues are, because we have the very unhelpful, worrying situation of the way it currently works, leaving new families just coming together for the first time, parent and child—which is what all the adoption process is working towards—with those first stages of parenting taking place over weeks and indeterminately in an overseas hotel. It seems to me that it should be possible in this age of technology to manage to address that very simply, if there was a will to do so. That is key for us as well, and there are other things that perhaps we can address. One thing we have not touched on is that, in terms of increasing the pool, our agency gets contacted on the advice line frequently from UK nationals living and working in overseas countries who would like to adopt a child from the looked-after system here. Equally, there is a great interest from people in Ireland, another Hague convention country, who are interested in adopting children from the looked-after system, and there are many children who would share the heritage of those families in Ireland waiting to adopt. I think we should look at addressing those two areas of children perhaps being placed appropriately, with proper safeguards, outside the UK with families who would increase the pool of potential adopters. The Chairman: That is very helpful, so we look forward to your further note. Q427 Baroness King of Bow: To be fair to you, I should say you have basically set it all out here, but just set it out for us again, because that is what politicians ask. The Chairman: Simply. Naomi Angell: Two pages. Baroness King of Bow: Yes, that is exactly right. I just wonder, basically, on the approach to domestic interracial adoption, are there lessons, both positive and negative, that we can take from the international intercountry adoptions? As I say, you mentioned earlier that those people, prospective parents who have been through that training, will be more aware of issues around racism and so on that might face a child, but are there any others, please? Naomi Angell: What is very impressive is the very low breakdown rate of international adoptions in this country, although many of the children will have come from multiply deprived backgrounds. There has been a study by the Maudsley Hospital on the Romanian adoptees, and they could not have come from a worse situation of deprivation, and the breakdown rate has been very, very low. On the preparation and assessment, having chaired an adoption panel of an agency that did a lot of intercountry work, I think it has just improved and improved and improved, and I think that

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Intercountry Adoption Centre (IAC)—Oral evidence (QQ 412–436) the local authorities should look to the voluntary agencies who have expertise in assessment and preparation of families who are looking towards trans-ethnic and transracial placements in intercountry adoption, where there has been a very, very impressive success rate. Gill Haworth: I think we need to be very aware that being placed in a visible adoption actually has an impact, and there are additional challenges for the adoptive family and the adopted person. Q428 Baroness King of Bow: Can you just explain what that means for others who might not be aware, so meaning that it is obvious— Gill Haworth: If they are placed transracially, the additional challenges include that it is a visible adoption and the child faces a lot of questions, as do the parents. They are growing up really close to people that do not reflect how they look, and that has an impact as well at a psychological and emotional level. Having said that, that is a process, and all the research suggests that, contrary to public perception or professional perception perhaps, there is no correlation between poor self-esteem and transracial placements. The research is showing that sound emotional development and a positive sense of identity can be developed within that sort of family context, and the things that do impact much more than transracial placements might be the age at placement and the pre-placement experiences. It is not published yet, but there was a conference last week reporting on a British/Chinese adoption study, which I think is the only study—perhaps even worldwide—looking at the adult adopted person in their 40s and 50s, who were adopted from Hong Kong as a group, and their reporting of their experience. It is very telling how successful that has been and how although some have needed support, some particularly at teenage years, around their racial identity and their heritage but none the less, for the most part, they have had an extraordinarily successful placement, as presumably their adopters had as well. Q429 Baroness Morris of Bolton: I wanted to ask about the cost of intercountry adoption, but we have already covered that quite comprehensively, so I wondered, given that you say we are the most expensive country for intercountry adoption, what we might be able to learn from other countries and how we could reduce the cost and where you think we might be able to do that. You also say the processes are very specialised and therefore costly. Can I also ask you about the length of time it takes for intercountry adoption? Are there any unnecessary delays that we can look at where we might be able to address them and cut back the time? Gill Haworth: So far as the cost of the service or the fees involved, other countries do not necessarily have the extent of domestic adoption that we do. That is not true of the USA, where they have a dual system, but in countries in Europe, including Scandinavia, the domestic adoption is small. They have fostering provisions. There intercountry adoption is the predominant form of adoption and, therefore, there is considerable state investment in that service, so preparation might be funded, as it is in Belgium, from the Justice Department. There may be grants or tax breaks for prospective adopters, equivalent to the level of infertility allowances and treatment. It is the place of adoption in those countries that is determining the approach to who pays the cost, and so that is how you see the state government departments doing home study assessments free of charge and preparation fees being nominal.

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Intercountry Adoption Centre (IAC)—Oral evidence (QQ 412–436) Then there is the linking with the overseas countries. We are very different in as much as in the UK, apart from the countries that we are now accredited at IAC to work alongside, the intercountry adoptions are largely independent and private with the adopters going out and making their own arrangements, and that is where some of these high fees are brought into play in places like Russia and in the US. In most other countries, it is an agency-to-agency placement, so accredited agencies have programmes that the central authority oversees, and they are the programmes that adopters go through. It might be more restrictive, it may not be open to a wide range of countries, but it has more official oversight, and that is where the major fees are encountered by intercountry adopters in those other countries. Prospective adopters may not pay for the assessment but they would pay for that very important process of engaging an agency to make the adoption arrangements for them with the agency in the state of origin. It is a different way of looking at it. IAC has now been accredited in India and in the Philippines and just this summer to run the China special needs programme in the UK, so we are beginning to move into that sort of model through the investment of our agency in pursuing accreditation in states of origin. So that is a complicated answer, but it is about structure and difference in the different places of adoption. Q430 Baroness Morris of Bolton: Within that, where are there areas that we may be able to look at—it is phenomenally expensive for people to go down that route, which may be the only route they can go down. Gill Haworth: There could be central government funding for the assessment process and for that to be perceived, as we would see it, as a safeguard for the child, rather than as it is currently defined as a service for the adopters. It is a service for the adopters, but it is ultimately there for the child. That is the distinction and a different attitude that causes it to be possible for it to be seen to be right that the adopters pay, but if it was seen as a service for the child, as a statutory responsibility with central government funding, then that cost would not fall to the adopters to meet. I do not know if you have any other ideas, Naomi. Naomi Angell: No. But the common feature of both domestic and intercountry adoption is that it is a child-centred process. It is finding a family for children; it is not finding children for families. Given that there is that conjunction, it results in very different funding, and that does not make complete sense to me. The Chairman: Baroness Knight, did you want to follow up on something? Q431 Baroness Knight of Collingtree: I understand now that it costs money whether one adopts a child in this country and it is completely local, or when one goes overseas. Is that true and, if it is, how do the costs compare? Is it far more expensive, or are some cases very much more expensive than— Naomi Angell: It will be completely cost-free for the adopters to adopt domestically. The cost will be incurred by the local authority in doing the assessment, supporting the family and doing every other stage of the adoption process. In intercountry, it is carried by the adopters. Q432 Baroness Morris of Bolton: On the length, is there anything we can do? Gill Haworth: The length is not usually incurred at the UK end, unless it is a very complicated case where there are pre-inquiries about immigration and otherwise. Usually, the process

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Intercountry Adoption Centre (IAC)—Oral evidence (QQ 412–436) follows the current standards, which is that it is completed within eight months of application. The indeterminate part arises as there is added time when documents have to go through central Government and then one is in the hands of the overseas country, who are responsible for the matching, and that tends to be where the first significant delay can be experienced. Subsequent to that, as we have already mentioned, are the months that it can take to actually achieve immigration for the child as well. The Chairman: I wonder if I could move us on. Baroness Eaton, we had a good burst on immigration. Is there anything more you want to ask? Q433 Baroness Eaton: No, not really, because you have touched on immigration and it is one of the things on the list for you to write back to us about. Are there any other things you have not mentioned that are barriers for intercountry adopters? Gill Haworth: The key problem is the education and the knowledge base of the people who are responsible for responding to the applications. I think it is for visas and passports. The efficiencies that have been perceived through introducing what is called a hub and spoke system have depersonalised the process, and through that sadly it seems that intercountry adopted children have lost their priority. That is a matter of great concern to us. It is also the case that there is not so much personal interviewing, if there are known birth parents and birth relatives, relinquishing relatives, and again for efficiency that system has declined. So it is impersonal and, to be frank, some of our adopters actually report circumstances where they have been faced with entry clearance officers who do not realise that, as a result of the Hague Convention, they are now dealing with a British citizen, as the child already has British nationality, and there is a sense that they are still seeking to exclude. That is reported to us. Also the fact that there seems to be a view that there is something untoward about the adopters and their family, and the way in which they are interrogated, when they are actually merely providing a permanent family for a child, albeit internationally, is really quite unacceptable. Naomi Angell: There are two other things that I would flag up. One is quite technical and I think it is probably something that would be better addressed in detail when we submit some more written evidence. This is within English adoption proceedings when you have to re-adopt in this country to get the recognition, there are requirements that a child should have their home with the family for certain periods of time, which is different depending on the circumstances. The least time is, in a way, for the least risky cases and the most time that the child has to have their home with the family is for the most risky cases, and there is the issue whether safeguards should be the greatest. An example of this is the children who come into this country for another purpose, maybe for a family visit, for medical reasons or for educational reasons and the child ends up staying here and a British family makes an adoption application. That child has to have had their home with that family for three out of the last five years, unless they apply to the court for leave—before they can even start their adoption application—for that period to be shortened. In my mind, those are very risky adoptions, where there should be the maximum surveillance and safeguarding by local authorities at the earliest possible time. The ones that have the least period of time are the ones that are completely compliant. Yes, they should have a short period of time, but when we gave evidence in relation to the 2002 Bill it was about there needing to be much shorter periods for those miscellaneous non compliant adoptions—I think there are potentially huge risks. Otherwise— and I do not know if this is an area that the Committee is interested in—there are the outgoing

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Intercountry Adoption Centre (IAC)—Oral evidence (QQ 412–436) adoptions to countries, where the UK is the state of origin and children are going abroad for adoption. I do not know whether that falls within your remit. The Chairman: I am not sure whether it does or it does not, but I am also looking at the clock. Could we leave you to discuss this with the secretariat afterwards? We will be in touch with you about that, and if there is anything more to be said, perhaps we could use your good offices to help us. I want to move us on because we are running out of time, and there are some questions on post-adoption support, which we would like to raise with you. Q434 Baroness Hamwee: On that last one, outgoing adoption, I think it would be very helpful to have a note because it goes back to the pool of prospective adopters. You have talked about differences in support, and particularly attitude pre-adoption. Can you tell us if there are similar distinctions post-adoption? Your written evidence has reminded us that the assessment of the need for post-adoption support applies to whether it is domestic or intercountry, but are there differences in attitude and are there differences, particularly in practical support, I suppose, between intercountry and domestic? You have particularly mentioned schools, so I might have a follow-up on that. Gill Haworth: I speak anecdotally, obviously from feedback that we have had and from people returning to our agency. These are straitened times, and I think post-adoption support has always been something that has been underresourced. People are now well aware that adoption has a lifelong impact and adoption is not the end; it is the beginning of a different part of the journey. But funds and resources to support adoption are limited, and funds for adults affected by adoption are non-existent and very hard to raise income streams for. The perception of our adopters is that it follows through that they were doing something that was not quite as legitimate as domestic adoption in the first place and therefore, in a way, they are somehow less deserving of the scarce resources. That is the perception; whether it is actually borne out in reality is difficult to evidence. But I think there is a real weakness in there being only a duty to provide an assessment and not a duty to provide what is assessed as needed. Q435 Viscount Eccles: I précis the question: is there a need for more to be done about the information about both families and circumstances of adoption to children adopted from abroad? Gill Haworth: To some degree we are in the hands of the overseas country. It is always possible for the central authority, at the early stages of the placement, to request more information. As an accredited agency, we can do that in relation to the countries where we are a partner agency, but the information that is provided at the early stages is very varied. It is also very difficult to verify some of the information because placing children for adoption is a huge stigma in some of the overseas countries, and so birth families protect themselves by perhaps not giving the most accurate of details. There are challenges in that way. The Swedish Central Authority is looking at what can be done at a government level to be the first place that people can contact if they want to have more information, and to be the repository of records, which is not the case at the moment for the UK, where the central authority for England does not keep records at all. I think I am correct in saying that we are the only agency that provides some sort of place that people can come to if they have a cross-border or international search. It is something that will

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Intercountry Adoption Centre (IAC)—Oral evidence (QQ 412–436) be resource heavy, but there could be a mechanism for the central authority to link with other central authorities in states of origin to actually smooth the path for people who are either seeking information or seeking to reunite with family members. Q436 Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top: I know that, for example—and again being anecdotal—children adopted from China have a big convention every year and everyone goes along and they meet other children who look like them, and all the rest of it, which is probably as far as they are going to get in terms of identity and recognition of identity, so the kids from the same orphanage will meet together and this sort of thing. As an agency, are you helping to inform people who contact you that those sorts of things are possible, and that you would encourage that in other ways for other nationalities and that sort of thing? Gill Haworth: Yes, absolutely, and we do put people in touch. We host the International Searchers group, which is a group of adult adopted people or those permanently placed where their placement has an international or cross-border element. They meet three times a year. Some of those are domestically adopted people. We have supported the formation of the Indian support group, Asha. We assisted the Pakistan group to set up as a group here, and we have a very central role in doing that. We have a responsibility as an accredited agency for India to actually bring together children from India regularly. That is part of our responsibility that we sign up for. Similarly, we would have a role with the Philippines. I would say that the Philippines and China, in particular, are very keen that we work with them around root visits, going back to the original country, so that is in embryonic form and it probably will have its impact some way ahead when the children are older, but that is certainly a responsibility of ours as an accredited agency. Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top: That could be something that the Government could think about in terms of the whole framework of encouraging that sort of relationship with countries that people are adopting from. That is interesting. The Chairman: We have covered a lot of ground, and thank you very much for being very patient with us and answering our questions. We are grateful to you for coming. We have clearly hinted towards the possibility of a little more homework coming from you, for which we are very grateful. It would be helpful if you could explore with the secretariat the issues around children leaving this country on intercountry adoption, and we will get a better feel for that. On immigration, what I would just say is that, although there is a lot of material in your evidence about some of the issues around this area, which is very complicated, I can tell you, from my own experience within the Home Office, that getting changes to immigration procedures and rules is extraordinarily difficult, so I think we need to have a key set of messages from you on the priorities that you would see in that area, because there are battlegrounds, frankly, there. Thank you very much for coming, and thank you for the further bits of work that you will kindly be doing for us.

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Intercountry Adoption Centre (IAC)—Supplementary written evidence

Intercountry Adoption Centre (IAC)—Supplementary written evidence Introduction This supplementary memorandum is written further to our Memorandum of Evidence dated 23 July 2012 and to our oral evidence given to the Select Committee on 16 October 2012. Our written evidence sets out the range of changes which we consider should be urgently addressed. In preparing this supplementary evidence IAC has taken advice from the Immigration Law Practitioners Association (ILPA)73 Priorities for legislative change 1.

Safeguarding

Overall priority should be given to changes to legislation which will enhance the safeguards for children. 1.1 The proposed changes to the Designated List, alongside the revocation of section 14 of the Adoption and Children Act 2006 Act, will reduce the risk to children from being adopted overseas and brought into the UK without the adopter having been properly prepared, thoroughly assessed and without the adoption having proper official oversight. We hope these changes will be implemented at the earliest possible moment. 1.2 There should be no occasion where a child is left without a body or person having parental responsibility for them as happens in some intercountry adoption cases and we would urge that a legal remedy be sought. We have made some suggestions as to possible steps in our written evidence and there may be others. 1.3 Amendment to the Schools Admission Code to be amended to include children who were adopted, or placed for adoption, overseas prior to coming to the UK in the group who would be afforded priority in the admission process. This would enhance any adoption support programme available to the children and families concerned. 2.

Increasing the pool of domestic adopters

73 The Immigration Law Practitioners’ Association (ILPA) is a professional membership association the majority of whose members are barristers, solicitors and advocates practising in all aspects of immigration, asylum and nationality law. Academics, non-governmental organisations and individuals with an interest in the law are also members. Established over 25 years ago, ILPA exists to promote and improve advice and representation in immigration, asylum and nationality law through an extensive programme of training and disseminating information and by providing evidence-based research and opinion. ILPA is represented on numerous Government bodies, including UK Border Agency, and other consultative and advisory groups.

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Intercountry Adoption Centre (IAC)—Supplementary written evidence In England and Wales the Adoption Register reports a considerable and widening gap between the number of referrals of children and prospective adopters. One possible and feared outcome is that many of those registered children will never be placed with an adoptive family. 2.1 The Hague Convention provides for a child to be placed in intercountry adoption when s/he cannot be care for in any suitable fashion in his or her original country. When the UK implemented the Hague Convention in 2003, it brought into effect provision for children to be placed outside the UK under the Convention. IAC believes that the Department for Education will have had some experience of these types of adoption placements but so far as we are aware has not published regular annual statistics. It is IAC’s understanding that the only “outgoing” placements made to date have been with relatives or “connected” people, where local authorities have pursued the duty placed upon them by the Adoption and Children Act 2002 to explore such potential placements prior to considering adoptive placements with strangers. The most common circumstances in which these placements are considered are set out in our written evidence at 6.2. Our written evidence also sets out the systemic obstacles to achieving such placements with adopters who are deemed to be suitable. Addressing these challenges will, we are sure, increase the numbers of adoptive families for some children. Section 84 cases outside the Convention with relatives and connected people are also challenged by the 10 week qualifying period in order to make an adoption application and our recommended changes, if implemented, would facilitate these placements as well. There is further scope to increase the numbers of potential adoptive families for looked after children, perhaps considerably. Legal provision is already in place for the necessary cooperation between the UK and other contracting States to the Convention, in order to receive applications for the adoption of children habitually resident in the UK by prospective adopters habitually resident in other contracting States, whether or not the prospective adopters have a pre-existing link to the child. From contacts with IAC’s Advice Line, we are aware of the interest from people living overseas, often British nationals, in adopting children from the UK and the existing provision could be used to facilitate this. We appreciate there is likely to be considerable opposition to such a proposal but we recommend that serious consideration be given to giving life to that provision and facilitating outgoing adoptions, particularly in relation to ex patriates who are only temporarily living abroad and will be re-settling in this country in the future. This could be introduced in respect of prospective adopters from all contracting States or could be limited to those with which the UK establishes an additional bi-lateral agreement over and above the Convention. There is, for example an extremely strong argument for a bi-lateral agreement with Ireland, in which country IAC understands there are many more prospective adopters than there are children waiting for domestic adoption. The UK could follow precedents set by established States of origin, by limiting applications to those for children with a certain profile, e.g. children over 4 years, sibling groups or children with disability. As with other contracting States, eligibility criteria for adopters could be tightly drawn e.g. by prioritising applications from British nationals or those from English speaking households and

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Intercountry Adoption Centre (IAC)—Supplementary written evidence where, if contact arrangements are envisaged for the child, such arrangements could be honoured. 2.2 Approved and waiting intercountry adopters in the UK might provide a further addition, if more limited in numbers than the above recommendation, to the pool of families available for the placement of looked after children. Whilst we would not go so far as to recommending a dual domestic and intercountry approval, the provision of a national register of approved intercountry adopters who would be willing to be considered for a domestic placement might increase the potential for such matches to be made, especially if there is more flexibility for intercountry adopters to move to domestic adoption without necessarily relinquishing their intercountry approval prior to the conclusion of the domestic match. 2.3 Statistics are illusive in intercountry adoption. The small numbers of inbound or outbound adoptions prevent the Department for Education publishing meaningful statistics on the adoptions in which they have a role because of Data Protection considerations. A proportion of outbound placements which are conducted outside the convention procedures may take place without any Departmental involvement. It is not, therefore, possible to assist the Select Committee in establishing the current pattern. 3.

Immigration

3.1 It would appear to IAC that there has been a change of ethos and practice in the UK Border Agency since the reduction in the number of diplomatic posts processing these applications through the introduction of a “hub and spoke” system. We would recommend the following changes to process and practice: 

 



Where prospective adopters are seeking to apply for an assessment in respect of a known child, a process is introduced whereby the Home Office can consider the merits of any potential application for the child’s entry, prior to the prospective adopters embarking on the assessment process; Applications for visas or British passports for adopted children are no longer being afforded priority for visa and passport applications, we would urge that this is reinstated. Difficulties in obtaining visas and passports for children are not limited to applications made in non-Convention, non-Designated countries. Visas and passport are being delayed in relation Convention Adoptions where the child may well have British nationality automatically on the making of an adoption order and are delayed or refused in relation to Designated List adoptions where the adoption is recognised in the UK. A comprehensive programme of education and training for those handling these applications is urgently required. As the numbers of international adoptions are relatively low, entry clearance officials do not have the opportunity to develop familiarity and knowledge of the applicable immigration rules. They may seek to impose increased additional requirements not found in the immigration rules, or to second guess decisions of competent family courts. In IAC’s opinion a specialist team should be established to deal with visa and passport 611

Intercountry Adoption Centre (IAC)—Supplementary written evidence

   

applications as soon as is practicable. The numbers of applications per year are unlikely to exceed 200 and arguably will be far fewer. Savings on review and appeals processes are likely to compensate for any additional costs involved in implementing this proposal. Applications should be processed to the fullest extent possible prior to the adopters travelling to the country for the visa/passport appointment in order that the visa/passport can be issued within days of that appointment. Clear timescales should be established which reflect a child’s sense of time and which are clearly communicated to the adopters to facilitate their planning for placement and return to the UK Where the entry clearance officer is not satisfied, prompt communication with DfE should be effected for queries to be addressed promptly. This was common practice in the past but seems rarely now to happen; Where applications are refused, appeals should be heard promptly. It is IAC’s experience that these refusals are usually overturned on appeal but frequently take many months to be heard.

There is a real need to focus on the families and children affected by these processes, so that they are not bureaucratic hurdles but genuine protective devices for children and that there is an overriding concern for the welfare of adoptive/ adopted children and a focus on their rights to family life with the people who are, or who they see to be, their legal parents and siblings. 3.2. Changes to the immigration rules Permanent residence In our written evidence at paragraph 5.3, we point out that UK immigration rules have overlaid the Hague Convention requirement that a prospective adopter should be ‘habitually resident’ in the UK with the immigration concept of ‘settlement’, or in the case of citizens of the European Union, ‘permanent residence’. In almost all categories of the immigration rules, settlement or permanent residence is now achieved only after a minimum of five years residence in the UK. Requiring a prospective adopting family to have resided in the UK for five years does not reflect the realities of a global economy, where individuals move countries for employment reasons. The family rules for temporary resident visa classes do not make any provision for the entry and stay of adopted children of the family. In respect of EU nationals, IAC is advised that requiring EU citizens to have permanent residence before permitting international adoption is arguably a restriction on their rights of freedom of movement within the EU and a breach of their rights under Directive 2004/38/EC74 as well as under the Treaties. The requirement for a prospective adopter to have settled immigration status to sponsor a child under the immigration rules, and it follows therefore in order to be assessed on their

Directive 2004/38/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 29 April 2004 on the right of citizens of the Union and their family members to move and reside freely within the territory of the Member States. 74

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Intercountry Adoption Centre (IAC)—Supplementary written evidence suitability to adopt, should be replaced. It is enough in family law (and meets the provision of the Hague Convention) that the adopter is habitually resident. Review of Immigration Rules so far as they relate to adoption The immigration rules for all bar Hague Convention adoptions, require that the prospective adopted child has broken ties with his or her family of origin and that the original parents are incapable of caring for the child. 75 There is no parallel with these requirements in family law, and there is a tension with adoption practice where it is recognised that there may be benefit to the adopted child in the longer term for there to be contact ( albeit not necessarily direct or face to face) with birth family members and this may be encouraged. Public Information and Changes There is little accessible and explicable information concerning adoption and immigration provided by UKBA or currently by the Department for Education. Public information on Intercountry Adoption and the Immigration Rules should be accessible to all who are thinking about intercountry adoption and provided in plain English. Any proposed changes should be subject to consultation across government departments and more widely to ensure that impact, perhaps unintentional, on the intercountry adoption process and applications in train can be anticipate76. 5 November 2012 Addendum to Supplementary Written Evidence Introduction At points 2.1 and 2.3 of Intercountry Adoption Centre’s supplementary evidence dated 5 November 2012, reference is made to the fact that statistics on outbound adoptions are not centrally held and that as a result of the low numbers and data protection considerations, publication of data by the Department for Education is limited. The following information has been collated from other data sources. This is a partial view, as it reflects the placement of children to Convention countries only. The data at Tables 2 and 3 is UK wide and may , therefore, refer to placements of children not resident in England or Wales.

75 76

See, for example paragraph 316A (vi) (vii) of HC 395. Immigration law is complex as the senior judiciary have repeatedly acknowledged: “I am left perplexed and concerned how any individual whom the Rules affect … can discover what the policy of the Secretary of State actually is at any particular time if it necessitates a trawl through Hansard or formal Home Office correspondence as well as through the comparatively complex Rules themselves. It seems that it is only with expensive legal assistance, funded by the taxpayer, that justice can be done”. AA(Nigeria) v SSHD [2010] EWCA Civ 773, Court of Appeal, Lord Justice Longmore at Para 87.

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Intercountry Adoption Centre (IAC)—Supplementary written evidence Table 1 England as a State of Origin Convention Adoptions 2007 – 2009 Year

Total

2007

10

2008

8

2009

4

Source: Information submitted to The Hague Permanent Bureau by the English Central Authority Table 2 USA as a Receiving State Convention Adoptions or Entrustments from the UK 2005 - 2009 Year

Total

2005

4

2006

8

2007

3

2008

5

2009

5

Source: Information submitted to The Hague Permanent Bureau by the USA Central Authority (2010)

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Intercountry Adoption Centre (IAC)—Supplementary written evidence Table 3 Receiving States Children placed from the UK Country

Year 2007

Australia Canada

Total

2008 2009 2010 2011

2 3

6

France

2 4

18

4

14

45

2

2

Malta

1

Sweden

4

1

1

Switzerland

1 6

1

1

USA

3

3

3

2

9

20

Total

8

13

10

23

25

79

Source: Dr. Peter Selman, Visiting Fellow, Newcastle University and Research and Literature Advisor to Intercountry Adoption Centre, compiled from information provided by central authorities/other relevant bodies in receiving States.

6 November 2012 (Addendum)

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Interdisciplinary Alliance for Children—Written evidence

Interdisciplinary Alliance for Children—Written evidence 1 INTRODUCTION AND SUMMARY OF CONCERNS 1.1 The Interdisciplinary Alliance for Children includes a wide range of organisations and associations from the fields of law, medicine and social work. Its members have many years collective experience as family justice professionals representing children and families in family courts. The overriding concern of the Interdisciplinary Alliance for Children (IAC) is that the rights and welfare of children remain at the heart of policy and practice. 1.2 A focus by the House of Lords Select Committee on adoption, whilst providing a welcome opportunity, needs to be placed in the context of safeguarding all children who cannot live with their birth parents and are therefore ‘looked after’ (LAC) by the local authority, regardless of the route through which they arrive at that status. 1.3 We very much welcomes the opportunity to submit specific evidence to the Committee with regard to the IRO service and court scrutiny of care plans: 

We have several concerns about a proposed dilution of the duty of the court to scrutinise key details in care plans, and with regard to the functioning of the IRO service. These two issues are inextricably linked; if court scrutiny is reduced in the absence of improvements in the capacity of the IRO service to safeguard LAC children it will place such children at unacceptable risk.



We are concerned that tensions between the corporate focus of local authorities regarding child populations and the focus of courts on the welfare of the individual child have not been fully explored. Thus, the benefits for individual children which result from the focus of the court as determined by s1 of the Children Act 1989 and the failures of the IRO service in the context of the current corporate framework have not been made sufficiently public.



We have a number of substantive concerns in relation to the functioning of the IRO service. These centre on the ineffectiveness of the service in protecting the rights and welfare of looked after children and the consequent potential risk of breach of their human rights under Articles 8, 6 and 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms 1950 as incorporated into the Human Rights Act 1989, and under Articles 3,9, and 12 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.



The IRO service in theory at least constitutes the major safeguard for children and young people once they enter the public care system. If the service is insufficiently

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Interdisciplinary Alliance for Children—Written evidence



independent and ineffective in protecting and representing children, that has serious implications for all placement policies including adoption. With regard to care plans filed in proceedings, effective safeguards are necessary so that these are developed with an independent input on behalf of the child (from the child’s guardian and legal representative). Plans should be subject to scrutiny by the court as being in the individual child’s best interests, this being part of the necessary checks and balances on state intervention, exercised as part of judicial discretion, where children can no longer live with birth parents.

CARE PLANNING AND THE ROLE OF THE COURT 2 Proposals of the Family Justice Review and Government’s response 2.1 In its final report the Family Justice Review recommended:  ‘Courts should refocus on the core issues of whether the child is to live with parents and other family or friends, or be removed to the care of the local authority. Other aspects and the detail of the care plan should be the responsibility of the local authority, thus,  When determining whether a care order is in a child’s best interests the court will not normally need to scrutinise the full detail of a local authority care plan for a child.’77 2.2 Despite the fact that a number of children’s organisations and representatives raised concerns about this proposal and the likely impact for children – not least in a climate of substantially reduced local authority resources - Government accepted those recommendations, albeit with little hard evidence that a focus on care planning of itself increases cost and delayed cases disproportionately.78 2.3 Section 5 of the draft legislation therefore aims to amend s.31 (3A) of the Children Act 198979 which states that no care order may be made…until the court has considered a section 31A plan. The proposed amendment states: (3A) a court in deciding whether to make a care order (a) is required to consider permanence provisions of the section 31A plan for the child concern, but (b) is not required to consider the remainder of the section 31A plan.

the

Section (3B) of the draft states that for the purposes of subsection (3A) the permanence provisions of a section 31A plan are such that the plan’s provisions set out in the long term plan for the upbringing of the child concerned as provide for any of the following:

Family Justice Review – Final Report (2011), Para 3.18. See, page 52 recommendations 60, 61 and 62, in MoJ & DfE (2012) The Government Response to the Family Justice Review: A System with Children and Families at its Heart. Cm 8273. 79 Draft legislation on Family Justice (Sept 2012) Section 5 – Care plans. Cm 8437. 77 78

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Interdisciplinary Alliance for Children—Written evidence (a) the child to live with any parent of the child’s or with any other member of, or any friends of, the child’s family; (b) adoption; and, (c) long-term care not within paragraph (a) or (b). 2.4 Our concerns are compounded by the fact that if the role of the court is routinely reduced there will be an accompanying curtailment of the scope of the investigations undertaken by the child’s guardian’s and this will have a significant limiting impact on the independent safeguards for children in proceedings. 3

Tensions between corporate focus of the local authority and that of the court under s.1 of the Children Act 1989 3.1 While we do recognise social workers try extremely hard to do what is best for children, there is some inevitable tension between the corporate focus of local authority managers and the individual focus of the court on the particular child and his/her needs. The managers of children’s services must have regard to the needs of all children their area – those designated as in need of services and those for which they have responsibilities as ‘looked-after’ children (whether placed under s.20 CA1989 – or as a consequence of a care order under s.31 of the Act). 3.2 Local authority decision making is subject to factors in addition to the best interests principle as this relates to the individual child subject to proceedings. Decisions by front line social workers may be overturned by managers for a whole range of reasons (e.g. managers may be more risk adverse, less willing to devote time and money to a family – with the aim of rehabilitation of a child in the longer term – or through pressures to meet government targets). Thus the 1989 Children Act and the court provide an important protection for the individual child: the child is separately represented and s.1 asserts the primacy of the welfare of the child over other concerns and these include the corporate imperatives of the local authority. 3.3 As indicated above, an important aspect of the judge’s role in scrutinizing the care plan is to consider whether the services required by the child are or will be in place. Without such services, the child might be left at risk of harm or the placement of a vulnerable child may be at significant risk of breakdown. Scarce resources often mean that a local authority is reluctant to commit to the provision of support services for children placed pursuant to care orders.80 3.4 Similarly, a local authority may not willingly provide appropriate financial support postplacement. There is for example, an indication that some social workers may be less than transparent with birth parents during the process of adoption about why things happen; parents however report judges are very clear.81 The judge has power to decline to approve a care plan because it fails to specify the financial or other support to be provided post-placement; this is an important safeguard which parliament should not remove and certainly not in the absence of

Family Law Bar Association (2012) Response to the House of Lords Justice Select Committee Consultation: Pre-legislative Scrutiny of the Children and Families Bill. 81 House of Lords Select Committee, uncorrected evidence 16 October 2012, Lynn Charlton, ‘After Adoption’. 80

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Interdisciplinary Alliance for Children—Written evidence clear evidence of other safeguards which are independent of the local authority and transparent in practice. 4 Care planning and court scrutiny 4.1 We have very serious concerns about the plan to curtail the work of the judge in scrutinising the care plan for children and do not agree with proposals to limit the judge's role in this regard. Indeed this may well be an unlawful interference with the duty of the court to treat the child’s welfare as paramount and with the exercise of judicial discretion in applying the welfare checklist as set out in s1(3) of the Children Act 1989. 4.2 If the court’s role in scrutinising a child’s care plan is curtailed, there remains a distinct lack of clarity about what information and level of detail the court will require regarding the care plan - and despite policy debate; in practice as case law clearly sets out it “is not an easy line to draw”.82 Indeed as members of the Alliance pointed out to the Review, proposals for care plans do not take account of the true state of the law on this issue, which is clearly set out in the 2002 judgment of the House of Lords, Re S(Minors)(Care order: implementation of care plan);Re W (Care orders: adequacy of care plan)83. The judgment of Lord Nicholls includes a careful analysis of the history and nature of the difficulties, and sets out fully how a court needs to approach this issue in the interests of children. The Family Justice Review, while stating that its proposals would modify existing practices in so far as it would specify what is a sufficiently firm and particularised plan84 – gave no further details. 4.3 Moreover, the Family Justice Review and proposals failed to address the benefits which court oversight has on local authority planning and decision-making for children. For example, the care plan can stipulate the provision of resources to meet the needs of the child which would otherwise not have been made available, it can also include the provision of support necessary for placement of a child with a relative - that placement only being a viable option for the child if support is part of the agreed plan signed-off by the court. 4.4 It is simply unrealistic to suggest that these resources will be provided for every child that needs them as part of a care plan without the oversight and input of the court and that concerns for children in care such as issues of contact with birth parents, siblings and other family members will be resolved according to the rights and welfare of children unencumbered by any other concerns. It should, for example, be remembered that s34 of the Children Act 1989 was introduced because of evidence that family contact for LAC children withered away when left to local authorities. And moreover, that provision was introduced during a period where local authority resources were considerably greater than in the current economic circumstances and following further reductions to public spending.

In paragraph 4.159 of the interim report the Review Panel observe, on the question of how much detail a court requires “is not an easy line to draw”. Lord Nicholls, at paragraph 100 of his judgment puts it this way: “Cases vary so widely that it is impossible to be more precise about the test to be applied by a court when deciding whether to continue interim relief rather than proceed to make a care order.” 83 [2002] 1 FLR 836, per Lord Nicholls, in paragraphs 89 to 102. 84 Para 3.34, Family Justice Review Final Report (2011). 82

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Interdisciplinary Alliance for Children—Written evidence 5 Intention of the Children Act 1989 as to the role of the court in care planning 5.1 Whatever the original intention as to the court’s role in scrutinising the detail of care plans for children,85 concerns about plans and compliance with children’s assessed best interests under the welfare checklist - and provision of the services necessary to meet plans has resulted in the court giving necessary scrutiny to care plans as these are developed during the life of proceedings (see below, section 6). 5.2 The reasons for that development are set out in case law and in evidence to the Family Justice Review and we will not set out case studies here86 but we would reiterate that there are key issues regarding whether a child should be placed in residential or foster placement, issues of sibling placement and contact with parents, siblings and other significant people in a children’s life, along with health, educational and therapeutic needs (see below, section 5); these are features and services that are essential to the success of a plan so far as the child is concerned. We do not accept that this development in the role of the court in ensuring this information forms part of a child’s plan causes unnecessary delay for children and is a waste of time and money.87 5.3 For example, as was identified for the Review, with regard to future contact, where a child is not going to be returned to the parents’ care, it is important for all parties, including the children, to have a clear picture of what will change, and what the proposals are. Plans are not, of course, written in stone, and the review process may decide that arrangements need to be modified, but it is difficult to see how any party could be satisfied with a plan which baldly states that contact will be “regular” or “limited”. These terms are very imprecise. Monthly contact might be considered by different people to be regular, or limited. Contact, whether regular or limited, might be for one hour at a social services office, or for five hours outside, based on some activity.88 6

The value of clinical knowledge and expertise in the detail of planning for children 6.1 Nor do we consider that the court is limited to children’s needs at one point in time89; one aspect of the work of expert child and adolescent psychiatrists providing a large number of assessments of children with a range of social and mental health needs is that they are able to make longer term recommendations for children based on current needs and likely progression over time - given levels and types of maltreatment, individual children’s responses and as these are likely to develop over time. 6.2 A key finding from research on the work of experts in this field is that child psychiatrists see this area of work as a key contribution; they argued that addressing the question of ‘where do we go from here’ – is one of the best pieces of work and expertise they can offer to courts It was suggested to the Review (see Para 3.16, Final Report (2011)) that the court’s current scrutiny of the care plan goes beyond what was originally envisaged by the Children Act (quoting a submission from Lord Phillips and Lady Hale). 86 See for example, the evidence of the Association of Lawyers for Children to the FJR, paragraph 9 – case studies; evidence of the Family Law Bar Association to same. 87 Para 3.17 FJR ibid. 88 ALC see note 10 above. 89 Para 3.17 – FJR Ibid. 85

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Interdisciplinary Alliance for Children—Written evidence and parties.90 This information can include type of placement and what support needs should be put in place to enable it to succeed, the therapeutic needs of the child now and over time, and issues of contact with parents, siblings, and other significant people in a child’s life. That these children are highly vulnerable is unquestionable - that is why clinicians, on the basis of a daily clinical practice and training in dealing with highly such children, are able to help courts but also local authority applicants in developing the best plan for care, support and treatment tailored to the need of the particular child. Such plans are more likely to be cost effective, because they are tailored to needs. 6.3 A post hoc review of ‘breakdown rates’ does not obviate the need to ensure the best plans are explored. Moreover the starting point for a judge is not that ‘local authorities per se are incompetent’91 but rather the quality of the proposed plan presented for the particular child. Courts undertake this task and the frequency with which they have to do so is reflected in evidence to the Review. And while robust outcome data is limited – and the methodology necessarily complex - practitioners (guardians, judges and child care lawyers) remain in little doubt that the involvement of the court can and does improve plans for vulnerable children.92 6.4 That plans may need to change where circumstances subsequently change is not an argument for dispensing with judicial oversight – indeed early studies of care plans indicated these change only where there was good reason – not because the local authority felt the final plan agreed by the court was wrong/inappropriate.93 It is simplistic to suggest, in the absence of other data,94 that placement breakdown rates per se indicate a lack of robustness/failure of judicial decisions as to the best plan for a particular child. 7 Plans are a dynamic tool 7.1 It should be remember that the plan for a child is frequently unclear at the start of proceedings – indeed research evidence indicates many applications for a care order (some 40%) start without a relevant core assessment of children and parents and a care plan for the child. This is despite the finding that many children (one study noted over 50%) were already living away from parents at the start of proceedings (voluntarily accommodated under s.20 of the CA 1989); they should therefore have had a care plan.95 7.2 Within proceedings, the care plan is an evolving document; it is drafted and amended as assessments are completed and issues of fact and findings of the court as to threshold and significant harm are established. Key in this process is the welfare test regarding whether parents have the capacity and willingness to change to meet children’s needs; until that evidence is filed the short and long term plan for children cannot safely be determined. See, Brophy et al (2001) Child Psychiatry and Child Protection Litigation. Royal College of Psychiatrists/Gaskill: London. Pp 32-55. 91 See Para 3.27, FJR op cit. 92 See evidence from the ALC, the FLBA and the FJC. 93 Harwin J, Owen M, Locke R and Forester A (1999) Making care Orders Work; Hunt J and Macleod A (1999) The Best-Laid Plans: Outcomes of Judicial Decisions in Child Protection (but see also Wade et al (2010) Maltreated Children in the looked after system: A comparison of outcomes for those who will go home and those who will not. DfE; Farmer E and Lutman E (2010) Case management and outcomes for neglected children returned to their parents: A five year follow-up study. Now, DfE. 94 See Para 3.25, FJR op cit. 95 See, Brophy J (2006) Research review: Care Proceedings under the Children Act 1989. DCA Research Series 5/06; Jessiman P, Keogh P and Brophy J (2009) An Early Evaluation of the PLO. Research Series 10/09. MoJ: London. 90

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Interdisciplinary Alliance for Children—Written evidence

7.3 Equally worrying so far as the implementation of plans are concerned is the lack of information about whether/how IROs ensure a local authority takes forward the health recommendations made for children during expert assessments within proceedings (see below the IRO service). Some child and family psychiatrists instructed as expert witnesses in cases report they now have no idea if the recommendations they make following a detailed assessment of children and parents are in fact taken forward by local CAMHS.96 7.4 There was a period when such experts would check with local services as to the capacity and ability of a local CAHMS to take forward treatment recommendations planned for the court report. That is some concern that this no longer happens as local health services struggle to meet the clinical needs of children in the local child population and are often unable to meet additional demands resulting from court proceedings. This requires further investigation. Notwithstanding the formal provisions of s.27 of the Children Act 1989 and subsequently developments (e.g. care planning and review regulations, statutory guidance97 and local partnerships between health and children’s services etc) it rather begs the question of whether in practice, IROs are able to engage enabling provisions and powers to ensure maltreated children receive the health services they need as these were formally agreed by the court and incorporated into a care plan. 7.5 The legislative change being proposed, if implemented, would risk undermining key principles of family justice. As the Finer Committee warned when considering the vision of a family court: ‘The object of achieving welfare must not be permitted to weaken or shortcut the normal safeguards of the judicial process’ The Finer committee saw the formal court process as ‘a bulwark against any dangers from social systems, theories or ideologies swaying the decision makers and a consequent loss of public confidence in impartiality and independence.’98 We concur with that view and think it is of particular relevance in relation to the enhanced role and responsibilities envisaged for the Independent Reviewing Officer Service. THE INDEPENDENT REVIEWING OFFICER SERVICE FOR ‘LOOKED AFTER’ CHILDREN 8 The introduction of the IRO Service 8.1 IROs were introduced by s118 Adoption and Children Act 2002 to fill the legislative lacuna created by the lack of court review powers in the Children Act 1989 (CA 1989). The Court of Appeal case of Re W and B99 highlighted a group of looked after children who lacked an effective remedy where the local authority failed to meet its statutory responsibilities to them.

Concerns by child mental health experts about the capacity of local CAHMS to take forward the treatment they recommend for children were again raised by mental health experts following evidence to the (2010-11) House of Commons Justice Committee on the operation of the family courts (personal communication). 97 For example, see note 27 below. 98 DHSS (1974) Report of the Committee on One Parent Families. Cmnd 5629 Vol.1 at para 485 pp.174-175. London. HMSO. 99 Re W and B; Re W (Care Plan) [2001] EWCA Civ 757, [2001] 2 FLR 582. 96

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Interdisciplinary Alliance for Children—Written evidence 8.2 In the absence of a robust and effective remedy for this group of children, courts had introduced a catogory of ‘starred’ care plan. This provided a mechanism through which the court was enabled to require the child’s guardian to monitor the local authorities’ implementation of the care plan as this final plan was negotiated and agreed by the court. 8.3 The House of Lords (now the Supreme Court) subsequently rejected starred care plans when the case came before it as Re S 100 in 2002; it argued such a procedure was beyond the statutory powers of the court. However the House of Lords did acknowlege that there was a lack of effective representation and route to redress for children once in the care of the local authority. S118 Adoption and Children Act 2002 therefore amended s26 CA 1989 to require local authorities to appoint an IRO for every looked after child and the service was established in September 2004. 8.4 In the event of a breach of a looked-after child’s human rights, s25 b(3)(a) CA 1989 provides a route for IROs to refer the case to Cafcass Legal whose function was extended to enable it to consider bringing legal proceedings on behalf of the child. The action could include judicial review and claims for breaches of the child’s human rights. 8.5 Unfortunately the legislation did not require the IRO service to be independent of the local authority. Consequently, the service has always suffered from an inbuilt conflict of interests because IROs are employed by the very local authority they are required – on behalf of individual children - to challenge with regard to the detail of the care plan and to ensure that the local authority carries out its responsibilities iin loco parentis in a timeley and appropriate manner. The conflicts of interest inherent in the local authority employing and managing the IRO service will become all the more relevant if the level iof court scrutiny of local authority care plans is reduced as proposed in the Bill. 9 9.1

The duties of the IRO These include:  ensuring that the agreed care plan continues to meet the needs of the child;  ensuring that the child is consulted and that their voice is heard in all reviews and planning meetings when decisions are being made about their care;  challenging the local authority if they – or the child – has concerns about the decisions being made in relation to the child; and,  referring the case to Cafcass Legal to consider intiating legal proceedings on behalf of the child;

10

The effectiveness of the IRO

100

Re S, House of Lords, 14 March 2002, previously known as Re W, W and B.

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Interdisciplinary Alliance for Children—Written evidence 10.1 From its inception, questions have been raised about the effectiveness of the IRO service. In 2006 the Green Paper ‘Care Matters’ identified a number of key concerns:  a failure of IROs to challange decisions made by the local authority even in cases where the social work input was poor and not in the child’s interests  a failure to conduct statutory reviews so as to encourage a challenging analysis of the local authorities plans for the child  insufficient weight being given to the child’s own views or those of their parents, carers and other professionals  reviews taking place as part of a sterile box ticking exercise because care plans were not being rigously examined. 10.2 Such was the concern that a provision to enable the IRO service to be removed from local authority administration to Cafcass or an alternative body was included in s11 Children and Young Persons Act 2008. The Act also amended the CA 1989 (s26A) to give the IRO additional new responsibilities to review the local authorities’ performance generally, not just in relation to a particular looked after child. 10.3 The IRO Handbook 2010101 makes it clear that a far more assertive and proactive role in the scrutiny of LA plans - and challenging plans where necessary - is expected from the IRO service. Measures are set out in the guidance and regulations to strengthen the IRO’s capacity to fulfill that responsibility. Two key areas where the regulations were strengthened were, lowering the threshold for referral of cases to Cafcass Legal and spelling out the IROs responsibility to be more proactive in protecting children’s human rights. 10.4 There are therefore three distinct aspects of the role: the first is in relation to ensuring that the care plan meets the needs of the individual child, the second is in relation to reviewing a local authority’s practice and policy generally, and a third relates to the pursuit of human rights challenges by referring individual cases to Cafcass legal. There is, however, little indication that IROs are exploring the full potential of the latter two roles and considerable independent evidence to demonstrate that the IRO service continues to underperform and indeed fail in aspects of its responsibilities to individual children. 11 Concerns about the IRO service 11.1 The IRO service has proved ineffective as an independent safeguard for children in local authority care. Since September 2004 it has been a legal requirement (s118 Adoption and Children Act 2002) for every looked after child to have an IRO to oversee the implementation of the court agreed care plan, to challenge the local authority if necessary and to ensure that See DSCF (2010) IRO Handbook: Statutory guidance for independent reviewing officers and local authorities on their functions in relation to case management and review for looked after children. https://www.education.gov.uk/publications/.../DCSF-00184-2010. 101

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Interdisciplinary Alliance for Children—Written evidence the child has a voice and that their views are represented at all reviews and planning meetings. The service is structurally flawed as all IROs are employed by the same local authorities whose responsibility it is to implement the care plan. From its inception, concerns have been raised that IROs are insufficiently independent and robust in challenging their local authority employers. 11.2 In theory, the link with Cafcass Legal should have provided a powerful axis of challenge; in practice this has not been utilised or developed. It was estimated that at least 100 such cases per year would utilise this route in holding local authorities to account. In practice in eight years there have been just eight referrals to Cafcass (as at November 2011); none of these have resulted in legal action being taken on behalf of the child by CAFCASS Legal. Moreover, the IRO could refer a case to a family lawyer outside Cafcass but in practice this does not happen and the funding rote for such advice is unclear. 11.3 The complete absence of cases indicates that either the route is effectively blocked by the ineffectiveness of the IRO service as an independent, unfettered and robust voice for children; or, as the Family Justice Review panel concluded, the absence of legal challenge was an indication that cases were being resolved through internal negotiation between the IRO and the local authority. We consider that the latter is a dangerously over optimistic view which is not supported by the evidence coming from the children’s independent advocacy organisations and recent court cases. 11.4 In the year 20010/11 NYAS dealt with 8,537 substantive referrals, while Voice recorded over 5,000 for the same period, with some 6069 young people helped/reached in 2011/12 The National Children’s Advocacy Consortium, is a coalition of organisations providing advocacy services or campaigning on policy relating to advocacy for children. Recent reports102 by members of the Consortium highlight the post code lottery in the provision of advocacy services dependent on a range of issues including geography, care status and type of placement. The main independent advocacy providers (NYAS and Voice) illustrate that the top three issues raised by young people were:  changes of placement - often unplanned and without regard for the need for a statutory review,  breaches of their human rights, and  requests for support in their statutory reviews. 11.5 This high level of use of independent advocacy services by looked-after children bears powerful witness to serious concerns about the inadequacies of current IRO system: all the Brady L (2011) Advocacy services for children and young people in England scoping report; NCAC (2012) Listen to me; Pona I and Hounsell D (2012) The value of independent advocacy for looked after children and young people. 102

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Interdisciplinary Alliance for Children—Written evidence children referred to above should have had an IRO. And a further worry feature is that many young people say that they do not trust in house ‘independent’ services. It is also important to stress that while there have been improvements in statutory guidance103 in relation to the provision of independent advocacy there is no statutory right for the child to be represented in any part of administrative care planning and review process. 11.6 The Family Justice Review panel commented on the concerns about the independence of the IROs and their excessively heavy workloads.104 Children’s reviews do not take place with sufficient frequency for IROs to be in a position to monitor the issues for each child in detail or in a timely way. However, they too interpreted the lack of referral to Cafcass as an indication that cases were being satisfactorily resolved through internal dispute resolution - an optimistic assumption which, sadly, is not supported by independent research evidence – which demonstrates that a significant number of children are already living away from parents at the point of proceedings (under a s20 Agreement) but lack a core assessment and care plan. 11.7 It is a measure of the extent of the problem that the National Association for Independent Reviewing officers (NAIRO) wrote to the Minister for Children on 14 May 2012 to inform him that a significant number of IROs were being threatened and intimidated by local authority managers in order to deter them from making challenges to care plans for children. IROs that persist with challenges have been both threatened with and in some cases, subjected to disciplinary action. 11.8 The conflicts of interest and the professional constraints occasioned by the restrictions of an essentially closed in-house service have proved overwhelming for many IROs who do not receive the training, support and independent legal advice they need in order to be an effective safeguard for LAC children. Many IROs have unmanageable caseloads and struggle to see all the children for whom they are responsible. 11.9 A recent poll of 290 members carried out by the British Association of Social Workers105 indicated huge variance in the IRO service across the UK but particularly in England with 87% of respondents indicating caseloads in excess of the maximum of 70 recommended by the 2010 IRO Handbook; 85-100 cases was regarded as normal with indications that some caseloads are as high as high as 200. BASW reported that ‘children caught up in such a system can only expect a raw deal’; only 11% of respondents were confident that children were always seen prior to a review; just 53% thought children were seen ‘most of the time’. As one IRO reported ‘I do not have time to see children separately from the review with a current caseload of 95 plus children’. Para 1.10, The Children Act 1989 Guidance and Regulations, Vol. 2: Care Planning, Placement and Case Review 2010. Para 3.112 - 3.115 FJR op cit. 105 Reported in ‘Professional Social Work’ Nov 2012. BASW. 103 104

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Interdisciplinary Alliance for Children—Written evidence

11.10 The case A and S v Lancs CC [2012] EWHC 1689 (Fam)106 provides a stark example of children who suffered significant harm over a lengthy period while in the care of the local authority and who became ‘statutory orphans’ having been freed for adoption for 11 years without being permanently placed. In that authority the IROs had caseloads of 200 children. The children in the case were brothers aged 16 and 14. One had had been moved 77 times and the other 96. They were subjected to physical and emotional abuse in two of the placements and had suffered lifelong damage as a result of their experience in care. The boys were awarded substantial damages by the judge. The local Authority was deemed to have breached the children’s human rights under Articles 3, 6 and 8 and the IRO under articles 6 and 8.The IRO accepted that he had failed to carry out his role adequately and accepted a number of specific shortcomings including that he ‘had not addressed or monitored the repeated failures of social workers or promoted the rights of A and S107 11.11 As indicated above, the intention underscoring clause 5 of the Bill is to reduce the focus of the court in scrutinizing the detail of care plans, and the child’s guardian and his/her solicitor would be restricted to exploring the category of placement planned for a child. 11.12 A significant consequent of this change will be to give IROs additional responsibilities for looked after children who will be even more dependent on the vigilance and forcefulness of the IRO to ensure that they do not drift in care, deprived of the opportunity for a loving adoptive home or stable permanent placement or perhaps access to the services that will make for a success placement (see above section 7.4). There is no evidence – and indeed we have no confidence given hard evidence to date about the service - that as currently constituted, the IRO service will be able to meet these challenges. Looked after children will therefore remain without an effective voice and access to safeguarding systems on which they depend and to which they are entitled. 12 Conclusion 12.1 Paradoxically, although the legislativeframework of the service and accompanying regulations and guidance are robust and wide ranging, practice fails to explore the full potential of the powers and duties available to the service. This is due in large part to the constraints placed on its independent functioning. However it is also due to the lack of specific training in children’s rights, a lack of access to independent legal advice and excessivly high caseloads. In addition, it appears that local authorities and Cafcass Legal may operate as de facto gatekeepers to the pursuit of human rights challenges. The difficulties of surmounting structural and bureaucratic obstacles to achieve a sucessful resolution for children should not be underestimated. 106 107

http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/Fam/2012/1689.html. A and S v Lancs CC [2012] para 136.

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Interdisciplinary Alliance for Children—Written evidence

12.2 In its evidence to the Family Justice Review the Alliance proposed that the IRO service be removed from local authorities and should be enabled to work much more closely with Children’s Guardians as part of a proposed new independent Children’s Representation Unit. In the event this proposal was not pursued. 12.3 We understand that the continuing pressures on Cafcass – coupled with other concerns and public confidence in the service - mean that it is simply not in a position to take on the responsibility of administering the IRO service. Indeed in the current climate that is not a viable option for the IRO service. However, that position should not prevent other options being explored in the context of a fundamental reform of the service to ensure it becomes - and is seen to be - a child centered, truly independent, transparent service which is fit for purpose. 12.4 A key aim in modernising the family justice system is to reduce delay and work to the child’s timetable. The IRO should play a significant role in improving family justice; if it continues to be ineffective or impeded in its progress by the issues outlined above (conflicts of interest, organisational constraints, lack of training in a children’s rights), that will be to the detriment of the whole public law system as well as to the human rights and welfare of many thousands of looked after children. To this end, we would ask the Government to implement s11 of the Children and Young Person’s Act 2008, which is an existing enabling provision allowing the IRO service to be removed from local authorities; the wording of s11permits consideration of removal to another independent provider. The Association of Lawyers for Children The British Association of Social Workers The National Association of Probation and Family Court Officers The National Association of Children’s Guardians, Family Court Welfare Officers and Independent Social Workers The National Youth Advocacy Service The Family Law Bar Association The Law Society Dr Margaret DeJong, Consultant Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist, Leader – Children and Parent Team, Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children, NHS Trust. Women’s Aid 628

Interdisciplinary Alliance for Children—Written evidence

Voice

629

Nicola Jones-King, Martha Cover, and Ian Bugg—Oral evidence (QQ 622–667)

Nicola Jones-King, Martha Cover, and Ian Bugg—Oral evidence (QQ 622–667) Transcript to be found under Martha Cover

630

Justice for Families—Written evidence

Justice for Families—Written evidence Introduction Justice for Families is an organisation which argues for changes to family law to strengthen the position of the family. Behind this submission is the perspective that Care proceedings are intellectually unreliable in that the decision-making is not a process that produces good outcomes from children and families. This has been recently confirmed by the research of Professor Jane Ireland who concluded that in the 126 cases of care proceedings in the three courts that her team reviewed, the psychological reports were either poor or very poor. The attention of the committee is drawn to A & S (children) and Lancashire County Council [2012] EWHC 1689 (Fam) which is available on Bailli at: http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/Fam/2012/1689.html This case is unusual because it looks at the process of a failed adoption from the perspective of the children. It should be noted that as at 31st March 2011 according to the SSDA903 return there were 250 statutory orphans across England. Questions and responses >a. Do we have the right structure for adoption? No. There remains an obsession with adoption in part driven by the treasury priorities that does not consider the reality of care proceedings. For example if a baby is taken into care because the mother is depressed it should not be thought that a rapid movement to adoption is the correct solution. According to statistics from the DoE prepared for the author of the 3,050 children adopted from care in the year to 31st March 2011 only 2,190 were taken into care because of abuse or neglect. >b. Should we be concerned about the falling number of adoptions? Why are the numbers falling? The numbers have been falling in recent years because the government changed its objective from adoption to achieving “permanence”. This includes special guardianship orders and residency orders. If the total figures for permanence are included then the numbers leaving care to permanence are increasing from 5,500 in 2010 to 5,960 in 2011. The author has more statistics relating to this if the committee is interested.

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Justice for Families—Written evidence It should, however, be noted that the A&S case highlighted above is one in which the box of “permanence” was ticked with one of the children being subject to an SGO. Legislation >a. What impact did the 2002 Act have on the adoption process? >b. Have all aspects of the 2002 and 2006 Acts been implemented appropriately and successfully? There are still many children driven through the adoption process wrongly, but that arises substantially from the failures of the decision making system. >c. Is further legislation required to improve any aspect of the adoption system? It is really a general improvement of decision making relating to care proceedings in the round that is needed. >d. Can you as a respondent identify a problem and tell us if, and if so where, the legislation (including >regulations), needs to change? Time taken in placing children >a. Is excessive time taken in placing children? Do some groups of children take a disproportionate >length of time? The system is viewed too simplistically from the perspective of government. We have also forgotten the concept of trying to return children to their parents. The numbers returning to their parents (remembering the Post Natal Depression issue I highlighted earlier) is still going down. If a child is to be adopted (for example because of abandonment) it is the placement with potential adoptive parents that is key rather than the legal status. >b. What aspects of the adoption process, including pre-process care proceedings, take most time? Again this oversimplifies the analysis of the system. >c. Do the various parts of the system – local authorities, adoption agencies, courts and others – work >effectively together? No. The adversarial system is ill suited to what are in theory therapeutic decisions. >d. Could the adoption process be speeded up, whilst ensuring that necessary safeguards are >preserved?

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Justice for Families—Written evidence The system is failing at the moment. Merely speeding it up is likely to make it go wrong much faster. >e. How widely used is concurrent planning? What are its advantages and disadvantages? It is relatively rare, but it makes prejudgments. Giving again the example of PND, is it a good idea to place the baby of a depressed mother with an adoptive family? >g. Does the recent increase in knowledge about early child development affect the balance between >children’s rights and parental rights? There needs to be urgent research as to the number of adoptive children with reactive attachment disorder and how that has arisen. The author believes from the statistics and Professor Rutter’s research that some of this is caused by the care system. Court proceedings >a. Do court proceedings take undue time in the adoption process? It is a mistake to isolate out the adoption aspect. >b. Would the recommendations of the Family Justice Review substantially alter the position? The FJR is likely to create more miscarriages of justice. >c. How effective are provisions for the representation by guardians of children in court proceedings? It would be better to remove the Guardian ad Litem and instead have an independent social worker assessment. >d. How effective have placement orders been in facilitating the placement and adoption of children >compared with “freeing orders”? It is not clear that there is any substantial difference. >f. How will changes to legal aid impact, if at all, on adoption proceedings? Legal aid rules often prevent parents from contesting proceedings as they often operate on a merits basis. (for example contesting the renewal of an interim care order). 25 June 2012

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Six independent Chairpersons of Adoption Panels, in Kent—Written evidence

Six independent Chairpersons of Adoption Panels, in Kent—Written evidence The role of the Adoption Panel in securing the best outcome for Looked After Children where the Local Authority plan is adoption Authors: Six independent Chairpersons of Adoption Panels, in Kent. We offer this evidence, because we do not believe there has been full consultation with Adoption Panel Chairs regarding the proposed changes to the function of Adoption Panels in England. As a group we have significant relevant experience and knowledge which we can use to assist in making the best and timely plans for children where there is an adoption plan. Our backgrounds include personal experience of adoption and professional experience as senior managers in health, education, psychological and social services. Fundamentally we do not believe that the Panel system has caused delay in achieving the Placement Orders for children as suggested by some, and our position is supported in the recent Report by OFSTED which concluded that no evidence could be found that the Panels consideration of the child’s adoption plan had caused delay ( paragraph 71 to 76) .This is also the conclusion of a representative group of Directors of Social Services and BAAF. In our view delay within Proceedings is often caused by the adversarial nature of the legal process with parties battling over the paramountcy of the needs of the child versus the rights of the parents to family life, which results in the commissioning of many additional expert and kinship assessments to be completed before the Final Hearing. We also recognise that there is on occasion, unnecessary delay in the social worker initiating Proceedings on behalf of the child. We are very aware of the effect of delay on the immediate emotional wellbeing of the child, as well as increasing the difficulty in identifying an early match and increasing the risk of additional challenges the child and adoptive family will face in the future. It is also our view that our function in considering the child’s adoption plan is not simply a duplication of the court process, and some advantages of a Panel’s consideration of the child’s plan are given below. The positive role of the Adoption Panel 



Members have a breadth and width of experience of adoption, some who have been adopted, have adopted children , and who have worked with troubled children and those placed in alternative permanent care. This experience augments the care planning process, offering the social worker a consultation which is not duplicated in the Court process. Members are independent and solely child focussed, separate from the Local Authority‘s operational management and any demands on targets or finance. As volunteers expenses are

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Six independent Chairpersons of Adoption Panels, in Kent—Written evidence





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paid but members are motivated by the fundamental desire of wanting the very best outcome for the child. Panels focus on the future use of the presented reports by the child when they are over 18; what will the child understand about himself, his birth family and the actions of the Agency when he reads the documents? Again this function is not duplicated in the Court process. Panel offers independent advocacy for the child, giving clear advice and comments on the paperwork presented which may then be amended and improved; this quality assurance role can lead to improved practice in the Agency. Such scrutiny is time consuming for Panel members, though cost effective as members are paid per session. Panel can be said to be part of the Corporate Parenting function of the Local Authority. Many Panels have members who are county councillors, although this is no longer a requirement for Panel quoracy. Membership is multi-agency with a broad range of perspectives to consider the child’s welfare. This mirrors the community and democratic principles of corporate parenting, taking responsibility and accountability for the most disadvantaged children. The lifelong needs of the child are considered by Panel, which includes their social, educational and any other support needs through to adulthood. These needs are highlighted by Panel for reference in future matching and the support needs of adopters. This function is not duplicated in the Court Process and such depth and width may not be achieved by the senior manager of the Local authority who is to be the decision maker.

Concerns regarding proposal that Adoption Panels do not consider the child’s adoption plan  

 

The court system is adversarial; neither Panel’s strengths nor function are mirrored in the legal process. The Decision Maker’s new role will require considerable additional time for managers already hugely stretched and balancing a great number of priorities-managing financial pressure, improving performance, meeting targets. Currently the Decision Maker relies on Panel minutes and discussion with the Agency Advisor to guide him, and acting alone will not equal the width and depth offered by the Panel. Shifting the Decision Making process to a sole manager within the Local Authority removes the extra dimension offered by Panel discussion, and may be open to challenge by the parents legal team as lacking objectivity, which could in fact cause additional delay for the child.

We are aware that no formal request has been made for feedback from Panel Chairs, but we are taking this opportunity to present our views as we are a group motivated solely by the wish to achieve the best outcomes for the most disadvantaged children. Signaturies ; Diane Butler, Paddy Tutt, Judith Paul, Sybil Roach, David Guy, David Yandell. July 2012

635

Kinship Care Alliance—Written evidence

Kinship Care Alliance—Written evidence Prepared by Family Rights Group on behalf of the Kinship Care Alliance endorsed by BAAF, Buttle UK, The Fostering Network, The Grandparents’ Association, Grandparents Plus, Mentor UK, The Who Cares? Trust Summary of key recommendations 1.

2.

3. 4. 5.

6.

There should be a new duty on local authorities to identify and consider wider family placements for a child, whenever they are considering removing a child from their parents because they may be at risk. This would allow contingency planning  at the same time as a parent is being assessed and  in parallel to unrelated carers who would meet the child’s needs being identified before proceeding with a ‘foster before adoption’ placement, except in emergencies. This would be best achieved by a family group conference being convened. A Family Group Conference108 should be offered wherever a local authority is considering removing a child at risk from their parents or as soon as the first child protection review has occurred and before any plan for adoption or ‘foster before adoption’ is embarked upon. If necessary, this can happen in parallel with developing other permanence plans in order to minimise delay for the child. There needs to be more effective support delivered in special guardianship cases, mirroring that which the government intends to provide in adoption cases There needs to be a new statutory right to support for family and friends carers raising children who cannot live with their parents in order to optimise the outcomes for children in family and friends care arrangements. There needs to be a corresponding duty on local authorities to provide a family and friends care support service modeled on the support service provided for children under special guardianship and adoption cases and also a national financial allowance for family and friends carers to cover the costs of raising a child for whom they are not legally liable to support. The definition of parent in the Adoption and Children Act 2002 should be amended to include birth fathers, regardless of whether or not they have parental responsibility. This would lead to more routine involvement of fathers and the paternal family in planning for permanence.

What is the Kinship Care Alliance? 1.

The Kinship Care Alliance is an informal network of organisations working with family and friends carers which subscribe to a set of shared aims and beliefs about family and friends care. Since 2006, members have been meeting regularly to develop a joint policy agenda and agree strategies to promote shared aims which are:  to prevent children from being unnecessarily raised outside their family,

108

Further details about FGCs can be found in Appendix 1.

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Kinship Care Alliance—Written evidence 

to enhance outcomes for children who cannot live with their parents and who are living with relatives and  to secure improved recognition and support for family and friends carers. The Kinship Care Alliance is serviced by the charity Family Rights Group. 2.

Family Rights Group is the charity in England and Wales that advises families whose children are involved with or need local authority children’s services because of welfare needs or concerns. We provide direct advice to 7000 such parents and wider family members per year, so that they understand their situation, including their rights, and the options available to them. We also promote policies and practices that help children to be raised safely and thrive within their families wherever possible, for example we:  campaign for effective support to assist family and friends carers, including grandparents who are raising children who cannot live at home;  run the national Family Group Conference network and have developed national standards and are now trialing an accreditation system for family group conferences services. Family group conferences are an approach which are proven to help families engage in making safe plans for their children when the local authority is concerned about their welfare.

3.

We have responded to the questions listed in the call for evidence under themes rather than by reference to specific questions, as many of these cover similar issues.

Adoption is not the only permanence option 4.

We are concerned that the government’s drive to secure permanence for looked after children is focusing on adoption as the only, or most desirable, option. Although it is held up as the gold standard for permanence, in reality adoption is suitable for only a small minority of looked after children. How permanence is best achieved is different for different children, depending on their age and circumstances. For example, a very positive permanence option for many children is family and friends care which is discussed further at paras 8-15 below.

5.

We are concerned that the introduction of adoption scorecards109 may well compound this over-emphasis on adoption by distracting local authority focus away from considering the best option for the child, towards reaching externally-set targets at the expense of the individual child’s welfare. Moreover we consider that scorecards are inconsistent with the thrust of Government child welfare policy following Munro, which has acknowledged, and started to address the distortions that can be caused by nationally-driven performance targets.

6.

Whilst we agree that children should not wait longer than is necessary to move to an adoptive placement once the due legal process is completed, we do not feel that these scorecards will encourage local authorities to consider the range of options for permanency that best meets the individual child’s needs, within the overarching context of their right to respect for family life. Indeed, there is a real danger that the pressure on local authorities to meet these targets, 109http://www.education.gov.uk/inthenews/inthenews/a00208881/adoption-scorecards-show-the-serious-extent-of-delays-

across-england

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Kinship Care Alliance—Written evidence combined with the proposed 6 month time limit in care proceedings, will mean they will not have the time, resources or flexibility to work with the birth parents and the wider birth family to consider whether living with family or friends might be the best option for the child. 7.

Our submission is that rather than focusing primarily upon one legal solution, planning for children must take account of each child’s identified needs, their right to respect for family life and the range of available options that may apply in each particular case. To further this aim we are collaborating with other stakeholder organisations to undertake A Care Inquiry – building futures for our most vulnerable children, to explore in depth the range of permanence options and their outcomes for children, which will report in Spring 2013.

Family and friends care as a positive option for permanence 8.

One increasingly popular route to permanence for many children is family and friends care, whereby relatives and friends take on the care of children who cannot remain safely at home with their parents. These carers are typically grandparents, aunts, uncles, or siblings, who care for a child because of parental difficulties, such as mental or physical ill health, domestic abuse, alcohol or substance misuse, imprisonment or bereavement. It is estimated that there are currently 200-300,000 children living in these arrangements and the number has risen dramatically in recent years110. This rise is expected to continue, as local authorities tackle record rates of child protection referrals, seek alternatives to costly care proceedings and grapple with a severe shortage of unrelated foster care placements.

9.

The majority of children in family and friends care live with their carer either under a private agreement with the parents (but that means the carer does not have parental responsibility111) or under a residence order or special guardianship order in favour of the family and friends carer. These carers often apply for such orders at the request of, or with the strong encouragement from, the child’s social worker, in order that the child is safe and has a permanent home. Only 6% of children in family and friends care arrangements are looked after by the local authority,112 with their carers approved as foster carers.113 What are the outcomes for family and friends care? Research confirms that the outcomes for children in family and friends are generally successful. Despite children in these arrangements suffering from similar adversities to children in the care system and their carers having multiple problems of their own, when compared to children in unrelated foster care, children in family and friends care are as safe, and are doing as well if not better in relation to their health, school attendance and performance, self-esteem and social and personal relationships. Moreover, there is a marked improvement in their emotional health and behaviour and their carers are more likely to match 114 their ethnicity and be highly committed to them, leading to more stable placements .

Nandy, Selwyn, Farmer and Vaisey (2011) Spotlight on Kinship Care: Using census microdata to examine the extent and nature of kinship care in the UK at the turn of the Twentieth century (University of Bristol) 111 This means they have to refer back to the parents about important decisions about the child and the child may also be removed from their care by the parents 112 A child is looked after by the local authority when they are in care with the agreement of their parents or others with parental responsibility or if they are under an Emergency Protection Order or Care Order. In these circumstances the relative or friend must refer back to the social worker about all major decisions concerning the child’s life. 113 They must be approved in accordance with the Fostering Services Regulations 2011 and the national Minimum Standards on Fostering, unless the placement is made in an emergency in which case they must be approved in accordance with Regulation 24 Care Planning, Placement and Case Review Regulations 2010. 114 Farmer & Moyers (2008) – Kinship Care: Fostering Effective Family and Friends Placements 110

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Kinship Care Alliance—Written evidence

These arrangements also have the added advantage of the carer being able to provide short and long term care, hence they provide stable placements and can promote strong attachments for the child with minimal disruption. In that sense they are similar to concurrent planning foster care arrangements whereby foster carers are recruited to foster the child and support the parents/family to resume care of the child but where that fails they then go on to apply to adopt the child. This is discussed further under paras 24-28 below. However, in order to optimise the outcomes for children in family and friends care, there is clearly a need for more effective support. Research confirms that many family and friends carers suffer financial hardship (75%), are in poor health/suffer from 115 116 disability (31%), and live in overcrowded conditions (35%) . Over a third (38%) of carers have to give up work to raise the children. . Few receive financial or practical support to address the child’s emotional or practical needs or to address very challenging situations, such as managing contact arrangements with the child’s parents, who may also be their own daughter/son/sibling or parent. Family and friends carers will often persist with placements despite the children’s very significant difficulties. One of the reasons for this lack of adequate support is that the majority of children in family and friends care are not looked 117 after , which would give them a right to statutory support. For children who are not looked after, whether or not support is provided is at the discretion of the local authority

118

.

This documented lack of support is likely to get much worse in the future since, in the current economic climate, such non statutory support is typically being cut rather than developed, despite the aspirations and expectations of the Family and Friends 119 Care statutory Guidance. In order to address this lack of support, we recommend that there is a new statutory right to support for family and friends carers raising children who cannot live with their patents. This right needs to be supported by: a corresponding duty on local authorities to provide such a support service at least equivalent to, if not better than, the support service provided for children in special guardianship and adoption cases and 120 a national financial allowance to cover the costs of raising a child for whom they are not legally liable to support .

10.

11.

Special Guardianship and family and friends carers The introduction of the Special Guardianship order (SGO) into the Children Act 1989 was a positive aspect of ACA 2002 that may in part explain the falling numbers of adopters. This new legal option for securing permanent arrangements not only coincided with a national rise in the number of children in family and friends care, but was also much better promoted by government and practitioners than its precursor, custodianship, and, as a result, has been more successful. However, despite its take up, we are aware from our extensive advice work that there remain a number of difficulties facing carers who apply for, or are encouraged by the local authority to apply for an SGO. In particular, there is a lack of effective support for families once they lose their status as foster carers and move to being a special guardian. Despite provision in the legislation to assess and support such special guardians where the child has been looked after, a Farmer and Moyers (2008) ibid Ashley C (Ed) Authors: Aziz R, Roth D and Lindley B (2012) Understanding family and friends care: The largest UK survey (FRG) 117 Instead, they are either living with their carers either with no legal order or under a residence or special guardianship order as outlined under para 9 above. 118 If the child is looked after and placed with a family and friends carer there is a right to support but in all cases where a child is not looked after (by far the majority of children in family and friends care) such support is at the discretion of the local authority. 119 DfE, 2011, https://www.education.gov.uk/publications/eOrderingDownload/Family%20and%20Friends%20Care.pdf 120 Under s.1 Child Support Act 1991 it is only parents who are responsible to support a qualifying child, not their de facto carer. 115 116

639

Kinship Care Alliance—Written evidence considerable number of callers to Family Rights Group’s advice line are struggling to get the help they need. Some of these cases have reached the courts – and on each occasion local authorities have been forced to reassess their policy on support paid to special guardians121. 12.

Special guardianship is rightly recognised by courts as a potential permanence order for a child who cannot live with their parents. There needs to be a clear statutory right to support, with clear guidance on the level of the SGO allowance, in line with the decision in B v Lewisham LBC122. This would then mirror the improved adoption support which the government has already committed to. It should never be the case that carers are given a perverse incentive to apply for a particular order (i.e. adoption) simply because it elicits better support for the placement than the alternatives. The child’s welfare should always be the paramount consideration123.

13.

Furthermore, recent changes to legal aid will result in many relatives or friends, who wish to apply for a special guardianship order or residence order as an alternative to a child being adopted outside the family, not being entitled to legal aid. This may strangle the burgeoning rise in family and friends care as a key permanence option for children who cannot remain with their parents.

14.

The potential impact of the 6 month time limit in care proceedings on family and friends carers Although we support the government’s intention to remove harmful delay for children from the system, we are concerned that the proposed new six month time limit for all care proceedings, save in exceptional cases124, will have the unintended consequence of squeezing out wider family members who want to take on the care of a child who cannot live with their parents because there will simply not be enough time to consider their application.

15.

Typically, many family and friends carers are concerned not to undermine the parents (who may be their son, daughter, brother, sister) whilst they think they still have a chance of having their child back to live with them. Therefore, many wait until there is a finding of fact against a parent, before putting themselves forward as alternative carers.

16.

Under the new time limit for care proceedings, if they are late in offering themselves as carers for the child, there may well not be enough time for the relevant assessments to be carried out or for their applications to be fully explored because the six month time limit will only be B v Kirklees Metropolitan Council [2010] EWHC 467; R ( B) v Lewisham LBC[2008] EWHC 738 (Admin) Fam Law July 2008 p.640 122 In B v Lewisham LBC Black J (as she was then) held that (1)Paragraph 65 of the Special Guardianship statutory guidance indicated there should be a close association between fostering allowances and special guardianship allowances. (2)The local authority had failed to have had regard to those allowances in the way in which it was required by that paragraph to do. Instead, it made a rigid link with adoption allowances which was not in accordance with the Guidance. It followed that the resulting scheme was unlawful. (3)The intention of the legislation and regulations (Reg 6) about special guardians was that financial support should be made available to special guardians to ensure that financial obstacles did not prevent people from taking on that role. (4) A local authority was not free to devise a scheme which failed to do what was required by reg.6 or which dictated that some types of placement for a child carried a significant financial disadvantage in comparison with others or, worse, would impose such a financial strain on a carer that he or she would be forced to choose another type of placement. 123 S. 1 Children Act 1989 124 in the forthcoming Children and Families Bill 121

640

Kinship Care Alliance—Written evidence extended in exceptional circumstances. The result is that many children may be denied the chance of living within their family network simply because the process has been speeded up.

Case example from FRG’s advice line: The caller was an aunt who was positively assessed as a foster carer. However, she did not care for the child but instead supported the maternal grandmother who had the child placed with her at that time. The grandmother sought a SGO, and was supported by the local authority in this plan. However, the local authority subsequently changed their care plan to adoption as the grandmother was considered unable to protect the child from the mother. The mother supported adoption. The court refused the grandmother’s application and made a placement order. The aunt felt that she had not had the opportunity to be considered as a long term carer because she had withdrawn herself in favour of the maternal grandmother. She said that she would have been willing to move away from the maternal family and the mother had she known that the care plan was going to change. 17.

18.

19.

This case illustrates the importance of social workers being alert to the need to give consideration to family and friends care on a contingency basis throughout the local authority care planning process, including at the early stages. In particular, pre-proceedings processes and interventions which encourage and promote early engagement of wider family should be actively promoted (see paras 29-30 below for detailed proposals). The potential impact of the proposed ‘foster first before adoption’ policy for family and friends care We agree with the government that children who cannot live with their families should be placed with alternative permanent carers as quickly as possible with the minimal amount of disruption and changes to their placements, not least so as to maximise their chances of being able to form healthy attachments later in life. However, we have significant concerns about the government’s announcement that it intends to legislate to introduce a new legal duty on local authorities to consider placing children with approved adopters who will foster the child first, as we fear that this over emphasis on adoption will compromise the chances of a child being able to live within their wider family where it is in their interests to do so. The Charity Coram Families has pioneered concurrent planning, placing babies with specialist foster carers while their long-term future is being decided. The carers work with the birth parents to enable the child to return home if in their best interested, but if this cannot happen, the child can be adopted by their carers, avoiding unnecessary and often traumatic disruption. The success of this approach is largely dependent on highly trained teams  recruiting and supporting foster carers who have the ability to work toward two opposing goals of wholeheartedly helping the parents to resume care of their child and only when this is ruled out as a long term option do they take on the role of prospective adopter, subject to the decision of the court; 

supporting high levels of contact between the parents and child, up to 3 times per week, during which the parent(s) can receive or ask for help with particular aspects of caring for their child – such as play, suitable food, bathing, dressing etc.

641

Kinship Care Alliance—Written evidence 20.

We would support a roll out of concurrent planning provided it incorporates these principles and was underpinned by practice guidance explaining how the model works and National Minimum Standards. However it is becoming clear that the government’s policy is not one of promoting concurrent planning whereby the adoptive parents/foster carers will be working with the birth parents to actively explore rehabilitation as an option. Annie Crombie, Director of Adoption Reform, stated in evidence to this House of Lords Select Committee on 2nd July 2012, “We think there is probably greater potential in trying to place children earlier with their future potential adoptive parents on a foster care basis, so that we have a sort of fostering for adoption practice, where of course the court will still decide whether or not the child should be adopted. Just as in concurrent planning, the carers run the risk that the child will return to its birth parents but there is not the same sort of active rehabilitation going on as is the case in concurrent planning because that is not part of the child’s care plan and is not appropriate. “

21.

This comment makes it clear that the proposal is to promote a ‘foster first before adoption’ policy which we consider is not only in contravention of the principle behind placement orders in the ACA 2002 but is also very likely to be challenged under the Human Rights Act 1998 for breaching both the child and parents’ right to respect for family life. This is discussed further under paras 29-30 below.

22.

If the government proceeds with this proposal, we feel strongly that, at the very least, the new duty on local authority should include a requirement to consider all potential family placements before proceeding with a foster first before adoption arrangement. Our detailed proposals on how this would be best achieved are set out in the next section.

Detailed proposals for ensuring that family options, which meet the child’s needs, are explored at an early stage 23.

Whenever there is a possibility that the child may need to be removed from their parents, it is essential that the process of identifying the appropriate future placement for the child balances:  different aspects of the child’s welfare, including their need for stability, having their identified needs met, and developing and building attachments as well as their long term wellbeing including identity and welfare,  the need to avoid delay  the child’s right to respect for family life  the child’s views, wishes and feelings and  the rights of the parents and wider family members including their right to fair process and respect for family life.

24.

Combining all these considerations, we propose that planning for permanence should include: a new duty on local authorities to identify and consider family and friends care placements alongside other permanence options as soon as there is a possibility of a child being removed from their parents. This can be done on a contingency (plan B) basis and can be done in parallel to other permanent options for the child being considered. The most effective mechanism for identifying such placements is a family group conference.

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Kinship Care Alliance—Written evidence 125

A family group conference should be offered wherever there is a possibility the child may be removed or as soon as the first child protection review has occurred. This could happen in parallel with developing an adoption/foster to adopt plan in order to minimise delay for the child. Family group conferences have the advantage of there being an independent coordinator who can help wider family members to understand the need to get involved early so as not to be ruled out at a later stage if they delay in offering to care for the child and can also signpost them to sources of independent advice at the outset. It also allows wider family draw up contingency plans, without undermining the parent, including identifying whether there are family members who would wish to raise the child, if the parents cannot. 126

Steps should be taken to ensure more widespread implementation of the legal requirement that when children are removed from their parents, the first choice of placement is with the other parent and then preference is given to wider family members who are approved as foster carers, before considering unrelated foster carers; and 127

The government’s proposals to roll out the ‘principles of concurrent planning’ more widely should be supported by Practice Guidance as to how it should be conducted and for which children together with National Minimum Standards which spell out the key requirements to make this way of working effective.

Case example: the grandparents did not know the baby was in care and likely to be adopted, until the family group conference was convened. The result was initially for the grandparents to care for the child, and after a period of positive assessment the parents went to live with the baby and grandparents. Eventually they went on to have another child and they now live independently with support from grandparents and an uncle and aunt who have since the beginning provided respite and emotional support. Amending the Adoption and Children Act 2002 to include fathers without parental responsibility in the definition of ‘parent’ 25.

Under the Children Act 1989, the term parent is used irrespective of whether the parent has parental responsibility. In theory, at least, this results in both parents (and their wider families) being involved in local authority and judicial processes regarding making plans for children at risk of harm. However, under adoption legislation the term ‘parent’ is defined as ‘a parent having parental responsibility’ (Section 52(6) ACA 2002). This means that a child can be legally placed for adoption with the consent of the birth mother only, if the father does not have parental responsibility. Further, where a placement order is necessary, the birth father will not be involved in proceedings unless they are otherwise known to the local authority, or have been identified by the birth mother. In some cases, this has the effect of excluding fathers, and the wider paternal family from taking part in this fundamental decision about the future of their child.

26.

The result is that some children are denied the possibility of being raised by their paternal family even though this might in every other way meet their short and long term needs.

27.

We would therefore advocate amending the definition of parent in the Adoption and Children Act 2002 to include birth fathers, regardless of whether or not they have parental responsibility. This would result in fathers and paternal family being more routinely Further details about FGCs can be found in Appendix 1. Section 22C Children Act 1989 and reg 24 Care Planning, Placement and Case Review (England) Regulations 2010 127 Ref action plan for adoption 125 126

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Kinship Care Alliance—Written evidence involved in all adoption agency and court processes regarding adoption, and would maximise the chances of a child having the option of living with or having some relationship with their paternal family where that was deemed to meet their needs. In our view, consideration of both the birth parents and their families as alternative options for permanence during the adoption process is an essential element of securing protection of the child’s right to respect for family life. Appendix 1: Family Group Conferences (FGCs) FGCs originate from New Zealand. They are a decision making meeting in which a plan is constructed by the family (including extended family members and friends) which addresses the local authority’s concerns (or bottom line) to ensure the child is safe and their welfare promote128129. FGCs are proven to: Result in extended family members stepping in to support struggling parents and when necessary to take on the care of the child if s/he cannot remain with their parents; Engage fathers and paternal relatives; Give children a voice; Be cost effective in preventing children being unnecessarily subject to care proceedings or removed into care. For example a survey by Family Rights Group of six FGC projects reported that they have prevented 206 children becoming looked after in the last year, including avoidance of proceedings for 100 children, and that FGCs had led to 56 children returning to their family from local authority care at a total saving of approximately £9.899 million (see appendix A). The FGC project costs amounted to £1,239,000 in 2009/10 and whilst costs to public agencies of supporting the family plan must also be taken into account, nevertheless the savings are clear. Despite there having been an expansion in the number of child welfare FGC services in recent years:  Around a third of local authorities in England do not have any FGC service and even in authorities that do, whether or not families are offered an FGC largely depends upon the social worker. It is only a small minority of authorities which have a policy to offer an FGC to all families prior to proceedings being taken.  Many FGC services are focused upon the ‘high’ end, in other words cases which are close to proceedings being issued, yet families often state that they wish they’d been offered an FGC early on when problems first emerged.  FGC services are non-statutory and a number are now closing or being scaled down, or the principles upon which they work are being compromised as a result of funding cuts. July 2012 Further information about how they work can be found in a Protocol, endorsed by the Family Justice Council and CAFCASS, on the use of FGCs for children who are or may become subject to care proceedings – see http://www.frg.org.uk/pdfs/FINAL+FGCs+and+courts.pdf 129 The FGC is convened by an independent co-ordinator who visits family members in advance of the FGC. The meeting itself consists of three stages: the information giving stage during which the social worker and other key agencies set out the concerns that must be addressed within the plan. The second stage is private time when the family (the agencies and coordinator should not be present) construct the plan. The third stage is when the local authority/key agencies agree to the support plan as long as it is safe.. The child normally participates in the FGC and should be offered an advocate to help ensure their voice is heard. 128

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Dr Derek Kirton (University of Kent) and Professor Ravinder Barn (Royal Holloway, University of London)—Written evidence

Dr Derek Kirton (University of Kent) and Professor Ravinder Barn (Royal Holloway, University of London)—Written evidence Submission to be found under Professor Ravinder Barn

645

Councillor Rita Krishna, Cabinet Member for Children's Services, Stoke Newington central ward—Written evidence

Councillor Rita Krishna, Cabinet Member for Children's Services, Stoke Newington central ward—Written evidence The Hackney Social Work Model Five years ago we set out to make a number of fundamental changes to the way that we deliver social work support to families. Our aim was to enable more children to live safely within their families. In order to achieve this we understood that we needed to radically change the way that families both experienced and perceived our social workers. This meant changing our expectations and requirements of our social workers and making some significant changes to the way that senior managers relate to front-line practitioners. Our intention remains for families to experience our services as helpful rather than intrusive and as appreciative rather than judgemental. Our practitioners work alongside families, wherever possible, to enable them to achieve changes that allow them to provide a safe level of care for their children. In order to achieve this, we continue to rigorously recruit the highest calibre social workers with the right skills and attitudes to work respectfully and constructively with children and their families. Social work is a complex job and our practitioners are skilled at promoting change wherever possible and making clear and timely decisions about the likelihood of change and the necessity of alternative arrangements. We have redeveloped organisational structures and resources to provide social workers with the support they need to carry out their responsibilities safely and well. We believe that in order to practice confidently and competently social workers need to have their professionalism and expertise recognised and that they should be supported to make decisions that are commensurate with their skills and experience. Whilst we continue to hold that the most monumental decisions about a child’s life should be the responsibility of senior managers, most decision making has been devolved to small multi-disciplinary units led by a senior social worker who holds accountability for all cases. Senior managers are accessible to provide support and guidance and maintain oversight through observation and audit to ensure that any problems in the system are identified early and addressed. The management approach is not one of enforcing compliance but rather of facilitating thoughtful and high quality practice, focused on skilled interventions within an open reflective system. Whilst we continue to develop and modify the model that we have developed there are some key principles and beliefs that continue to underpin our approach. These include: 1. That children are best cared for within their families wherever this can be safely achieved 2. That harnessing the strengths of families, including extended family, can enable creative solutions to meet the needs of children 3. That investing in providing services that are able to promote change within families is frequently more effective and efficient than removing children and placing them in alternative care

646

Councillor Rita Krishna, Cabinet Member for Children's Services, Stoke Newington central ward—Written evidence 4. That collaborative approaches to working with families (‘doing with’ rather than ‘doing to’) are more likely to be effective in sustaining long term change than more directive interventions 5. That successful interventions should have a sound evidence-base and be delivered by highly skilled and trained professionals, who are trusted and supported by their organisation 6. That in most cases decisions about interventions should be made by those who understand the child and their family/carers best, which will normally be the practitioners who are working with them. However, responsibility for decisions that have life-long implications for the child (for example, the decision to remove a child from the care of their family) should be carried by senior managers 7. That social work is a skilled and highly responsible task and that to perform well, practitioners need to feel well supported within their work setting and to have opportunities to reflect on their interventions with others 8. That having more than one person’s perspective on a situation enhances assessments and helps to mitigate risk by ensuring that alternative viewpoints are explored 9. That having several professionals working collaboratively with a child and their family is supportive for each individual worker and enhances confidence in managing and ‘holding’ risk These principles and beliefs inform the way in which we deliver our interventions. All cases are allocated to a lead social worker who works with a small unit of multi-disciplinary practitioners. These units have a high degree of autonomy and share responsibility for all the cases allocated to the unit, with the lead social worker holding overall accountability. The organisation insists that practitioners take time to reflect on what is best for the child and this is achieved through a weekly half-day meeting of information sharing, analysis, reflection, planning and decision making. The units are crucially supported by a dedicated administrator allowing practitioners to have as much time as possible working directly with families. Our transparent way of working allows for practice issues to be readily identified and addressed. Practitioners use evidence-based interventions and methodology that provide enhanced capacity to assist families in making positive changes to achieve better outcomes for children and enable a consistent approach between practitioners. A number of clinical practitioners are co-located with social work staff and a range of clinical skills and expertise are available in the provision of consultancy to social work practitioners, informing assessments and supporting practice development across the service. The range of different expertise and perspectives within the social work unit enables better informed assessments of risks to the child and the provision of a broader range of interventions. The shared responsibility and opportunities for co-working generate alternative viewpoints, a higher level of challenge and richer thinking about often very complex situations. We have also found that workers feel more able to ‘hold’ and manage risk when they are sharing and thinking about this with others. We are invested in improving life for children and ensuring our interventions are effective. Due to our focus on building resilience in families, we are getting better at identifying which options are better for which children. We have identified a wide variety of options to ensure children have the best family experience they can, which sometimes involves alternative family

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Councillor Rita Krishna, Cabinet Member for Children's Services, Stoke Newington central ward—Written evidence arrangements achieved through adoption or fostering. As an outcome, we have lower numbers of children in care compared to our statistical neighbours, increased placement stability and a low use of residential placements. We continuously encourage innovation and strive to change quickly that which doesn’t work. We do not believe that the Hackney model of social work is the only or best model for service delivery – we continue to question, evaluate and refine the model, seeking feedback from others, including children and families, about the effectiveness of our approach. We do believe that there are elements of our model that have enabled us to work in more effective ways with families, evidenced by improved outcomes for children. July 2012

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Councillor Rita Krishna, Councillor Nicola Greene, and Councillor David Simmonds— Oral evidence (QQ 275–308)

Councillor Rita Krishna, Councillor Nicola Greene, and Councillor David Simmonds— Oral evidence (QQ 275–308) Transcript to be found under Councillor David Simmonds

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Local Government Association—Written evidence

Local Government Association—Written evidence Introduction 1. The Local Government Association (LGA) is here to support, promote and improve local government. 2. We will fight local government’s corner and support local authorities through challenging times by focusing on our top two priorities:  representing and advocating for local government and making the case for greater devolution  helping local authorities tackle their challenges and take advantage of new opportunities to deliver better value for money services. Summary 3. The LGA welcomes the House of Lords Select Committee on Adoption Legislation’s work on this incredibly important area and is pleased to have the opportunity to submit evidence. 4. Adoption plays an important role in providing secure, stable and loving homes for some children who can no longer live with their birth families; however it must be considered in the context of other forms of permanence. What is best for individual children must be at the heart of decision-making. 5. We acknowledge that there is variation in local government performance and that councils with poor performance need to be supported to improve. Local government recognises the need for continued improvement of children’s services and the sector has taken responsibility for driving this itself by establishing the Children’s Improvement Board (CIB). Adoption is a priority for the CIB and Appendix A sets out more detail on this work. 6. However, the adoption system is complex and not entirely within councils’ control; it cannot therefore be assumed that local variation is necessarily due to local authority practice. This submission describes some of the challenges and complexity facing councils, including around harder to place children; the court system; matching children and families; and, post-adoption support. It also describes how some authorities are working together to help address some of these challenges. 7. The submission also outlines the reasons for the LGA’s opposition to the introduction of local authority scorecards for adoption.

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Local Government Association—Written evidence Background 8. Adoption plays an important role in providing secure, stable and loving homes for some children who can no longer live with their birth families. While it is valid to look at trends in numbers, the figures should not be viewed on their own, but in the context of other forms of permanence, such as special guardianship. Although adoption rates have decreased, over the last 5 years there has been a 27 percent increase in overall permanence orders. 9. What is best for each individual child should be at the centre of any placement decision and it is important to recognise that adoption may not be the most suitable option for all, such as those who are older who may not wish to permanently and legally sever all ties with their birth family or those with other family members that are willing and able to care for them. 10. It remains important to investigate how the adoption system could be improved, but the debate must also take account of these wider permanence issues if it is to avoid being a skewed one. Legislation 11. The LGA does not believe that improvement to the adoption system requires extensive changes in primary legislation. The most significant improvements are likely to be achieved through changes including: more prospective adopters, including those willing to adopt sibling groups, older children and those with complex needs; an improved and faster court process; reduction in bureaucracy; and building on existing social work reform. On the whole, these do not necessitate legislative change. 12. We also acknowledge that there is variation in local government performance and that councils with poor performance need to be supported to improve. Local government recognises the need for continued improvement of children’s services and the sector has taken responsibility for driving this itself by establishing the Children’s Improvement Board (CIB). Adoption is a priority for the CIB and more information about the support it is providing for councils is can be found in Appendix A. 13. One area where there is a need for change to regulations is in relation to the assessment process for prospective adopters. The Government’s Adoption Action Plan committed to streamlining the assessment of adopters and making it easier for people who have previously adopted and those who have been approved as foster carers. Social workers will still want to be assured that children are being placed in safe homes and adopters will need sufficient time to prepare for such a significant life change. However, there is scope for reducing unnecessary bureaucracy and the LGA supports the principle in order to speed up the process and improve the experience of prospective adopters.

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Local Government Association—Written evidence

Time taken in placing children & court proceedings 14. The time taken to place children for adoption varies considerably, for a range of reasons; for example, it can take longer to find adoptive homes for sibling groups and those with complex needs, compared with healthy babies. As such, although there is certainly potential to reduce delay in the system while retaining safeguards, it is not possible to say that all cases that take a long time are ‘excessive’ in length. 15. We accept that there is scope in some local authorities to improve practice and recognise the need for continued sector improvement. This is being supported by the sector-led Children’s Improvement Board, as described in Annex A. The emerging learning from this support work will be available later in the summer and we would welcome the opportunity to submit further evidence at that point. However, while we recognise and are addressing the need for improvement in local government, the adoption system is complex and not entirely within councils’ control; it cannot therefore be assumed that local variation is necessarily due to local authority practice. 16. The Ofsted report ‘Right on time: exploring delays in adoption’,130 published in April 2012, found that the key factor causing delay in the cases it looked at was the length of time for care proceedings to be concluded before an adoption plan could be confirmed. 17. The Family Justice Review, the final report of which was published in November 2011, provides a detailed analysis of the problems and delay in the family court system, along with a series of recommendations. It found that the average public care case in county courts takes over 60 weeks and many take much longer; delays which contribute to the time average for a child to be adopted.131 18. The Family Justice Review described a relationship between courts and local authorities characterised by mutual distrust and misunderstanding and work is underway both nationally and locally to improve this. For example, the Care Proceedings Pilot of the three tri-borough London councils of Hammersmith & Fulham and Kensington and Chelsea and Westminster, working with the local family court system, was launched in May. This involves a new ‘pact’ between the local authorities and judges to speed up proceedings, with an overarching aim of achieving greater permanency and emotional stability for vulnerable children in the authorities’ care.132 Other local areas are learning from such examples through a recently completed set of Family Justice Review workshops commissioned by the Children’s Improvement Board.

http://www.ofsted.gov.uk/resources/right-time-exploring-delays-adoption http://www.justice.gov.uk/downloads/publications/moj/2011/family-justice-review-final-report.pdf 132http://www.lbhf.gov.uk/Directory/News/Tri_borough_councils_join_forces_to_speed_up_care_proceedings_in_national_pil ot.asp 130 131

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Local Government Association—Written evidence 19. A number of councils are already training and assessing would-be adoptive families to ensure that vulnerable children being placed in care get the chance to be fostered by them while courts are making the final decision, whether through concurrent planning or ‘fostering for adoption’.133 This creates greater stability and enables attachments to be made, which research shows is important in child development. However, some children will be fostered by families that want to adopt them, with the courts subsequently deciding that adoption is not the right option. Fostering for adoption shifts the burden of this risk from the child to the adults, who need to be fully aware of and prepared for this possibility and supported throughout. It should be recognised that not all people wanting to adopt may wish to take this approach. The number of potential adopters 20. In spite of recruitment drives and strategies, the number of prospective adopters is less than the number of children waiting for adoption; this is widely held to be one of the major challenges in securing children adoptive homes. It is not only about numbers, but a mismatch between children waiting for adoption and the types of children adoptive families want to adopt. We need people willing to offer homes to sibling groups, older children and children with complex needs too. The Adoption Action Plan proposed a National Gateway for Adoption, as a first point of contact for prospective adopters alongside existing local information services. Proposals that help to increase numbers of adoptive families are welcome. 21. Best ‘fit’ will depend on the particular circumstances of individual children and families. The law currently states that due consideration should be given to a child's cultural and ethnic background, but also that the impact of delay on a child should also be taken into account. There is no simple one-size-fits-all approach to adoption and social workers must be able to use professional judgement to make the best decision in each case. They will consider a child's religious persuasion, racial origin and cultural backgrounds when trying to find their ideal home, but these factors should not delay placing a child with a loving family if they are otherwise suitable. 22. Although there are many individual cases referred to of children not being place with families due to ethnicity, the extent to whether or not this is a widespread, institutional problem is unclear. The Ofsted report ‘Right on time: exploring delays in adoption’,134 found that processes for matching children with adoptive placements were generally robust and that there was little evidence of delay caused by an unrealistic search for a ‘perfect’ ethnic match. This suggests that problems are likely to be related to practice and the solutions in social work training and development. We would therefore question the need for legislative change.

Examples include, amongst others, the London Borough of Harrow, Cambridgeshire County Council and East Sussex County Council. 134 http://www.ofsted.gov.uk/resources/right-time-exploring-delays-adoption 133

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Local Government Association—Written evidence Post-adoption support 23. Under the Children and Adoption Act 2002, local authorities are required to carry out assessments of adoption support needs, when requested to do so. It is then for the local authority to decide whether to provide services based on the particular circumstances of the case and local area. 24. Local authorities recognise the importance of post-adoption support and improvements could potentially lead to an increase the number of people willing to adopt harder to place children. However, at a time when local government is managing funding cuts of 28 per cent and facing a likely funding gap of £16.5 billion a year by 2019/20,135 any new requirements to provide services must be fully funded. The question of post-adoption support should not be restricted to only local government, but also give consideration to the role of other public services such as Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services and schools. It must also take account of the mobility of families between local authority areas. Other permanent placements 25. The best way to ensure permanent and consistent placements for children requires focus on what is best for each individual child and this will depend on their particular situation. The use of special guardianship has increased since it became available in 2005, with numbers more than doubling between 2007 and 2011. 136 It is difficult to say whether there is a direct correlation between this and the decrease in adoption numbers, but it would appear reasonable to assume some relationship. 26. A study on special guardianship in eight local authorities by the University of York, 137 reported that the majority of carers (76 per cent) and social workers (83 per cent) thought that the placements had gone "very well" and most children were reported to be thriving, especially in relation to their health, attachments and emotional wellbeing. The Department for Education has commissioned further research on the use of special guardianship.

27. There are differing views regarding the extent to which birth parents should be supported in improving their parenting and the point at which children should be taken into care and then placed for adoption. As has been noted in the past, social workers can be criticised either for stepping in too early and breaking up families or for leaving children too long in unacceptable situations. The Munro review138 of the child protection system called for much greater freedom for social work http://www.local.gov.uk/web/guest/finance/-/journal_content/56/10171/3626127/ARTICLE-TEMPLATE Department for Education statistical release http://media.education.gov.uk/assets/files/xls/england%20summary%20tables%20sfr212011.xls#'D1'!A1 137 Wade et al, Special Guardianship in Practice, 2009. Adoption Research Initiative http://www.adoptionresearchinitiative.org.uk/index.html 138 http://www.education.gov.uk/munroreview/ 135 136

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Local Government Association—Written evidence professionals to be able to use their judgment. There is a balance to be struck between reducing delay, whilst also allowing for quality decision making by professionals on what is in the best interests of a particular child, keeping in mind that prompt, timely decisions are generally preferable, particularly for very young children. 28. The social and financial case for earlier intervention is widely accepted; however a coherent, comparable and robust evidence base is not currently available. It is difficult to predict with any certainty the effect an increase in early intervention would have on numbers of adoptions, but it would be reasonable to assume that it could potentially have implications through enabling some children to remain with their birth families that may have otherwise been adopted. Following the independent reviews of early intervention by Graham Allen MP on behalf of the Government,139 the Department for Education is currently procuring an Early Intervention Foundation, which aims to provide a more robust evidence base on the effectiveness of different early intervention programmes in order to support and inform local commissioning decisions. It is possible that this evidence base may in some cases consider the effectiveness of programmes in enabling children to stay with birth families, but it would remain difficult to separate that cohort into children that would likely to be adopted, compared with foster care and so on. Monitoring and performance 29. The LGA, with the Association of Directors of Children’s Services and the Society of Local Authority Chief Executives, have unanimously raised serious concerns about the introduction of local authority adoption scorecards.140 30. They do not provide a fair picture of performance and fail to provide a sound basis for comparison across local authority areas. For example, one council's Ofstedrated 'outstanding' adoption service looks like a poor performer in the score card, which is simply not credible. Some of the small numbers involved mean that the figures can be easily distorted by one case and the figures are based on a three year lagged average (2008/9-2010/11) which does not provide an accurate representation of the current situation. In cases where foster carers adopt children they are already caring for, the length of process does not have an impact on the stability for that child and as such should not be included in the scorecards. 31. The scorecards do not take into account the quality of placements and the excellent work some councils do in finding homes for children that are harder to place, such as sibling groups or those with health problems or disabilities. A scorecard that is limited to speed rather than the bigger picture including quality and stability of placements risks creating perverse incentives. 139http://media.education.gov.uk/assets/files/pdf/g/graham%20allens%20review%20of%20early%20intervention.pdf

http://www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/resource-library/early-intervention-smart-investment-massive-savings 140 http://www.local.gov.uk/web/guest/media-releases/-/journal_content/56/10171/3544146/NEWS-TEMPLATE

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Local Government Association—Written evidence

32. As previously highlighted, the system is complex and not completely within councils’ control: there are significant delays in the court system, and it is essential that councils do not get penalised for factors outside their ability to influence. 33. The scorecard also only looks at adoption, failing to take into account an authority’s wider work on permanence, including the use of special guardianship which may be more appropriate for some children. 34. Worryingly, scorecards could deter prospective adopters if councils are wrongly deemed to be underperforming, acting detrimentally in terms of the need for more people to come forward to adopt. 35. In addition to these practical issues, the scorecard is inconsistent with wider Government policy on local government performance and improvement, which has rightly recognised that bureaucratic target settings and top-down micromanagement of councils do not deliver better services.

Joint working across local authority boundaries 36. There are many examples of local authorities sharing services, both across councils and with other public sector agencies or voluntary and community organisations. Shared services can mean many things. Traditionally thought of as back office arrangements (transactional, operational or professional), councils and other public services are increasingly looking to share senior management, consider joint venture relationships with other public sector bodies and the private sector, and also move to shared front office services such as adults' and children's services. The LGA has produced a national shared services compendium and map showing that 219 councils across the country are engaged in 143 shared service arrangements resulting in £156.5 million of efficiency savings.141 37. Councils are taking partnership approaches to help them address challenges they face in finding adoptive homes for children. This might be particularly, but not exclusively, appropriate in areas where small numbers of children are placed for adoption. By working together, councils can increase the pool of prospective adopters and also invest in or retain capacity and expertise that might not otherwise be feasible. 38. Many authorities are already part of well-established and long-standing regional consortia,142 some of which also include voluntary adoption agencies. Consortia share resources and prospective adopters, creating a larger pool of families and maximising placement choice. Consortia also collaborate on recruitment and http://www.local.gov.uk/web/guest/productivity/-/journal_content/56/10171/3511353/ARTICLE-TEMPLATE Examples include, but are not limited to, the South West London Consortium, the Yorkshire Adoption Consortium and the South Coast Adoption Consortium 141 142

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Local Government Association—Written evidence training, sharing practice and developing common standards. 39. Some authorities have started to go beyond this consortium approach to create more formalised shared services. For example, Warrington, Wigan and St.Helens Councils created the WWiSH adoption shared service in 2012 which operates across the three boroughs, bringing expertise into one team. The authorities created the service to help address the gap between children waiting to be adopted and people wishing to adopt; the North West has seen a 9 per cent rise in the number of children seeking adoption but only a 4 per cent rise in adopters.143 40. As part of the wider Tri-Borough working by Hammersmith and Fulham, Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea and the City of Westminster,144 the three boroughs have combined children’s services, headed by one Director. This includes one fostering and adoption service that operates across the boroughs, split into four teams: Recruitment and Assessment; Duty and Placement; Connected Persons; and Permanence and Post-Order. When a child is identified as probably not able to return home, all locality teams consult with the Permanence team at an early stage. 41. This single fostering and adoption service approach is anticipated to improve outcomes for children, through increased numbers of adopters, reducing delay, better placement matching and fewer breakdowns, improved support for families, but also to deliver financial savings to the three authorities.145 42. There is a wide array of shared services models operating across the country. The varying models each have different advantages and disadvantages, and one will not suit all councils, localities, or types of service provision. It is therefore important that authorities are empowered and enabled, with the right information, to make a decision based on their own local and regional circumstances. Appendix A – Children’s Improvement Board support for councils The Children’s Improvement Board (CIB) is a partnership between the Local Government Association (LGA), Association of Directors of Children’s Services and Society of Local Authority Chief executives (SOLACE). It supports sector led improvement in children’s services, drawing on the expertise of political leaders and senior officers in councils. An important part of CIB’s role in sector led improvement is to support councils as they manage policy changes on the ground. New policies and priorities present challenges and may have implications for the view that government takes of council performance. CIB supports councils to understand their own strengths and weaknesses and work with their peers to improve performance. Its work is part of a drive by local government to move away from top down inspection and control towards a sector led approach.

http://www.sthelens.gov.uk/newsroom/2012/03/06/councils-team-up-for-new-adoption-service/ http://www.westminster.gov.uk/workspace/assets/publications/tri-borough-proposals-report_aw3-1297241297.pdf 145 http://www.local.gov.uk/c/document_library/get_file?uuid=7fc04927-6142-45ce-8536-1b5c879ae169&groupId=10171 143 144

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Local Government Association—Written evidence CIB is offering improvement support to any councils whose performance falls below performance thresholds set by the Government. This includes a small number of councils identified by DfE as causing particular concern. CIB has commissioned, jointly with DfE, a “diagnostic assessment” which aims to provide a more rounded picture of the council’s performance and to tell the story behind the data, as well as strengthening the council’s own improvement plan where needed. Where the assessment has shown a genuine need for improvement support, CIB is working with the council concerned to agree what support will be needed to make a difference and to put this in place. Experience from these assessments will produce an assessment tool which can be used for the benefit of other councils who may wish to gain a better understanding of their performance on adoption. In addition, support on adoption will be provided through regions. This year £2.3m from CIB’s budget has been allocated to regions and each region has been asked to include adoption, care and family justice within their improvement programme for the year. For example Yorkshire and Humberside will be analysing data from performance indicators and providing support through the region to those councils in greatest need. The region will identify and disseminate practice which is proven to make a difference. The North East region is planning to use the diagnostic assessment developed by CIB to amplify the performance data, the councils will be discussing collectively the implications of performance data to be published in 2013 and they will be looking specifically at the stability of placements and the needs of black and ethnic minority children. The most sustainable improvement in services will come from councils being highly selfaware and ready to take rapid action to address areas of weakness. Learning from CIB’s work, including support on adoption, is helping both local and central government understand the best ways to ensure that councils themselves get better at understanding what they need to do to deliver high quality services for the most vulnerable children. July 2012

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Local Government Association—Supplementary written evidence

Local Government Association—Supplementary written evidence The LGA would like to submit supplementary evidence to the House of Lords Committee following oral evidence on Tuesday 17 July 2012. Sharing Best Practice (Question 1 – How is good practice on adoption shared between local authorities?) In addition to the information given at the evidence session, the LGA wants to draw the Committee’s attention to the work of the Children’s Improvement Board. Adoption is a priority for the Children's Improvement Board (CIB), which is leading an important initiative to help councils improve their performance in children's services. The CIB is a partnership between the Local Government Association (LGA), Association of Directors of Children’s Services and Society of Local Authority Chief executives (SOLACE). It supports sector led improvement in children’s services, drawing on the expertise of political leaders and senior officers in councils. An important part of CIB’s role in sector led improvement is to support councils as they manage policy changes on the ground. New policies and priorities present challenges and may have implications for the view that government takes of council performance. CIB supports councils to understand their own strengths and weaknesses and work with their peers to improve performance. Its work is part of a drive by local government to move away from top down inspection and control towards a sector led approach. CIB is offering improvement support to any councils whose performance falls below performance thresholds set by the Government. This includes a small number of councils identified by DfE as causing particular concern. CIB has commissioned, jointly with DfE, a “diagnostic assessment” which aims to provide a more rounded picture of the council’s performance and to tell the story behind the data, as well as strengthening the council’s own improvement plan where needed. Where the assessment has shown a genuine need for improvement support, CIB is working with the council concerned to agree what support will be needed to make a difference and to put this in place. Experience from these assessments will produce an assessment tool which can be used for the benefit of other councils who may wish to gain a better understanding of their performance on adoption. In addition, support on adoption will be provided through regions. This year £2.3m from CIB’s budget has been allocated to regions and each region has been asked to include adoption, care and family justice within their improvement programme for the year. For example Yorkshire and Humberside will be analysing data from performance indicators and providing support through the region to those councils in greatest need. The region will identify and disseminate practice which is proven to make a difference. The North East 659

Local Government Association—Supplementary written evidence region is planning to use the diagnostic assessment developed by CIB to amplify the performance data, the councils will be discussing collectively the implications of performance data to be published in 2013 and they will be looking specifically at the stability of placements and the needs of black and ethnic minority children. The most sustainable improvement in services will come from councils being highly selfaware and ready to take rapid action to address areas of weakness. Learning from CIB’s work, including support on adoption, is helping both local and central government understand the best ways to ensure that councils themselves get better at understanding what they need to do to deliver high quality services for the most vulnerable children. Shared services (Question 3 – Should more formal joint working be developed between neighbouring local authorities, to provide services across larger areas?) There are many examples of local authorities sharing services, both across councils and with other public sector agencies or voluntary and community organisations. Shared services can mean many things. Traditionally thought of as back office arrangements (transactional, operational or professional), councils and other public services are increasingly looking to share senior management, consider joint venture relationships with other public sector bodies and the private sector, and also move to shared front office services such as adults' and children's services. The LGA has produced a national shared services compendium and map showing that 219 councils across the country are engaged in 143 shared service arrangements resulting in £156.5 million of efficiency savings.146 Councils are taking partnership approaches to help them address challenges they face in finding adoptive homes for children. This might be particularly, but not exclusively, appropriate in areas where small numbers of children are placed for adoption. By working together, councils can increase the pool of prospective adopters and also invest in or retain capacity and expertise that might not otherwise be feasible. Many authorities are already part of well-established and long-standing regional consortia147, some of which also include voluntary adoption agencies. Consortia share resources and prospective adopters, creating a larger pool of families and maximising placement choice. Consortia also collaborate on recruitment and training, sharing practice and developing common standards. Some authorities have started to go beyond this consortium approach to create more formalised shared services. For example, Warrington, Wigan and St.Helens Councils created the WWiSH adoption shared service in 2012 which operates across the three boroughs, bringing expertise into one team. The authorities created the service to help address the gap between children waiting to be adopted and people wishing to adopt; the

http://www.local.gov.uk/web/guest/productivity/-/journal_content/56/10171/3511353/ARTICLE-TEMPLATE Examples include, but are not limited to, the South West London Consortium, the Yorkshire Adoption Consortium and the South Coast Adoption Consortium. 146 147

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Local Government Association—Supplementary written evidence North West has seen a 9 per cent rise in the number of children seeking adoption but only a 4 per cent rise in adopters.148 As part of the wider Tri-Borough working by Hammersmith and Fulham, Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea and the City of Westminster,149 the three boroughs have combined children’s services, headed by one Director. This includes one fostering and adoption service that operates across the boroughs, split into four teams: Recruitment and Assessment; Duty and Placement; Connected Persons; and Permanence and Post-Order. When a child is identified as probably not able to return home, all locality teams consult with the Permanence team at an early stage. This single fostering and adoption service approach is anticipated to improve outcomes for children, through increased numbers of adopters, reducing delay, better placement matching and fewer breakdowns, improved support for families, but also to deliver financial savings to the three authorities. 150 There is a wide array of shared services models operating across the country. The varying models each have different advantages and disadvantages, and one will not suit all councils, localities, or types of service provision. It is therefore important that authorities are empowered and enabled, with the right information, to make a decision based on their own local and regional circumstances. 25 July 2012

http://www.sthelens.gov.uk/newsroom/2012/03/06/councils-team-up-for-new-adoption-service/ http://www.westminster.gov.uk/workspace/assets/publications/tri-borough-proposals-report_aw3-1297241297.pdf 150 http://www.local.gov.uk/c/document_library/get_file?uuid=7fc04927-6142-45ce-8536-1b5c879ae169&groupId=10171 148 149

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Local Government Association—Further supplementary written evidence

Local Government Association—Further supplementary written evidence Draft Adoption Clauses of Children and Families Bill INTRODUCTION Adoption plays an important role in providing secure, stable and loving homes for some children who can no longer live with their birth families; however it must be considered in the context of other forms of permanence. What is best for individual children must be at the heart of decision-making. Focusing only on adoption misses the bigger picture of permanence and stability: adoption is not right for all children and overall permanence orders, including special guardianship, have risen by 27% over the last 5 years. We recognise there is some variation in council performance and practice and the sector is addressing this through the Children’s Improvement Board (CIB). However, adoption is complex and the system is not entirely within councils’ control. Local variation does not necessarily equal variation in local authority performance. Some of the challenges facing councils include:    

A shortage of adopters Some children are much harder to find families for example, sibling groups and those with health problems or disabilities A slow court system (found by Ofsted to be the main reason for delays) Bureaucracy, in particular assessment of adopters.

DRAFT CLAUSES Early Permanence through ‘Fostering for Adoption’ Evidence clearly shows that children benefit from stability and the ability to form early attachments. ‘Fostering for adoption’ can increase this by enabling children to live with prospective adopters much earlier and reducing the number of moves between placements. As noted in the Government’s Action Plan for Adoption, some councils already make use of this practice. The proposed clause should lead to greater uptake, though the central consideration in any adoption decision must always be what is in the best interests of each individual child.

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Local Government Association—Further supplementary written evidence Prospective adopters that choose to take this route will need to be fully aware of the implications. These include the distinction between the fostering and adoption stages and the potential for the courts to decide that the child should not be adopted, even after a considerable period of being fostered by that family. The principle of transferring the risk and impact of disruption from the child to the adults, where appropriate, is sound. However, this scenario could be extremely traumatic for the prospective adopters who will need to be provided with support throughout. It is important to recognise that for these reasons not all prospective adopters will wish to ‘foster to adopt’. Fostering for adoption can increase stability by enabling children to live with their prospective adopters during often lengthy court proceedings. Nevertheless, it remains essential to address the significant delay in the courts, to reduce uncertainty for the child (and birth parents and prospective adopters) and for those who are not being fostered for adoption. The LGA welcomed the Family Justice Review and is pleased that the Government has published draft clauses for pre-legislative scrutiny in order to implement its recommendations. Matching for Adoption The Ofsted report ‘Right on time: exploring delays in adoption’ found that ethnicity was not a cause for delay in the cases it investigated. However, the LGA recognises that there is anecdotal evidence that the search for a ‘perfect ethnic match’ has caused delay which is cause for concern. Ethnicity should be one issue balanced amongst all considerations, not an overriding factor. The draft clause supports this approach as the best interests of the child, including taking into account their particular needs and background will still be at the heart of decisions about adoption. 16 November 2012

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Local Government Association—Further supplementary written evidence

Local Government Association—Further supplementary written evidence Here is the LGA response to the question you raised about the adoption clauses of the draft Children and Families Bill. The Committee would be interested to know whether you think that, rather than remove entirely the provision to give consideration to the child’s religious persuasion, racial origin and cultural and linguistic background, it should instead be included in the ‘welfare checklist’ – i.e. under section 1 (4) d of the current ACA 2002. Section 1 (4) d of the Adoption and Children Act 2002 requires that the court or adoption agency must have regard to the child’s “… background and any of the child's characteristics which the court or agency considers relevant”. This existing wording appears to give scope for consideration of the child’s religious persuasion, racial origin and cultural and linguistic background if it is relevant in a case. There may be differing interpretations regarding the extent to which these are relevant; however the paramount consideration remains the welfare of each individual child. November 2012

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Tim Loughton MP—Oral evidence (QQ 567-588)

Tim Loughton MP—Oral evidence (QQ 567-588) Evidence Session No. 10.

Heard in Public.

Questions 567-588

TUESDAY 6 NOVEMBER 2012 Members present Baroness Butler-Sloss (Chairman) Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top Baroness Eaton Viscount Eccles Baroness Hamwee Baroness Knight of Collingtree Baroness King of Bow Lord Morris of Handsworth Baroness Walmsley Lord Warner ________________ Examination of Witness Tim Loughton MP, former Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Children and Families

Q567 The Chairman: We are delighted that you were prepared to come. We think that your evidence will be extremely important to us. It is very good to see you. I think you know everybody around the table. Tim Loughton: Just about, I think, yes. The Chairman: I hope you have had a copy of our questions. You will know very well that we have put them around various people, and I ask Lord Warner to start. Q568 Lord Warner: Based on your experience, do you think we have the right structure for adoption services? Should we continue with a situation in which all local authorities are providing an adoption service, irrespective of the size of the local population and the scale of their operation? Tim Loughton: Lady Chairman, let me say first that I am delighted to be here, and on a voluntary basis, having appeared under compulsion before five Select Committees, I think, in the space of two weeks before the Summer Recess. It is always a pleasure to be here and it

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Tim Loughton MP—Oral evidence (QQ 567-588) really does not matter what I say. There is a disclaimer to that, in that what I do say is completely unaided by helpful submissions from officials at the Department for Education. The Chairman: That is one reason why we are so glad to see you. Tim Loughton: Indeed—or helpful officials fluttering around in the background, nervous as to what you are going to say. On structures, I think this is an interesting one, but the real question should be about outcomes. In the past, with legislation and changes throughout the whole of the care system and adoption, it had been an obsession with structures rather than what achieves the best outcome. What I think we need to see is a far better development of partnerships. That may be partnerships between different authorities federating together to be able to have a more sophisticated adoption service. It may be partnerships between authorities and voluntary agencies, of which the classic and best progressed so far is between Coram and certain authorities who have gone down that route. What I am against is about having a national adoption service, which I know some favour. That would have significant downsides in taking it away from the localised knowledge and sensitivities that should still be important. Having said that, I think better, wider and greater use of the national adoption register—which is certainly one of the things envisaged through the adoption action plan—is vital as well. The thing we need to fight against is a sense of local jealousy over territory in those authorities who are very loath to go outside their own direct prospective adopters in order to find a placement for a child. I think that has been most harmful to children, where there are potentially suitable adopters for that child who do not happen to be physically within the boundaries of an authority or part of that authority’s adoption pool. The Chairman: Let me just interrupt to say I forgot to tell all Members of our Committee, and indeed our witnesses, that we are being recorded for television. Tim Loughton: I will not change that answer. The Chairman: I did not for a moment think you would. Q569 Lord Warner: I would like to probe a bit more on this. I am with you on not changing structures for the sake of structural change, but what is coming out in some of the evidence is a concern about the scale of operation being too small in some places, both to get the experience among the social work profession in handling adoption, because they simply do not see very many cases, and some issues around timeliness. Clearly, some authorities—a limited number—are starting to take the law into their own hands, in a sense, where they are fusing the organisations to create a bigger scale of operation—Kensington and Chelsea, Westminster and Hammersmith are a good example. The purpose behind this is: is it good enough to leave it to voluntary manoeuvres, or is there such a serious set of evidence about some minimum scale being important that one really ought to give it a bit of a push from the centre? No one is arguing for a national adoption service—well, we are not arguing for it, I do not think—it is a question about whether there is enough impetus to get to some minimal level of scale to produce a good adoption service.

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Tim Loughton MP—Oral evidence (QQ 567-588) Tim Loughton: The reason I shake my head is some people are arguing for a national adoption service, but I think they are in the minority. I will give you two examples. Obviously there is the tri-borough experiment, which is going on across all the activities of those three London boroughs, and I think that brings with it a significant benefit. If one takes the first experiment of partnership with an adoption agency, and that was Harrow and Coram, which has been going for six or so years now with huge success, that did not mean that they were going beyond the boundaries of Harrow, but what it did mean is that Coram was able to offer prospective adopters from well beyond the boundaries of just Harrow because of their national network. That is why I am saying it is horses for courses. You can open up a wider pool of prospective adopters by greater use of the national register, by partnership with more national organisations, or by federating—as I call it—between several different local authorities. If you take my own area, which is West Sussex, we are a largish, rural county but increasingly we are seeing activities jointly with East Sussex and with Brighton and Hove, so between the three Sussex authorities you start to get some economies of scale. As you quite rightly say, I think there is also a problem in some of the local authorities. In some of the data we have, this comes below the 10 or fewer threshold, so we do not have the figures of the performance of some of those authorities, which is hugely frustrating. I think that there should be a strong nudge to smaller authorities, in particular, to buddy up, to federate—be it with other authorities, be it with other voluntary agencies, social enterprises or whatever—in order to achieve a greater pool of prospective adopters and a greater variety of the prospective adoptees, making it more likely to find better matches. The Chairman: Lady King, that moves straight into your question, does it not? Q570 Baroness King of Bow: That has already answered my question but I will ask what your definition of “a strong nudge” would be. Tim Loughton: A strong? Baroness King of Bow: Nudge. You said they need a strong nudge. Is it directives or what is it? Tim Loughton: We are at an interesting point at the moment, and there are the powers that be that would—on more dogmatic grounds—like to see all adoption services effectively contracted out to voluntary agencies. That is premature. It is prospectively counterproductive and, therefore, I think it is dangerously dogmatic. It also comes when we have only recently introduced the adoption scorecards, and it is going to take a number of years for local authorities to get a proper handle on exactly where they are and be able to prove that they are going in the right direction. So I think that the “strong nudge” is the adoption scorecard because there is nowhere to hide now. Baroness King of Bow: Incidentally, I want to say I think you are one of the best Ministers that I have ever come across. That gets that out of the way. Tim Loughton: I could not possibly comment. Q571 Baroness King of Bow: What do we do about local authorities where they might have one adoption case a year, there is a history of lack of expertise, experience, and ability to

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Tim Loughton MP—Oral evidence (QQ 567-588) match children, that sort of thing? In those instances, should they not be given more of a strong nudge than simply, “Let us have a look at your scorecard”? Tim Loughton: That scorecard will reveal everything—that they are perhaps in denial, that the figures are poor and not improving—but what we cannot do is take a snapshot of just one year. As you know, to bring about these improvements in adoption is not going to happen overnight. It is going to be several years, regrettably, before we start to see the benefits of what is going on at the moment, but there are some early signs of that. If the adoption scorecards are clearly showing weaknesses, what will happen—and is already happening—is that the Department for Education intervention team will go and have a conversation with that authority. If they are still deemed to be not strongly going on the right course, then there will be an intervention plan. Of course the Secretary of State has the authority to intervene and effectively take those services over from them, so that they can be run by somebody else. That probably needs to happen to set a precedent and to send a very clear message that this is not something that you can dawdle on or not take seriously. As to whether we need to legislate for it, I think we can do it largely with the powers we have already. We need to send out a message that we are serious about this, and it will happen in certain cases. I hope—and I am cautiously confident—that enough local authorities have woken up to the fact that their adoption services are underperforming and they need to do better. They need to do better because the Government have set it as a priority, but clearly they need to do better because it is the best thing for the child. Q572 Baroness Eaton: My question was particularly about whether you should remove the powers for the adoption service from underperforming local authorities. What you said is that, in your view, there is no need for further legislation—the powers are probably there but we need to use them. Tim Loughton: Yes. Baroness Eaton: You mentioned scorecards. There is quite a bit of concern about whether or not it gets to some of the fine print of what goes on in adoption, particularly around large sibling groups, or where there are disabilities and it is harder to find adoptive parents. Do you think the scorecards show the underperforming authorities fully enough, or could they be finetuned a bit more? Tim Loughton: They can probably be fine-tuned a bit more. A lot of work went into this, and I was very clear that we needed to come up with a sort of cocktail measure—that was the original phrase I used—of how an authority is doing. Part of the weakness here is that, in the past, an authority’s success or failure on adoption has largely been measured by how many kids get adopted, and it is not a numbers game. The last thing I wanted to do was to go back to artificial targets, whereby local authority officers were scrambling around near the end of the year to say, “Gosh, we are 10 kids short of our adoption target, we had better find some to snatch”. That leads to all the accusations and the controversy around it. What we needed to do with adoption scorecards was to come up with a measure that showed how many children were being adopted and, hopefully, to be then able to show how, over several years, it was gradually rising, or certainly in proportion to the number of kids coming into care, and to also concentrate very heavily on timeliness. I think delay is a major damaging 668

Tim Loughton MP—Oral evidence (QQ 567-588) factor to children. It is not just an inconvenience. Delay itself damages children, particularly those very young children where attachment is absolutely key to that child having any serious chance of having a normal childhood. I am acutely aware of the fact that much of the delay problem is not solely in the hands of the children’s services department and social workers, which is why, on the other side of the coin—as you are very familiar with, Lady Chairman—the reform is going on to the family justice system. It is a game of ping-pong. In particular, I have sat on adoption panels where you ask the members of the panel who is at fault with delay, and things like that. They will say, “The trouble is judges are forever asking for yet more expert witnesses to come up with yet more testimony, which delay and delay”. Then I have sat with groups of judges who say, “The problem is with adoption panels and local authorities, who are constantly delaying meetings, and they are getting all these social worker reports in,” and so on. It is this game of ping-pong. It is down to children’s services to get their act together better on the way they are taking the children forward, and more children forward, to adoption. It is down to the courts to remember that delay is a damaging factor for those children and to speed it up. They need to remember that we will never get a perfect match for every child. It is a balance between getting a really good placement that hopefully is going to last, against the damage that spending a few years in care is going to do to that child. What is also important about the adoption scorecards—and I am afraid this is a long answer but it is something I feel strongly about—is the contextualised information that is there, some of which is not available yet and some of which will become available over the next few years. That is how we treat prospective adopters, because there is a supply and a demand side here. Some authorities—many authorities—have been rubbish at welcoming prospective adopters. They have frightened a lot of them off with all sorts of scare stories that many of us are aware of. Also, in the contextualised data, there is the information about how well authorities are doing with sibling groups, with kids from BME backgrounds, with older kids and with kids with disabilities. This is not chapter and verse. This cannot deliberately be put into a league table. Although the press try to, and will manufacture some sort of league tables, it is not about league tables. Frankly, the way we have approached this is, first of all, to have a helpful, constructive chat with officials from the departments, so that if an authority is scoring particularly poorly on some timeliness factors, or on some number factors, but they are doing really well on adopting problem child, sibling groups, and so on, then that is an excuse for it, and I think one would take a balanced view of the fact that they are doing much better on dealing with children who would otherwise be in care permanently, against the fact it is taking them a bit longer in order to achieve that, as sibling groups and others inevitably will. Q573 The Chairman: Is the three months before which children will go on to the national adoption register the right period? Should the children go on earlier? Tim Loughton: That may be fine-tuned. Three months was an initial stab at it. I still think that children are best dealt with locally, by those people who have the corporate parent knowledge, hopefully, of that child. Putting them on the national adoption register means you are taking away some of that local knowledge initially. Clearly, we should be looking at every possible avenue that makes a suitable adopter available to a child, wherever that prospective adopter is, and that is where the national adoption register comes in, but it need not happen on day one.

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Tim Loughton MP—Oral evidence (QQ 567-588) Q574 Lord Morris of Handsworth: Could you tell us whether you think the Government should intervene to level the playing field between local authorities and the voluntary adoption agencies by fixing inter-agency fees? Tim Loughton: Probably. The inter-agency fee is quite interesting. It is an area where we did some work some years ago in opposition, when, as shadow Minister, I produced a report on adoption. We did quite a lot with Julie Selwyn, a professor from the Hadley Centre at Bristol. Her 2009 report—I think it was—on the cost of adoption and the inter-agency fee blew the whole thing wide open. It showed that the cost of adoption going outside an authority was little different from keeping it in-house. An excuse many children’s services departments had used for many years, as to why they wanted to concentrate on finding an in-house adopter, was that it was a lot cheaper. In fact it is not. The figure that Julie Selwyn came out with was roughly £35,000, when one takes into account all the internal overheads that go with it. There was an interesting project by Action for Children, all about recruiting black adoptive families, prospective adopters, based in south London. It was a very successful project. They achieved what a lot of people had not been able to achieve, which was to find prospective adoptive families from various black families, given the disproportionate number of black kids, particularly black boys, in the care system. They could not get the local authorities to place their children with those prospective adopters. It was nothing to do with the quality of them. Again, they artificially wanted to keep things in-house. If we need to look at the whole fee basis, in order to make sure there are no barriers to local authorities going out of area to find prospective adopters, then we may well need to do that. There is another thing that I was working on, which I think is also important, and that is what I call a bounty fee. At the moment, voluntary adoption agencies only get paid when a match is done. There is some very interesting work being done with PACT—parents and children together—where, of course, they are subsidising the adoption service with other fostering services. It is a Church of England-backed voluntary charity. They have to bear the cost of advertising, recruiting and training prospective adopters, with no guarantee of getting paid for that until, and unless, a child is matched with any of those adopters from a local authority, so there is a cap on the pool of prospective adopters that they can recruit because it costs them to keep them in that pool. I think we should bring in some form of bounty fee, whereby the agency is paid for recruiting and training and then passing good adopters, even if they have not at that stage been matched. That way the voluntary agencies, who are more successful in recruiting good-quality prospective adopters, would have a bigger pool, would have more choice, and would be more likely to match more children in a more timely manner. The CIAG fee is only part of that, but it may well be we need to look at it. The Chairman: That is a very interesting suggestion, a bounty fee. Nobody has suggested that up until now. I think it is something we ought to explore. Q575 Baroness Walmsley: Is it not inevitable, when local authority employees are making a decision as to whether to keep the work in-house, or to give it to somebody else, they will decide to protect their own jobs, even when the cost is equal? Tim Loughton: I do not think that is inevitable because what should be inevitable, by a goodquality social worker, is to want to achieve the very best for that child in the care system, for whom an adoption is the most appropriate course of action. 670

Tim Loughton MP—Oral evidence (QQ 567-588) Baroness Walmsley: Is there not some pressure, and how could we prevent it? Tim Loughton: If everybody realises that adoption is a priority area of children in care, not a last resort, as it is treated in some areas, and that we could only possibly go down the adoption route if we find the perfect ethnic match and everything else to go with it, then everybody should be striving to show that this authority has looked at every child in its care and has identified all those children for whom adoption is the likely most appropriate route, and they can then show that they are working night and day to achieve that goal. Whether it means finding more people locally, whether it means working with other partners nationally, or whether it means a better use of the national adoption agency, it should not matter. It is the local social worker, the responsible social worker working with every child in care, and the IRO as well, who should be doing the work locally to achieve that. I do not think this closed-shop attitude is appropriate and I cannot see any benefit from it. I hope the transparency that the adoption scorecards and everything else brings—as well as the fee basis I just mentioned— shows that there are no excuses for that now. Q576 Baroness Knight of Collingtree: What we are hearing from you, Mr Loughton, is absolutely crucial. You have now said that it is clearly recognised how serious an effect long delays of adoption can have on a child, and it perhaps gets them past the stage where they are fit for adoption. If we concentrate for a moment on this, how can the pool of adopters be increased? We understand it is two and a half years before you can be accepted as a potential adopter. Is that too long? Do you think because there is a shortage of social workers, and certainly a shortage of those who have had a lot of experience in this field—although one recognises that there are necessary checks that have to be made—there is any way that more social workers could help get over that particular difficulty, or do you think the national gateway is going to provide the impetus that we need? Tim Loughton: There are a lot of questions within that. Let us take various parts of it. On the social worker issue, I am glad to say that the vacancy rates are reducing, but, more importantly, the calibre of people coming into the social work profession is rising, for a whole host of reasons. One of the reasons that social workers are so stretched still is that they have to comply with too much process and too much regulation. That is why the Munro work and the Working Together rewrite were absolutely essential, so that they can spend more time eyeballing the families and children they are there to work with rather than sitting in front of a computer. Of course, the more children there are in care, the more social worker time it is going to take. The more of those children that get adopted, then the less time the social workers will need to spend with them as well, so there is an invest to save and gain situation here. Why do we not have more prospective adopters coming forward? This is a double-edged sword. It is quite interesting, because all the heightened profile there has been over adoption in the last two years because of the priority it has been given in the Department for Education, quite rightly, by the new Government, can have two effects. All the stuff we have been laying bare about delay, about political correctness, and trying to do something about it, for some people that will be, “Gosh, I am not going anywhere near that. I have heard all these scare stories, and now they have confirmed it, adoption is not for me”. Other people, and I hope more people, will say, “Yes, I was worried about coming forward as a prospective adopter, and it is a big ask to do it. I have heard all these stories about, ‘Oh, I am a bit overweight, I smoke and I am over 45, and I am white, indigenous’ and so on, therefore, they would not want me at

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Tim Loughton MP—Oral evidence (QQ 567-588) all, but that is all nonsense. Those are all myths.” We need everybody to come forward and we need to make it a much less bureaucratic process. I have met countless numbers of adopters. I have spent a lot of time going around the country speaking to prospective adopters, speaking to successful adopters, speaking to adoptive kids, and I had a ministerial advisory group with many of them on it. I followed several specific cases, where I was involved in television programmes with them. Every obstacle was put in their way. Look, we have 67,000 in the care system but only 3,400 of them get adopted. We think many more could. If somebody comes forward, plucks up enough courage to say, “I am interested in adoption,” we should be grabbing them by the neck and saying, “Thank God you are here. Come on in. Let us see if we can turn you into a good adopter”, not, “Don’t call us, we’ll call you”, which has been the attitude, frankly, and not, “I’m sorry, you are the wrong colour, class, age and so on. Don’t call us, we’ll call you”. The best local authorities do a good job, they grab those people. I was up in South Tyneside and I met lots of people involved in adoption. There was one family there who had become star adopters in their local authority. They had seen an advert and they said, “We are interested in that”. They rang up the local authority and said, “We are just inquiring about adoption”. Later that afternoon a social worker turned up on their doorstep and said, “I thought you might like to have some more information”. That is fantastic. That showed a commitment on behalf of that local authority that they were serious about it. Other authorities hold presentations at least every month, so within four weeks, you will go on an adoption introduction evening to talk you through what it is all about. You are much more likely then to keep them keen. There is quite a low hit rate on all this. When I went to PACT— and PACT is one of the best at it—they gave me some figures, which I have here. In 2011-12 they had 659 people ring them up with an initial inquiry. Of those, 200 prospective adopters turned up for an introduction session and, from that, 69 then went through the system to be adopters, of which 65 were approved. It was a very high approval rate but, effectively, it is a one in 10 successful conversion rate from somebody ringing up and saying, “I am interested,” to then becoming approved adopters available for adoption, and they are one of the better ones. I would think with many local authorities it might be one in 100. The trouble is we do not know. There are no figures around the success of local authorities in engaging and signing up prospective adopters. That is why that part of the adoption scorecard will be a very important part, but it will take several years before we get that information through. It is important that every local authority has a very welcoming face locally, on its website and in its recruitment, to prospective adopters, and that there is a national gateway, as part of a national promotion campaign, so people who—for whatever reason—do not want to go through their local authority can go on to a national recruitment campaign as well. Frankly, I do not care how we do it; what I really care about is that we need many more people who are able to offer suitable adoption placements than we have at the moment. Q577 Baroness Hamwee: Listening to that quite powerful description and putting it together with every Government’s default response to a problem, which tends to be, “Well, we had better have more legislation or different legislation”, can you say something about where the balance of effort and concentration should be, as between changing legislation and changing the practice?

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Tim Loughton MP—Oral evidence (QQ 567-588) Tim Loughton: I agree with you. Everybody seems to think, “We need legislation or we need new guidance”. What I learnt very quickly—but not quickly enough—is that the Minister changing the guidance does not automatically mean that the problem is solved and that behaviours and practices change. I changed the guidance for fostering and for adoption, in April 2011, and had a big focus about myth-busting around, “You could not possibly adopt if you were like me,” basically—although I do not smoke, but that might be a consideration—and yet it did not change things hugely. We also did it around children in care placements away from home and so on. What is required is a combination of things. One is for Government to show that it is absolutely serious, and I think local authorities have the message that we are absolutely serious. It might be about changing regulations and sending out much clearer guidance if the guidance needs to be clarified, but it is about transparency of performance. That is where I think the adoption scorecards are important. It is not really about naming and shaming, because the adoption scorecards show good performance just as much as they show poor performance. I think the attitude of Government in the past, of all persuasions, has been to point the finger of blame when things go wrong and not to highlight good performance when things are going right. One thing that I always did was that I found myself writing letters to authorities that had failed an Ofsted inspection and were then going into intervention for safeguarding adoption, whatever it may be. I said, “Do we ever write to those authorities who have done exceedingly well at an Ofsted inspection or come out of intervention?” and they said, “Oh no, we do not do that”. Therefore, I wrote to every local authority that got an excellent rating from Ofsted, or had come out of intervention, be it adoption or safeguarding, to show that progress as well. I think what happened is a lot of directors of children’s services were complacent and thinking, “We do not really have a problem with adoption,” but because we made such a big issue of it— I went in front of conferences of ADCS and had groups of DCSs together—and said, “You do need to get better,” they went back to their local authorities, and I know this from the experience of some of them. They looked at it in more detail, and they suddenly realised, “Actually, we do have a problem”. I think that message was probably the most important thing in making sure that there are adoption social workers on the case and that they are producing the goods. It is not some add-on to the department down at the end of the corridor. I think it is a combination of those things, but if we had to wait for legislation then this would take much longer than it is taking. It was really encouraging, but I was surprised with the adoption figures we had in September, which showed an increase of 12% over the previous year, the first uptick since 2007. It may well be that it ticks down again next year, I do not know. As I say, it takes some time for this to go through. I think that, clearly, now all local authorities have no excuse for not being on an upward trajectory because the Government is going to see this through. I am sure my successor will be as committed to it as I was. The Chairman: This is a rather good moment for Lady Armstrong to ask the next question. Q578 Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top: Yes. Has the predominance of adoption, as the way forward, undermined the other forms of permanency that may be more appropriate for a particular child? For example, we had evidence last week of a child being placed with someone else in the family and that not being examined early enough, and the race for adoption not

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Tim Loughton MP—Oral evidence (QQ 567-588) allowing proper examination of other ways forward that, in actual fact, might be the most effective for the child. Tim Loughton: It is a very fair question and one I was acutely aware of. The Secretary of State is absolutely committed to this, has a particular commitment to and interest in, in essence, adoption, but it does not make it mutually exclusive that all of a sudden all other kids in care are a secondary consideration. I think the fostering industry were concerned that they were being slightly demoted. Because we brought out an adoption action plan before we had a fostering action plan formally, I think that impression was then given. Virtually every speech I gave, or everything I wrote, was to say there is no hierarchy of care in the various forms of care available. It absolutely has to come down to what is the most appropriate destination for that child. Even if we were to double the adoption figures, in however many years—and that is not a target; it may be the right number, it may be too high, it may be too low, I do not know, but that is not the point—it would still represent fewer than 10% of the total number of children in care at the moment. It is always going to be a very small minority activity for the kids in the care system, but we need to make sure that we are giving that opportunity to the right kids who are not getting it now and that there are not kids who are being adopted for the wrong reasons. I know, from the discussions that you have had before, that obviously the queries about the total number of permanent placements have increased. That is particularly down to special guardianship orders and the Adoption and Children Act that introduced them. I do not think you were part of that at the time in 2001-02. It was Jacquie Smith who led for the Government on that. I very much remember that that was intended for older children staying within a family, who were particularly problematic in placing with strangers. In fact, it has turned out to be used for younger children far more than we ever envisaged. Now, is that right or not? I do not know. I have some suspicions. That is why we need to do more work on it, and the department has commissioned more work on it, and at the moment the jury is still out. Of course we do not have figures about the disruption rates for SGOs, just as we have very scant information for disruption rates for adoptions as well, which always appalled me. The excuses I received were, “We do not keep track of adopted children”. Well, we should be keeping track of adopted children. The excuse was that many of them would then move to another authority. Then it is the responsibility of the original placing authority to keep track of where that child has gone. I asked for more work to be done on keeping track of those children, so we could have some meaningful and robust evidence around adoption disruptions. There is a lot of misinformation about the rate of adoption disruptions and those authorities who keep a good track on it. If we look at Coram and Harrow, I think they have had one disruption in the last five years. Okay, it is early days but the signs are good. The long-winded answer to your question is: no, there should be no hierarchy between all of those. I have tried—and perhaps the Government needs to try a bit harder—to emphasise that, whether it is a long-term fostering placement, whether it is an SGO, whether it is an adoption, whether it is a child in long-term residential care, then it must be what is the most appropriate course of action for that child. There was a greater sense of urgency around adoption, because there were many children in care, very clearly, for whom there was no obvious safe way back to their birth families, for whom adoption could be a better alternative, but they were not being identified for it and, therefore, were being neglected.

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Tim Loughton MP—Oral evidence (QQ 567-588) Q579 Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top: Are you confident that the arrangements around cutting down delay will not mean that other forms of care, particularly with the extended family, will be neglected? Tim Loughton: It should not be. Again, one has to take a balance of what is the best possible outcome rather than the perfect possible outcome for those children. Where judges are dispatching social workers to Bangladesh and Nigeria, for example—as we know in some cases—in order to investigate some remote cousin of a family or aunt or uncle, in order to identify, to the nth degree, a possible kinship care match, or whatever, against however long that is going to take, despite the fact that that child may never have been to that country, never have met those people, has absolutely no empathy with that particular culture, that in extremis is the nonsense of it. It comes back to being able to make a balanced judgment of what is the best available to that child that is likely to make for a quality and sustainable placement. The Chairman: I do hope that is not happening very often. Tim Loughton: You should ask some of your former colleagues about that. Q580 The Chairman: They are coming to give evidence in due course. We will move on now to the various ways in which children may be placed for adoption. The Government appears very enthusiastic about fostering for adoption, sometimes called parallel planning, and we are told that the concurrent planning model of Coram is not the way that they see fostering for adoption—in particular, there is not going to be the same sort of active rehabilitation going on. Why is there a difference between parallel planning, fostering for adoption and the Coram model? Does it have something to do with the age or the circumstances of the child? How are we seeing this difference? Tim Loughton: I am slightly blind on this difference. I was reading some of the notes of the transcripts of previous witnesses. This was not something I was aware of, I have to say. Concurrency was very much a niche interest and had been a dwindling interest, and Coram were virtually the last flag bearers of that particular line of care. They came to see me some while ago, saying that they had to retreat from it because of funding problems and that people were not taking it seriously. I have always called it concurrent planning. I do not know where the term “fostering for adoption” came from. It is one of the things that some bright official thought up because it sounded good. Where I think this particularly applies is for young kids, maybe babies, who are taken from the birth parent, usually a single birth mother who has had several children already taken into care. Clearly, on the likelihood of outcomes, there is no way that that child is going to spend his or her childhood growing up with the birth mother. Therefore, we may as well get on with placing that child with the family who is likely to end up being the adoptive family, while the niceties—important though they are—around the legal processes are sorted out. As I said earlier, the disruption and damage that constant changing of placements can have on a young child, while the courts, social workers and others are sorting out how the processes work, are hugely damaging. Q581 The Chairman: From what the Government have been saying, it looks as though children are more likely to be placed with foster parents who are potential adopters before the placement order, rather than waiting for the placement order and then the family is out of the way. This is looking at—and the word “placement” is wrong—putting a child before the

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Tim Loughton MP—Oral evidence (QQ 567-588) placement order has been made. One thing that worries me is how some of the judiciary will see this. Tim Loughton: Yes. I am sure they will not be very happy. The Chairman: I think this is government-proposed policy that we have been seeing. Tim Loughton: Yes. The placement order is what I referred to as the niceties of the legal process, but the risk falls on the prospective adoptive family here rather than the risk falling on the child. There will be cases where the prospective adopters will be disappointed and the birth family will be pleased. In most cases where children are identified as suitable for concurrent planning—not as a default position, which I think has been mentioned, and again there is a limited pool of kids for whom I think it would be very suitable—the seamlessness of them staying with one family permanently, while support sorts that out, is hugely beneficial to that child. Q582 The Chairman: Personally, I think it is an excellent idea. I would have loved to have been able to do it when I was an adoption judge. Is the Government thinking, as far as you know, that this is only for the very young child or may this be appropriate for older children? Tim Loughton: There may be some older children. Again, I do not want to generalise here, as it needs to be on a case-by-case basis. If one speaks to Nick Crichton, who has great expertise through FDAC and everything here—and I have sat in his court where he has taken the 11th child from a mother into care—one sees the inevitability of that, to have to place that child in a temporary foster placement, and then perhaps another temporary foster placement, for however long it takes for the system to sort out the system rather than the system to do what is best as quickly as possible for that child. There are some clear candidates, there will be some borderline candidates and some more complicated candidates, but if we can make that available for as many children as possible for whom it is appropriate, then I think that would be a good thing. Q583 Baroness Walmsley: We can now move on to the issue of delay. Of course, I expect we would all agree that unnecessary delay is highly undesirable and we should reduce it, but quality of decision-making is also very important. I would like to ask you if you think we have the balance right, and whether target-setting sits well with the recommendations of Professor Munro about the exercise and the quality of professional judgment. Tim Loughton: I have huge admiration for Professor Munro, not least because I appointed her. I think she has done a fantastic job with her review and we need to see that through. Her review is all about getting rid of processes and giving more power and trust back to the professionalism of the people at the front-end doing that job. I know that there are a lot of social workers who are frustrated at not being able to promote a child for adoption more easily and swiftly than perhaps they are able to at the moment. As I have said all along, there needs to be a balance between getting on with it and getting rid of the damage of delay and coming up with a placement that is most likely—not inevitable, not guaranteed, but most likely—to be a good-quality placement that is sustainable as well. That is a balance of judgment that good-quality social workers can take themselves. In that way it is entirely complementary with Munro.

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Tim Loughton MP—Oral evidence (QQ 567-588) I always take issue with the use of the word “targets”. These are not targets within the adoption scorecard. They are thresholds of acceptability, which I suppose is a terribly Civil Service term almost. It is not a case of, “Unless you adopt 60 children this year you have failed”. That is why the adoption scorecards and the contextualised information is so important, because if an authority only adopted 55 children this year but had adopted some really difficult ones, then I think it gets some brownie points rather than the finger pointed at it. The way the system works at the moment is that the helpful official from the ministry goes down to have a helpful discussion, and then there is a degree of discretion as to whether formal intervention of whatever scale needs to follow and then the Children’s Improvement Board is used, which is a very important innovation that I was very supportive of here. It is starting to show merit, and it can show merit on adoption just as in safeguarding in other parts of the children’s services. Where a certain authority is doing rather well, then an authority that is experiencing weaknesses in certain areas should be knocking on that door and saying, “Can you give us some help?” The Children’s Improvement Board is a way of giving that peer mentoring for when things are looking weak and for when things are going well too. I do not think we are sacrificing quality. On the legal side of it, the judicial side of it as well, again we are bringing in these time limits that are challenging. On the transition time to it, we know there is quite a lot of squealing from some of your former colleagues as well. Again, it does not mean that if you do not have a case through within the six months, or whatever, then you failed and that child is taken somewhere else. You have to show why there are special reasons for why that child is taking longer, that there are very special circumstances surrounding that child. At the moment there is no reason or mechanism for having to justify delay. If you go to Australia, as the Family Justice Review board did, one of the things you find is a very transparent reporting of productivity of all the family courts there—alarming rates of productivity. I do not think we could replicate that level of productivity in this country, but why is it that certain courts seem to get through their cases in half the time of courts in the neighbouring district? This is all about relative performances. There is no gold standard. We are given some advice as to what we should be able to work towards but the differentials in performance, in terms of delay, in terms of numbers, in terms of problematic kids getting adopted, are alarmingly wide and that is what this throws wide open. The Chairman: That is what Mr Justice Ryder is working at, and I am glad to say he is coming to give evidence to us. Q584 Baroness Walmsley: I have a follow-up. I would like to take you back to this matter of professional judgment. We have an awful lot of guidance. Tim Loughton: Less than we did have. Baroness Walmsley: True, but do you think we have the balance right between allowing people to use their professional judgment and telling them what to do? Tim Loughton: We will have when all the Munro reforms have gone through. Working Together is the manual on safeguarding. It consists of 762 pages or whatever it is. By the time you have flicked through that to see what you should be doing in order to account for yourself, then you have not spent any time with that child. I said all along when I was the Minister that I wanted to give social workers the confidence to make the wrong decision, but based on the very best of

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Tim Loughton MP—Oral evidence (QQ 567-588) judgment and intentions. It is not a science; you will make the wrong decision about whether a child is taken into care or how that child in care is dealt with, but I want social workers to have the confidence, using all the evidence, to make the judgment that they think is right for that child rather than what it says in the manual in order to be able to cover themselves. Let me give one brief example. I spent some days being an IRO up in Leeds. I usually try to spend a week out each year to go and shadow a profession. They had a really good system in Leeds among the IROs where they had invested in the independent reviewing officers, and they had a strong relationship between the IRO and the child. I met a lot of children who knew who their IRO was, knew what they were there for and how they could go to them and so on. They had a specialist adoption IRO who happened to have worked in the adoption service beforehand, and her role was to assess every child in care to see whether they were suitable candidates for adoption. There was an audit of, “Here is a group who we might want to look at prospectively for adoption rather than others,” and it took somebody who had that name badge on to see that through. All IROs should be automatically looking at the children in their care to see whether they are suitable for adoption. The Chairman: Was it Leeds who were doing that? Tim Loughton: That was Leeds, yes. The Chairman: I think we might ask Leeds about this. Tim Loughton: They are very good on IROs. A few years ago, Leeds—because it was a failing authority as well and went into intervention—had one IRO to 240 kids, and they decided to invest in that service. They made a value judgment, so that now they have one IRO to about 60 kids and four times as many IROs. They completely reversed the ratio, and it works. Clearly the service those kids are getting is much better and any problems are intervened on at a much earlier stage, and they can use that professional judgment. Q585 Lord Warner: As a former Health Minister, who used the dreaded targets to drive improvement in services for patients, I probably take a different view from you on targets, but I do not want to go down that particular path. The important point—apart from the barracking from some of my fellow Committee Members—coming out of that era, was that if you do not identify one or two, or a limited number, of key issues, whether we call them targets, whether we call them indicators, whether we call them outputs, whatever we want to call them, and if you do not identify a limited number of performance management tools or indicators, you do not capture the attention of organisations. This is not always about individual social workers. This is about systems and organisations. My question to you is: it is fine having a balanced scorecard, but what are the two or three things on that scorecard that are going to wake up a local authority that is underperforming? What you need, after all the friendly chats, is to be able to take some action over organisations that are consistently underperforming, year after year after year. We know that happens in the public services across a range of service areas. Tim Loughton: I do not think there is an awful lot between us on that, but I think the use of a few crude targets in adoption had perverse consequences before. What we learnt from the 2002 Act is that whereas, effectively, there were adoption target numbers linked to payment from central government, that, in extreme cases, did lead to people dashing around looking rather too closely at certain candidates for adoption, who in normal circumstances might not 678

Tim Loughton MP—Oral evidence (QQ 567-588) have been suitable for adoption. That was potentially hugely damaging. It also did a lot of damage to the image of adoption as well, and gave rise to a certain parliamentary colleague of ours, and his chum at The Sunday Telegraph, trying completely to characterise adoption as child snatching, which is untrue and not helpful. It was easier in the health service to come up with certain targets than in adoption, which I think is a very different thing, but I see your point. What we do have in the adoption scorecards are not targets but very clear and acceptable thresholds. Particularly, the average time between a child entering care and moving in with the adoptive family should be a key measure. From the moment the child comes into care to when the child ends up with the family who is going to be the child’s family for life, that is what is taking far too long at the moment because of all the various court and other processes going on. Also, I think an important factor is the number of what I call more problematic children being taken into care. It is relatively easy to take a lot of nice, shiny, squeaky clean new babies into care and get them adopted—everybody wants one of those. A much better measure of how serious and dedicated an adoption service is to its children is how much time and resource it devotes to the problematic ones who are not easy to find homes for, so there are a number of measures here. Also there is the way we treat prospective adopters, which is why, when we get that data, it is going to be really important as well. I had in my office, and it is probably still there—Baroness Butler-Sloss and others have seen it— a six-foot-wide piece of brown paper. When I was embarking on this whole journey, I asked one of the officials to draw up two timelines: the timeline for a prospective adopter from the moment they plucked up courage to knock on the town hall door to say, “We are interested in adoption,” to them becoming an adopter at the end of the line; and for a child coming into care, for those where it is appropriate, ending up getting to an adoptive placement. In the end, they went to WH Smith and bought a roll of brown paper, because it was a very long timeline and I asked them to plot all the different processes they had to go through, particularly where there was an obstacle, a barrier or a time delay. What was interesting is that those obstacles and barriers were quite evenly spaced all the way through. It was not a question of getting more people in and then it is fine. There are obstacles all the way through. That is why coming up with a few targets, just saying, “Government wants to increase adoption numbers,” was not going to wash. It might have had a temporary effect, as it did post the 2002 Adoption and Children Act, but this is a fundamental systematic upheaval of the whole way we do adoption in this country, with a series of carrots and sticks, but absolutely the transparency of performance across the whole piece from which there is now no hiding place, and from which there are powers existing now, which a Government can and is determined and needs to take, to show the stragglers, those who have not been converted, that they cannot go on like that. The Chairman: We have two more questions, and we are running a little bit out of time because our next witnesses are waiting, so I think some degree of— Tim Loughton: I will be quick. The Chairman: Not only you, Mr Loughton, but also the Members of the Committee.

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Tim Loughton MP—Oral evidence (QQ 567-588) Q586 Viscount Eccles: After that my question is very humdrum. Do you think that the due consideration requirement now in legislation needs changing, to prevent ethnic matching from causing undue delay? Tim Loughton: It is a huge issue and, of course, it is the issue that the media love. Every time we were making an announcement, or I was responding to some figures or whatever on adoption, nine times out of 10 the ill-briefed interviewer on radio or TV would want to get back to the issue of ethnic matching, because that is the sort of stuff the Daily Mail and other papers like to run. It is an important consideration, and my approach to it was always that it is an important consideration but it should not be a deal breaker. I think a lot of people have that message, but some people for various reasons still do not. Up until a while ago, I would occasionally scan the websites of adoption services and local authorities where, in some cases, it would tell you, “If you are not black, under 45, and so on, then do not call us, we will call you”—almost as stark as that. It was crazy because if you are a good prospective adopter and they did not happen to have a child for you who was appropriate for you in that local authority, then they should be saying, “We know somebody who could accommodate you,” and signpost them up the road to another authority, or the national register or whatever. Do we need to go down the American route and legislate? The jury is out. I do not know. I think people are beginning to get the message, but until we see more evidence—and we saw some interesting figures yesterday from the CVAA about their success in placing more difficult-to-place children—I do not know whether we need to use the legislative route or not. Again, it takes time for that to come in. Q587 Baroness Hamwee: I cannot remember whether your roll of brown paper went on beyond the point of the order, but you have made it very clear this morning that it is the longterm outcome that is important. This question is about post-adoption support, in particular the cost-effectiveness of it as against adoption breakdown, return to care and so on. If your reply is that it is important, how do we get over the hump of longer-term investment or short-term budgetary considerations? Tim Loughton: Yes. It is a really important point and something we need to stress more. Adoption support services are greatly underestimated and it is a false economy not properly to invest in them. I remember back to the Adoption and Children Act 2002 where in that legislation it became compulsory to do an adoption support assessment, and yet recently Adoption UK has said something like two-thirds of adopters still do not even get an assessment, even though there is not a statutory requirement for them to get the services that that assessment will identify, which always seemed to me to be a bit of a nonsense. Of course the response was, “It will be too costly to provide all those services”. The ultimate cost is when that adoption breaks down, but because we do not have the full stats about the numbers and therefore the real cost, financially and socially, of that child’s adoptive placement breaking down, we cannot do a comparative calculation. What I do know is that the best adoption agencies, who in many cases—not exclusively—tend to have the most successful placement outcomes, invest in peri-adoption support services. That means doing good work to make sure that the adoptive family are going in with their eyes open and that they are fully supported around the whole introduction process and the transition. But there are adoption support services—particularly around psychological services and behavioural support, which are very often with older children the whole reason that they are there in the first place—which are

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Tim Loughton MP—Oral evidence (QQ 567-588) available for as long as it takes. An adoption pays for itself effectively in one and a third years, so the economics of doing it are a no-brainer, if one looks at the inter-agency fee costs and everything like that as a comparison. There is some really good work through the CVAA and Jim Clifford, in particular, who is a great star—he was responsible for the A Home for Maisie programme, because he and his wife have adopted nine children, all of them with some disability. It is amazing. He has been doing some work on a social impact bond, because I think adoption support services lend themselves to the SIB model. You can very clearly show that if you put this money up front in providing good-quality adoption support services, so that adoption placement is more likely to work, then after five years, if that child had stayed in care at a cost of £30,000 or whatever a year, at a cost of £150,000 plus with all the other add-ons you might have needed for the other services required, compared to putting £X thousand in at the beginning, it is a no-brainer. There is a very clear return on capital one gets for that financially but also socially as well. We need to be much smarter, and that is why I was encouraging some work around the use of social finance. Again, any half decent authority should realise the equation that if they put some effort in at the beginning then that child is off their balance sheet and out of their care, hopefully permanently, because that child has a successful placement. That is the right outcome, financially and socially, and it is not rocket science. Q588 Baroness King of Bow: Do you not agree with statutory duty? Tim Loughton: On adoption support services? Probably I do. Baroness King of Bow: Yes, I know it is hard. Tim Loughton: It is hard. There are adoption services doing it already, and the adoption scorecards should be about putting the spotlight on those who are not and there is no excuse for not doing it. Why were more local authority children’s services departments not beating a path to Harrow to say, “Gosh, you teamed up with Coram. You have doubled the number of kids getting adopted, none—apart from one—appears to have broken down in the last five years, and you are saving that authority £435,000 a year. We would like some of that, please”. Yet it took the continued bombarding, of me going on about it, saying, “Who has been to Harrow? Hands up,” before some others did. Several now have teamed up with Coram and some others are coming forward, but it is only the tip of the iceberg. I cannot understand it. The Chairman: We are exploring this a bit further, but we are grateful to you for raising that. We have to stop, with considerable reluctance because it has been extremely helpful and enlightening. Thank you very much for being prepared to come and for sharing with us your enormous experience during the time you were a Minister. Thank you very much indeed.

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Professor N V Lowe, Professor of Law, Head of Cardiff Law School—Written evidence

Professor N V Lowe, Professor of Law, Head of Cardiff Law School— Written evidence Adoption Legislation – how we arrived at the current position The History of Adoption Legislation Adoption was not formally recognised under English law until 1927. It was introduced by the Adoption of Children Act 1926. Northern Ireland and Scotland followed suit shortly afterwards by legislation in 1929 and 1930 respectively. By that time, a number of other countries had already passed legislation and indeed, one of the arguments for introducing it here was the positive experience of adoption in, for example, USA, Australia and New Zealand. One of the motivations for introducing adoption was to safeguard the interests of those involved in de facto adoptions, a phenomenon that substantially increased following the First World War, and by doing so, would encourage ‘an increasing number of people ready to adopt children for whom the natural parents are unable or unwilling to provide’. (The Tomlin First Report of the Child Adoption Committee, (1924-25). From the beginning, an adoption could only be effected via a court order, the effect of which was the permanent and irrevocable transfer of parentage – at any rate for the lifetime of the parties – since under the 1926 Act, succession rights were unaffected by adoption but that was subsequently changed by the Adoption of Children Act 1949 under which adoption permits, as now, the complete and irrevocable transfer of parentage for all purposes. The 1949 Act was not, however, the first piece of legislative reform of adoption, that distinction fell to the Adoption of Children (Regulation) Act 1939 which made it an offence for a body of persons (ie. not individuals) other than a registered adoptive society or local authority to make any arrangements for the adoption of children. The 1939 Act in fact marked the beginning of a trend to increasingly regulate adoption and to promote the involvement of local authorities in particular (see further below). The 1939 Act reform was based on the recommendation of the Horsburgh Committee (1937) which was the first of many committees or enquiries into the law and practice of adoption. The major enquiry in the 1950’s was that of the Hurst Committee (1954) and soon after, the law was consolidated by the Adoption Act 1958. The next major enquiry was the Houghton Committee (1972) whose recommendations were essentially accepted and incorporated into the Children Act 1975 and eventually consolidated by the Adoption Act 1976. Adoption was the one area of law not to be reviewed during the 1980’s and barring some minor amendments, was not reformed by the Children Act 1989. Instead, a full scale review was conducted by an Inter-Departmental Committee under the aegis of the Department of Health in the 1990’s. This led to the publication in 1996 of a Government White Paper ‘Adoption – A Service for Children’ which included a proposed Bill. However, apart from the passing of the Adoption (Inter-country Aspects) Act 1999 which paved the way for the UK’s ratification in June 2003 of the 1993 Hague Convention on Inter-country Adoption, no

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Professor N V Lowe, Professor of Law, Head of Cardiff Law School—Written evidence immediate action was taken on the 1996 Bill. However, a new initiative was launched in 2000 to review in particular adoption of children being ‘looked after’ by local authorities. This in turn quickly led to the publication of the Prime Minister’s Review of Adoption (2000) and of another Government White Paper ‘Adoption: a New Approach’ (2000). In turn, this led to our current Act, The Adoption and Children Act 2002 which repealed both the 1976 and 1999 Acts. Before looking at the 2002 Act in a little more detail, it is worthwhile to advert first of all to the changing pattern of adoption over the years and then to an issue already mentioned, namely, the increasing regulation of adoption and the developing importance of the work of local authorities as adoption agencies. The Changing Pattern of Adoption From its introduction in 1927, the number of adoptions steadily increased year on year (but with a post-War spike in 1946) and peaked in 1968 at nearly 25,000 (24,831). After that, there was an almost uninterrupted decline to the end of the century to well under 5,000 (4,387 in 1998). During this century and reflecting a real attempt to increase the numbers of children adopted out of care, there has been a slight overall increase rising to 5,486 in 2002 and 5,360 in 2004 but again followed by a falling back to 4,637 in 2007 and 4,472 in 2010 (3,050 children were adopted out of care in the year ending March 31st 2011). Incidentally, I would calculate that since its introduction in 1927 until the present, there have been roughly 920,000 adoptions in total. These changing numbers reflect significant changes of practice over the years. Instinctively, we think of adoption as process for babies and indeed in the 1960s, when adoption numbers were at their highest, a significant proportion of adoptions were of babies (ie. children under the age of 12 months). In 1968, for example, 51% (12,641) of all adoptions were of babies. 92% of these adoptions were of illegitimate children and it was in large part due to the change of societal attitude coupled with availability of financial support that baby adoptions have dramatically declined to under 200 per year. Another shift in adoption practice has been in relation to step-parent adoptions. Such adoptions had not been contemplated at all, when legislation was first introduced, yet by the 1970s constituted over half of all adoptions (9262 in 1975) but these too have now dramatically declined in large measure to their legal discouragement. As against these declining numbers there has been a rise of what may be termed ‘public law adoptions’, that the adoption of children out of care, which, again was something that had not been contemplated when adoption legislation was introduced. Indeed the law had to be amended in 1949 so as to make clear that local authorities could indeed make and participate in arrangements for adoption. Nevertheless only 3% of adoptions in 1952 were public law adoptions. Now they form the clear majority, currently some 75% of all adoptions. Intercountry adoptions have remained in a minority constituting something in the order of 610% and that marks out the UK from continental Europe where the overall statistics are almost

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Professor N V Lowe, Professor of Law, Head of Cardiff Law School—Written evidence exactly the other way round, ie. 90+% being intercountry with 10% or less being domestic. The key difference is the reluctance to permit adoptions against the will of the birth parents and in consequence of not using adoption as a ’solution ‘ to dealing with children in care even if they are not going to be returned to their birth family. One danger of this different attitude to adoption is that our practice could be seen as non Human Rights compliant but it has to be said that, so far, our law has survived Convention challenges at the Strasbourg court. Impact of these Changes The net effect of these changes has been two-fold. First, children are being adopted at an older age and therefore have memories of and relationships with their birth family and secondly, because the majority of children are now being adopted out of care, there are significantly more contested adoptions. The law has had to react to these changes: having to think, for example, whether adoption can be coupled with some form of continuing contact with the birth family, whether the grounds for dispensing with parental consent should be changed and, in any event, how best to deal with contested cases, whether adopters should be given adoption payment allowances and more generally obliging local authorities to provide post adoption support. Another crucial change has been the shift away from so-called secret adoptions to so-called open adoptions. Studies in the 1970s (by McWhinnie and Triseliotis) had convincingly demonstrated the deleterious effect upon adopted children of not knowing their identities and the law was eventually changed (in 1975) permitting (controversially, retrospectively) adult adopted children to obtain their original birth certificate and thereby to trace their birth family. Since the introduction of that right, an Adoption Contact Register has been created which provides a safe and confidential means of facilitating contact between adopted children and birth families. Increasing Regulation of Adoption When adoption was first introduced it was remarkably unregulated. However, following the recommendation of the Horsburgh Committee it became an offence for a body of persons other than a registered adoption society or a local authority to make arrangements for adoption but it was not until 1982 that (upon the recommendation of the Houghton Committee) it became an offence for an individual (other than relatives) to place a child for adoption. From that point, adoption became effectively fully regulated such that individuals seeking to adopt non relatives require agency approval before they can even begin the adoption process. As just intimated, the task of selecting potential adopters and placing children for adoption outside their family rests with adoption agencies, that is, registered adoption societies, commonly referred to as voluntary agencies, and local authorities, commonly referred to as statutory agencies. And here too there has been a marked shift in practice such that whilst the former handled at one time the majority of adoption placements (73%, for example, in 1966) now, following the demise of baby adoptions, the overwhelming majority (ie. over 80%) are arranged by local authorities.

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Professor N V Lowe, Professor of Law, Head of Cardiff Law School—Written evidence The Adoption and Children Act 2002 That finally brings me to the current Act, the Adoption and Children Act 2002 and the key changes it made to adoption law. They may be summarised as follows: 1. It makes the child’s welfare throughout his or her life the paramount consideration both for the court and the adoption agency. Before that (ie. under the 1976 Act) it was the first but not the paramount consideration in recognition of added protection thought necessary to protect the parent’s interests given the irrevocable transfer of parenthood that adoption involves. 2. It introduced a checklist of factors to which both court and agency must have regard when making decisions relating to adoption of a child. These include ‘the likely effect on the child (throughout his life) of having ceased to be a member of the original family and become an adopted person’ and the likelihood of any relationship (eg. with relatives) continuing and the value to the child of its doing so. These factors are of particular importance when considering whether to dispense with consent (see below). 3. The grounds for dispensing consent were re written confining them to the court being satisfied that the parent or guardian cannot be found or is incapable of consenting or that ‘the welfare of the child requires the consent to be dispensed with.’ Following this change it is difficult successfully oppose adoption. 4. The former ‘freeing a child for adoption’ provisions introduced by the former law were repealed and replaced by a new scheme known as adoption placement orders, which local authorities are required to obtain before placing any child for adoption. This seeks to balance the parental interest by making the local authorities justify their plans for the child to be adopted, at any early stage ie. before an adoption placement becomes a fait accompli; the child’s interests, by authorising long term plans when it is in their interests, and those of the potential adopters, by protecting them from having to face uncertainty and parental conflict. It is fair to say that this is a complicated part of the law. 5. Applications to adopt can be made by unmarried and by same sex couples. The motive for this reform was to increase the potential pool of adopters. 6. The introduction of more legal options, short of adoption, to enable step-parents to acquire parental responsibility. 7. The reformulation of the ‘adoption service’ that local authorities are bound to offer with an express obligation to provide post adoption support. 8. The introduction of a revamped Adoption Contact Register. 9. The incorporation of the Adoption (Inter-country Aspects) Act 1999 on adoptions with a foreign element. 19 June 2012

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Jan Loxley Blount TCert., Dip Child Development—Written evidence Written evidence from Jan Loxley Blount TCert., Dip Child Development. On behalf of : Parents Protecting Children UK 19/07/2012 & 23/07/2012 CONTENTS: a. 1.0 PRELIMINARY NOTE (a) 2.0 GENERAL POINTS  3.0 SOME THOUGHTS ABOUT ATTACHMENT & AUTISM (a) 4.0 E-PETITIONS (a) 5.0 CONTACTS & USEFUL WEB LINKS (a) 6.0 BRIEF COMMENTS ON SPECIFIC QUESTIONS ASKED IN THE CALL FOR EVIDENCE - House of Lords Adoption Committee (a) 7.0 EDUCATION SELECT COMMITTEE CHILD PROTECTION INQUIRY. Evidence by Jan Loxley Blount on behalf of Parents Protecting Children UK January 2012 - published on Government Website. 1.0 PRELIMINARY NOTE 1.1 Parents Protecting Children UK was unaware of this committee or call for evidence until I received an e-mail from the Countess of Mar on the afternoon on 17/07/12, saying that she had given sight of my January 2012 evidence to the Commons Education Select Committee on Child Protection to Lady Justice Butler Sloss. This document is attached here as an appendix - item 7.0 - or can be found online at: http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201213/cmselect/cmeduc/writev/1514/cps83.htm 1.2 I understand that Lady Mar spoke to Lady Justice Butler Sloss about my evidence and the importance of the contributions of organisations such as Parents Protecting Children UK, Parents Against Injustice Network, False Allegations Support Organisation et al to this debate. 1.3 I understand from Lady Mar that there is a possibility that Lady Justice Butler Sloss may be prepared to take oral evidence from my associates and myself. I would very much welcome this and would be happy to draw up a proposed small group, who could be seen together to save time.

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Jan Loxley Blount TCert., Dip Child Development—Written evidence 1.4 This evidence on behalf of Parents Protecting Children UK is not as detailed or coherent or organised as it could have been if more time were available. 1.5 I have consulted colleagues and understand that Richard Roper of Parents Against Injustice Network submitted something to you on the 19th. I have not seen this but urge you to consider this as potentially very important. Parents Against Injustice Network have vast casework experience in situations where child protection proceedings have gone very wrong indeed. In many of these cases there are possibilities of wrongful freeing for adoption - when, with correct diagnosis and support, families could and should be kept together. 2.0 GENERAL POINTS 2.1 Last week I attended the open meeting of the Family Justice Council in London. I had submitted my question in January and was able to ask it in the meeting. The text of my question was: What safeguards are envisaged to ensure that children of Families with Autism, learning difficulties, mental health difficulties and chronic ill health, including ME/CFS and metabolic disorders are not accidentally adopted before families have the time to prove their fitness to bring up their own children? The ensuing discussion was extremely interesting and relevant and I am sure that Lady Justice Butler Sloss could gain sight of the minutes either directly from the Family Justice Council or from Judge Nicholas Crichton who highlighted my question. Judge Crichton's particular interest stems from having two young relatives on the Autistic Spectrum. Through their lives and contacts he has been given a window into the world of which I speak. 2.2 Many cases are wrongfully reaching the family courts because of misunderstandings & misrepresentations at earlier stages. Family Court Judges are all too frequently left facing difficult decisions about possible adoptions, when with common sense and the correct assessments the families and children concerned should never have reached the courts in the first place. They could and should have been supported and kept together. These cases occur primarily because symptoms of abuse are erroneously identified by over zealous or under trained personnel. 2.3 There are of course some tragic families where the situation is completely impossible and adoption is the best answer - but these are few and far between. Many cases are currently reaching the family courts because disability, chronic illness or simple accidents have been misunderstood or misrepresented. 2.31Well meaning advocates of children's welfare have for many decades looked for ways of identifying evidence of abuse. 2.32 Unfortunately there is an overlap between symptoms which may indicate abuse such as inability to make eye contact and lack of self confidence - with symptoms of Autism, Asperger's Syndrome and other Autism Spectrum Difficulties & Differences.

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2.33 Children with many bruises may be Dyspraxic and therefore clumsy and accident prone. 2.34 Children seeming tired and missing a lot of school may have ME / CFS, adrenal malfunction or diabetes. 2.35 There are a myriad of logical natural straightforward explanations of many of these symptoms. 2.36 A baby with a broken limb may have been handled roughly by a toddler who doesn't realise that their new sibling isn't as malleable as a doll. 2.37 I was recently speaking to the solicitor William Bache and he suggested that in a couple of months we should see the results of a landmark case redefining evidence concerning what were previously considered to be shaken babies. 2.4 Many of these situations are misunderstood or misrepresented by often poorly trained workers in education, health or social services who see symptoms which tick boxes on their form and who don't stop to look for alternative explanations. Secret Professionals Meetings then make snap judgements based on false assumptions and cases are sent snowballing towards the Family Courts gathering layer upon layer of incorrect evidence and conjecture as they go. 2.5 Lists of symptoms such as that promoted in the press and on television by the NSPCC through their FULL STOP CAMPAIGN have led to massive numbers of mistaken or inappropriate referrals into the child protection system. 2.6 If I had time I could give many many examples from cases referred to Parents Protecting Children UK, Parents Against Injustice Network, False Allegations Support Organisation or other similar organisations or represented in court by Wm Bache & Co, Ridley & Hall and other solicitors with a particular interest in this work. Suffice to say that these cases are frequent and harrowing. 2.7 Last week an obviously Autism Spectrum mother with a son whom she believes to also have Autism Spectrum Difficulties & Differences contacted Parents Against Injustice Network and Parents Protecting Children UK, to say that her son had been removed by the court to a psychotherapeutic residential placement. She believed this to be the first step towards losing him to adoption or state care. How could she get him back? 2.71 Psychotherapy & psychotherapeutic assessment doesn't work for Autism Spectrum Difficulties & Differences. Psychoanalytic Theory has no cognisance of Autism and Asperger's Syndrome - the historical time frame was wrong. The nearest the fathers of Psychoanalytic Theory got to dealing with Autism Spectrum Difficulties & Differences was to suggest that Autism & Asperger's Syndrome were caused by 'refrigerator mothers'.

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Jan Loxley Blount TCert., Dip Child Development—Written evidence 2.72 We now know without a shadow of doubt that Autism Spectrum Difficulties & Differences are about NEUROLOGY NOT PSYCHOLOGY. 2.73 There are fascinating brain scan images of the US Autism Icon Temple Grandin, which show exactly why life is so very different for people on the Autistic Spectrum - but yet in France children with Autism are wrapped in wet bandages to supposedly heal their trauma (references are in paper appended below) and in the UK mothers of ASD children are being wrongfully assessed as having BPD and other serious conditions by centres and psychologists expert in psychoanalytic theory, but with no training or experience which enables them to understand autism spectrum differences. (See appendix section 7) 2.8 What it is important for the committee to understand is that things go wrong. They go very wrong. They frequently go very wrong. These are not a few isolated cases - there are vast numbers of them and many result in permanent removal of children from their families of origin. 2.81 It is almost reaching the discriminatory point whereby autism spectrum families are not permitted to bring up their own children. 2.9 There is a lot of current media and internet attention being given to cases of children sent to live in Australia or forcibly adopted in times past. Apologies are called for - some have been given. If we get things wrong over the current call for 26 weeks adoption targets and families with disability - some future government will find itself making recompense for the forced adoptions of the years after 2012.

3.0 SOME THOUGHTS ABOUT ATTACHMENT & AUTISM 3.1 I remember as a teacher training student in the late 60's, first encountering Attachment Theory and the work of John Bowlby. It struck me at the time that this work was based on research with a small sample of very specific children in a post war situation. Babies were born to single women because their UK boyfriend or fiancée didn't return from the front, or because US Servicemen remembered their loyalties to the wives & families they had left behind. Many of these babies found their way into institutional care where they provided a captive population of damaged children, ripe material for research. I remember shocking my tutors when, armed with quotes from Penguin Education Specials and other popular books of the day, I suggested that Attachment Theory was no longer relevant. How I wish I still had that essay. 3.2 If I could mount an argument that post war research was not relevant to the late 60's, then I fail to see why it has suddenly become the vogue of the early 2010's. This is not a post war society. Immigration has completely changed the face of Britain. Marriage and other social customs and conventions are vastly different. We need a new theory for a new age - not an attempt to revamp something no longer relevant.

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Jan Loxley Blount TCert., Dip Child Development—Written evidence 3.3 Over the last 20 or 30 years our understanding of Autism Spectrum Difficulties & Differences has changed seismically. Recent advances in computerised brain tomography now confirm observational studies which redefine Autism Spectrum conditions as neurological difference. This has displaced many psychoanalytically trained therapists and theorists and it may be that their fight back is through the resurgence of Attachment Theory. 3.4 Attachment in families with Autism Spectrum conditions is DIFFERENT - not better or worse and certainly not the same - it is different. Displaying emotion is different. Loyalty is likely to be immense but undemonstrative. It is frighteningly easy for someone who doesn't understand autism to walk into a household with Autism Spectrum Difficulties & Differences and completely misunderstand. I've seen this with my own family. 3.41 An autistic or Asperger's Syndrome child may not be able to cope with transfer of emotion between different situations - so if the parent suddenly arrives in the school playground the child may aggressively say 'go away stop hassling me' or make other negative comment. The playground supervisor may report this through the teacher and head-teacher as a sign that 'all is not well at home' and it may be the trigger for a child protection investigation which then finds that the child won't speak up in class or make eye contact with the teacher and so the mistaken case of supposed abuse builds up. The starting point in the playground may simply have been the child thinking 'I don't know how to cope with mum and my new mates all at the same time' - s/he will return home at the end of the day to say 'mum I need a cuddle' but that is unseen by those who misunderstood and misrepresented the playground incident. 3.42 There seem to be a terrifying number of cases where families and children with Autism Spectrum Difficulties & Differences are misunderstood and therefore misrepresented at early stages. 3.421 If they are very lucky there is an experienced SENCO or GP who is expert in Autism Spectrum Conditions who can say - 'no you got it wrong' and the process can be stopped in its tracks. Or with luck they may be assessed by a psychologist trained to understand Autism Spectrum conditions. This rarely happens. 3.422 Sadly what is more likely to happen is that assessment will be made by a psychoanalytically trained professional who does not understand Autism Spectrum Difficulties & Differences and who therefore reverts to a 1950s scenario of looking for reasons for the child's behaviour in the relationship with the mother or primary care giver (Bettelheim's 'Refrigerator Mothers'). Aspersions are wrongfully cast on the mothers character (she may also be struggling to cope with - or having left - an autistic partner - many AS boys are born to AS fathers) and it may be wrongfully suggested that the mother has a Borderline Personality Disorder and it would be safer to remove her children from her care. 3.5 I BELIEVE THAT THE TIME HAS COME FOR HM GOVERNMENT TO COMMISSION A PROPER ACADEMIC STUDY OF THE OVERLAP BETWEEN SYMPTOMS OF AUTISM / AUTISTIC SPECTRUM CONDITIONS AND POSSIBLE SYMPTOMS OF CHILD ABUSE - and that this study needs to consider the relationship between ATTACHMENT THEORY and Autism Spectrum

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Jan Loxley Blount TCert., Dip Child Development—Written evidence Difficulties & Differences. Possible University Departments to consider for this study would be Sheffield Hallam (Dr Luke Beardon et al) or Birmingham (Dr Dinah Murray et al). 3.6 UNTIL AND UNLESS THE STUDY I PROPOSE IN 3.5 ABOVE HAS BEEN UNDERTAKEN AND IT'S EFFECTS CONSIDERED I SUGGEST THAT IT IS UNSAFE, UNFAIR AND UNWISE TO SPEED UP ADOPTION PROCESSES, as there is too much danger of children being erroneously adopted. 3.7 Similar studies are also needed for other conditions - most notably for the frequently misunderstood condition of ME / CFS. 3.8 I spoke recently to Martin Narey the 'Adoption Tzar' at the end of a conference. He admitted that the views he had when leaving the prison service had been changed by entering Barnado's where he had learned about ATTACHMENT THEORY. The trouble with that is that ATTACHMENT IN AUTISM IS DIFFERENT - so a professional not trained to understand Autism Spectrum Difficulties & Differences will look for signs of Attachment or Attachment Disorder and see the wrong thing and make the wrong judgements, which can lead to the tragic break up of a family who would have been just fine, if somebody had taken the trouble to understand them properly. 3.71 I have read an interview with Martin Narey conducted on 19/07/2012 in which he suggests that for prospective adoptive children, the ties with the birth parents should be broken earlier than was previously suggested - and that siblings shouldn't necessarily be placed together. In tragic insoluble cases he may or may not be right - this isn't my area of expertise so I can't comment, however I believe that any such action would be wrongful until the issue of children possibly and probably wrongfully presented for adoption because of misunderstanding of relationships in families with Autism Spectrum Difficulties & Differences has been thoroughly explored. 3.72 I will send a copy of this evidence to Martin Narey and seek a meeting with him. 4.0 E-PETITIONS I would particularly underline the importance of the following two epetitions : 4.1 / http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/22259 Which closed in February after a 3 month limited run having gathered 222 signatures. It's text reads: Call for Select Committee to investigate Misleading Allegations of Child Abuse & meanwhile suspension of change to Adoption & Family Court proceedings We call for a Parliamentary Select Committee to be established to investigate and report on the issue of False and Misleading Allegations of Child Abuse. We demand a suspension of any plans to limit Family Court time, or speed up Adoption procedures, until the Select Committee on False and Misleading

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Jan Loxley Blount TCert., Dip Child Development—Written evidence Allegations of Child Abuse has completed it's investigations and it's recommendations have been fully implemented. The current government proposals on Adoption targets & Family Court procedures are potentially dangerous as children could be adopted before loving parents have the time to prove their innocence. There are particularly time consuming problems and processes in families where parent, child or sibling has a disability, including autism spectrum disorders & / or chronic medical or mental health difficulties. It was created by me on behalf of Parents Protecting Children UK. 4.2 / http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/33135 Which opened earlier in 2012 after the closure of the one above - it closes this week and has to date received around 350 signatures. It's text reads: Improving UK child protection legislation. We ask the Government to act to improve UK Child Protection Legislation for the benefit of all children and families. 10,000 children a year in the UK are removed from their families. This is the most draconian act the State can take against an individual. All efforts must be made to ensure the State gets these decisions right. We ask the Government to act to implement the following measures: 1. All child protection decisions to be made on evidence based fact. 2. Parents to be informed of the case against them and the evidence relied upon. 3. No family to be assessed by experts who have not met them. These measures will reduce the number of children wrongly removed from their families, freeing up Local Authority resources for the most vulnerable Its author Lucy Allan was a Tory Cllr & prospective Parliamentary Candidate in Wandsworth and sat on the board Social Workers had to come to before they removed a child - so she was totally wrapped up in the system - then out of the blue accusations were made against her and she had a baptism of fire which taught her to see the other side in all it's horror - she's now campaigning and doing some limited case work - much as I am. She's a lawyer by training and has good political contacts, she has now met many families who have been wrongfully involved in family court and child protection procedures so her contribution is extremely pertinent and valuable.

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5.0 CONTACTS & USEFUL WEB LINKS http://www.facebook.com/PPPC.UK http://www.parents-protecting-children.org.uk/ http://www.facebook.com/ImprovingUkChildProtectionLegislation?ref=ts http://www.false-allegations.org.uk/ http://www.parentsagainstinjustice.org.uk/ http://www.facebook.com/pages/Family-Rights-Group/462770955031?ref=ts 6.0 BRIEF COMMENTS ON SPECIFIC QUESTIONS ASKED IN THE CALL FOR EVIDENCE - House of Lords Adoption Committee Background a. Do we have the right structure for adoption? Until work has been done on ensuring that the wrong children are not accidentally adopted, this question is premature. b. Should we be concerned about the falling number of adoptions? Why are the numbers falling? In some cases numbers are falling because of improved social work practice eg I heard a very compelling presentation from Hackney * about early intervention, keeping families together etc and fewer children coming into care - by definition therefore any children coming into care would be likely to be hard to place. A few weeks later the news media lapped up government statistics on Hackney being slow to get its children placed for adoption - with no investigation of the possible reasons why. Legislation a. What impact did the 2002 Act have on the adoption process? No comment b. Have all aspects of the 2002 and 2006 Acts been implemented appropriately and successfully? No comment c. Is further legislation required to improve any aspect of the adoption system? Yes to ensure that no children are presented for adoption because of misunderstanding and misrepresentation in court or in pre- court procedures. d. Can you as a respondent identify a problem and tell us if, and if so where, the legislation (including regulations), needs to change? Please see sections 2 & 3 & 4.2 above. Time taken in placing children

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Jan Loxley Blount TCert., Dip Child Development—Written evidence a. Is excessive time taken in placing children? Do some groups of children take a disproportionate length of time? It takes much longer to work out what is happening in families with learning difficulties, mental health problems, chronic illness, neurological difference etc and proper time should be allowed for this - especially time to commission new reports from appropriate experts if the original reports did not understand the situation or conditions involved. b. What aspects of the adoption process, including pre-process care proceedings, take most time? Getting appropriate reports - the few people with proper experience and qualifications to assess Autism Spectrum Difficulties & Differences and ME / CFS have very long waiting lists indeed. c. Do the various parts of the system – local authorities, adoption agencies, courts and others – work effectively together? No - and in particular the voice of the family (including siblings and grandparents) is rarely heard in an appropriate manner. d. Could the adoption process be speeded up, whilst ensuring that necessary safeguards are preserved? Probably not - it is already too short to get appropriate re-assessments. e. How widely used is concurrent planning? What are its advantages and disadvantages? No comment. f. What are the reasons for the variations in time taken to place children by different local authorities? Please see my comment about Hackney * above. The number of potential adopters a. Are there enough potential adopters coming forward? Are there shortages in particular ethnic groups? No comment. b. How do we ensure the best “fit” for a child, and is trans-racial adoption relevant to this issue? No comment. c. Why do some potential adopters drop out during the adoption process? No comment. d. Have the changes to eligibility introduced by the 2002 Act impacted the number of potential adopters? No comment. e. What will be the likely effect of the measures proposed in the Department for Education’s ‘Action Plan for Adoption’? It seems likely that many more children will be freed for adoption, who could and should have remained with their birth families. f. Does the number of agencies inhibit the number of potential adopters recruited? No comment. g. Does the recent increase in knowledge about early child development affect the

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Jan Loxley Blount TCert., Dip Child Development—Written evidence balance between children’s rights and parental rights? Please see my comments in section 3 above about attachment - I think we've got it wrong. Court proceedings a. Do court proceedings take undue time in the adoption process? Court proceedings are often inefficient and the wrong questions are asked and the wrong assessments read - but due process needs to be given time so that parents have a chance to explain situations which may have been misunderstood. b. Would the recommendations of the Family Justice Review substantially alter the position? No comment. c. How effective are provisions for the representation by guardians of children in court proceedings? This seems to be a massive area of conflict - frequently the guardians have no understanding of disability , chronic illness or neurological difference so the guardian misunderstands and misrepresents the child. d. How effective have placement orders been in facilitating the placement and adoption of children compared with “freeing orders”? No comment. e. How common is it for care proceedings and placement order proceedings to be heard together or consecutively? What are the advantages and disadvantages of this approach? No comment. f. How will changes to legal aid impact, if at all, on adoption proceedings? Parents Protecting Children UK, Parents Against Injustice Network & False Allegations Support Organisation are seeing more and more cases where families are losing children or in danger of losing children or where inappropriate decisions are being made, because of inability to procure legal aid. I know of several cases where families have moved from owner occupied to rented accommodation to free up money for legal representation - this loss of a secure home cannot be in the long term interests of the children of those families. Post-adoption support a. How, if at all, has the 2002 Act impacted upon the provision of post-adoption contacts and support? No comment. b. Are measures needed to enhance post-adoption financial and other support for (i) adopted children; (ii) adoptive parents, (iii) birth families? Inter-country adoption YES FOR BIRTH FAMILIES a. Have the inter-country adoption safeguards introduced by the 2002 and 2006 Acts proved successful? No comment. b. Would you recommend any change to the legislation to make inter-country adoption simpler? No comment.

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Jan Loxley Blount TCert., Dip Child Development—Written evidence

c. Are there any special challenges in adopting children from particular countries or regions? No comment. Access to Information a. Has the 2002 Act made it easier for adopted adults and/or birth families to trace their relatives, should they wish to do so? No comment. Other permanent placements a. What has been the effect of the introduction, in the 2002 Act, of ‘special guardianship’? No comment. b. Is special guardianship an effective alternative to adoption, especially for those of school age (ie 5 and older)? No comment. c. What is the best way to ensure permanent and consistent placements for children? In many cases the answer is to do proper assessments and provide proper support and keep birth families together. d. Would earlier interventions in cases of children with difficulties have an effect on the number of children who need to be adopted or otherwise permanently separated from their birth family? YES - especially if this was coupled with better training to understand neurological difference, chronic ill health including ME / CFS and other forms of family difference or disability. Monitoring a. Do ‘adoption scorecards’ provide an appropriate means for monitoring the performance of local authorities with regard to adoption? No comment. b. How robust are current systems for monitoring the i) number of adoptions made, ii) the number of children awaiting adoption, and iii) the amount of delay experienced by those awaiting adoption? No comment. 7.0 EDUCATION SELECT COMMITTEE CHILD PROTECTION INQUIRY Evidence by Jan Loxley Blount on behalf of Parents Protecting Children UK January 2012 - published on Government Website. I believe that the Countess of Mar has already given Lady Justice Butler Sloss and the committee sight of the document appended below, it was submitted to the Education Select Committee Child Protection Inquiry in January 2012 and published by them on the Government website in May or June: It can be found at:

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Jan Loxley Blount TCert., Dip Child Development—Written evidence

http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201213/cmselect/cmeduc/writev/1514/ cps83.htm July 2012

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Lord Justice McFarlane, Mr Justice Ryder, Her Honour Judge Hindley, and Her Honour Judge Swindells—Oral evidence (QQ 770–804)

Lord Justice McFarlane, Mr Justice Ryder, Her Honour Judge Hindley, and Her Honour Judge Swindells—Oral evidence (QQ 770–804) Evidence Session No. 13

Heard in Public.

Questions 770–804

TUESDAY 27 NOVEMBER 2012 Members present Baroness Butler-Sloss (Chairman) Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top Baroness Eaton Viscount Eccles Baroness Hamwee Baroness King of Bow Baroness Knight of Collingtree Baroness Morris of Bolton Baroness Walmsley Lord Warner ________________ Examination of Witnesses Lord Justice McFarlane, Mr Justice Ryder, Her Honour Judge Hindley, and Her Honour Judge Swindells.

Q770 The Chairman: I hope you do not mind coming in a little earlier, since you were so splendidly early in arriving here. It suits us very well if you are to be early. May I welcome all four of you very warmly. It is extremely good of you to come from different parts of the country, and we will very much value what you have to say to us. I need formally to declare an interest. I know all four of the judges, and they reminded me earlier they have all appeared before me when I was a judge, which is quite funny. Lord Justice McFarlane: This room used to be the House of Lords Chamber. To appear in front of you in this room is something we never thought of. The Chairman: No, I did not think of it either. The Lord Chief Justice wrote a letter to the Committee, in which he reminded us of the constitutional issues regarding judges, and that they may not answer questions that are of a constitutional type or cross a boundary that the judges feel they should not cross. I leave Lord Justice McFarlane to make a decision if a question is

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Lord Justice McFarlane, Mr Justice Ryder, Her Honour Judge Hindley, and Her Honour Judge Swindells—Oral evidence (QQ 770–804) asked that he feels any of the judges ought not to answer. You very helpfully produced an opening statement. Perhaps you would like to read it to us. Lord Justice McFarlane: If that is convenient I would like to do that. The Chairman: Yes. Thank you very much. Lord Justice McFarlane: Thank you. It is a short opening statement designed to give the overall perspective that we have as judges coming to cases where, during the course of the case, a plan for adoption develops. We hope it is helpful to have this overview before we descend into the detail of the questions. As you will understand, a Family Judge sees a full spectrum of cases involving the welfare of children, and the decision made may run from fine-tuning contact arrangements between parents for the care of their child right up to some judges making life-and-death decisions relating to medical treatment. Although the spectrum is wide, the task of the judge in each case is the same, namely to understand the factual background of the child’s situation; if necessary, determining what has or has not gone on in the past; and then analysing the options for the child’s future, before fixing upon that option which is the best one to serve the individual child’s welfare. It is helpful to point out, I hope, that at the very beginning of most child cases it will not be obvious that adoption is going to be the only or, indeed, the best option for the child. Unlike the famous bear who turned up at Paddington Station, children who are the subject of care proceedings do not have a clearly printed label round their necks saying, “I am a candidate for adoption”. The court process involves the judge becoming immersed in the wealth of detail about the child and the family so that, in due time, the judge can analyse the risks and the strengths of the various options before deciding what is best for the individual child in the particular case. The phrase used in current Government proposals aimed at removing barriers and reducing delays is “all children for whom adoption is in their best interests”. A judge’s active involvement in cases is largely prior to that stage, and involves making the key determination of whether or not a particular child is or is not to be one of those children. It has been suggested, we understand, in some of the evidence that you have heard, that some members of the family judiciary are culturally opposed to adoption. We have discussed that, and that suggestion is one that causes each of us significant surprise and concern. It is outside our experience, which spans decades as practitioners and now judges working in this field. If a judge were opposed to the concept of adoption, he should not be sitting on these child protection cases. We are all plain about that. It may be that what is being described is the need for judges in particular cases to be properly persuaded that adoption is the right option for the individual child in that case. If that is what is being described, we would not be surprised because that description is no more than a description of the law and the legal context in which the court has to operate. While, in the later stages of a care case, adoption may develop and become the plan that the social services have, it is likely to be only one of a number of options that the judge has to analyse, decide upon and keep in play. So judges quite often will present in court as if—and it will be the case— they need persuading that adoption is the right option in that case.

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Lord Justice McFarlane, Mr Justice Ryder, Her Honour Judge Hindley, and Her Honour Judge Swindells—Oral evidence (QQ 770–804) Equally, we are very conscious that adoption is well recognised as the most draconian order that a Family Court can make, in terms of its impact on the child within his or her natural family. It is intended to be, and is, a life-changing event. It takes the child out and away from the natural family and grafts her into an entirely new family. In doing that, it extinguishes the legal relationships that the child has with the birth family and creates new ones. It does not do this just for childhood; it does it for life. That is what it is about. The process is achieved, if the child’s welfare requires it, against the will of the parents in particular cases. The responsibility for making this extremely important decision falls upon the judge. In approaching it, the judge must weigh up the options in accordance with the welfare checklists; secondly, determine what is necessary and proportionate, in order to respect the relevant rights under article 8 of the European Convention; and thirdly, only dispense with the parents’ consent if the child’s welfare requires adoption, as opposed to some other less intrusive arrangement. I hope that is helpful to set the background. It is no more than a summary of what the law requires the judges to do. Having read the draft questions, which you kindly let us see, may I make two short points about terminology? The phrase “adoption proceedings” is used in a number of the questions. As rather narrow lawyers, we take that to mean an application for the adoption order and that is now a very straightforward and short process. What you are concerned with, I suspect, is the move to the stage before that for placement for adoption orders, and that is what we will tailor our answers to. The second is timescale. There is a reference in one question to the time between coming into care and placement for adoption proceedings. The time-span that is most important for the child is the time between significant harm occurring to that child and—if what is going to happen is the child is going to move—the child achieving a safe haven and being permanently placed in a new home. That is the important time-span. The court’s role is in the middle of that. We only know about the child when the application starts, and in those cases our role is to get to a placement for adoption order in as thorough but as efficient and speedy way as possible. When we are talking about time-spans that is what we have in mind, and I hope you do not mind if I explain our rather geeky approach to those two phrases. Thank you for letting me make that statement. The Chairman: Could I just ask one question, Lord Justice? Is it still the situation that the President chooses which judges should sit on adoption? Lord Justice McFarlane: No. Things changed when the new Act came in, because it became apparent that the placement for adoption decision would pop up in ordinary care proceedings. Now any judge who has a licence to do public law child protection work is trained in adoption and will be making the placement for adoption decision. The Chairman: He or she will be trained in adoption? Lord Justice McFarlane: Yes. The Chairman: By the Judicial College? Lord Justice McFarlane: Yes. In fact, Judge Swindells and I developed the training package and between us we deliver it. As it happens, I am delivering it tomorrow morning to the new squad of judges who are being trained.

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Lord Justice McFarlane, Mr Justice Ryder, Her Honour Judge Hindley, and Her Honour Judge Swindells—Oral evidence (QQ 770–804) The Chairman: Thank you very much. We can now move to the questions. That is extremely helpful, and particularly helpful that you have typed it out for us. Thank you very much indeed. Viscount Eccles is going to ask the first question. Q771 Viscount Eccles: Lord Justice, I have a bad habit of slightly altering the questions, which are put in draft to us in the same way as they are put in draft to you. My question is: it was suggested in the Norgrove Report that local authorities, adoption agencies, Cafcass and the courts were not working together as effectively as they could. What do you consider to be the main issues facing the courts when dealing with applications for placement orders, of which adoption is one? Lord Justice McFarlane: If I lead off on that, the two judges, Judge Swindells and Judge Hindley—who are dealing with these cases in Lincoln and Birmingham—will have more detailed responses. I was a member of the Norgrove panel, and that was the very clear view we had that there was no communication between or even understanding of the respective roles of the individual parts of the “system” and that needed addressing. You will have read the Norgrove Report, and I am not going to repeat that. Mr Justice Ryder has been involved in events in the 18 months since Norgrove, and I think our collective view is that matters have moved on a lot now. As was intended, the Norgrove Report has been a wakeup call and it is now less likely that there will be a dysfunctional lack of communication between Cafcass, the local authority and the court. The problems occur, in part, because the realisation that the child may be a candidate for adoption does not become apparent to Cafcass, the local authority or the court, until the proceedings have been going on for quite some time. That is one element of delay, and the others will mention other matters. Perhaps it is worth stressing to this Committee that delays that occur are delays that are a feature of care proceedings and often the placement for adoption application does not add anything to that. It comes in at the end of what are care proceedings, which have been delayed or not, and the real focus needs to be on tightening up the care process and getting that working as efficiently and flexibly as possible. I do not know if Judge Swindells wants to come in. Judge Swindells: Yes. Certainly in my experience the delays in the care/placement proceedings come from extraneous circumstances. For example, where there are parallel criminal and family proceedings, there can be delay in the police disclosing their material into the family proceedings. Other areas where there can be delays are where we need expert witnesses, and the Legal Services Commission can often delay decisions over the funding of those essential expert witnesses. Another area is where we very carefully timetable expert evidence, but on occasion those experts transgress our careful timetable. Other delays are in obtaining representation for incapacitated litigants, and a frequent problem that we do encounter is right at the end of the proceedings a family member steps into the arena and says, “I would like to care for these children”. There has to be an assessment. It may be that they turn out to be an absolutely splendid person and the ideal person for those children. But there is a tendency for them to appear right at the end of the proceedings and that does cause delay. So I think it is extraneous circumstances, rather than any difficulty that there is in the working relationship between the local authority, the court and Cafcass. Certainly, in Lincolnshire there is an excellent working relationship between all of the agencies.

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Lord Justice McFarlane, Mr Justice Ryder, Her Honour Judge Hindley, and Her Honour Judge Swindells—Oral evidence (QQ 770–804) The Chairman: The fact that a potential kinship carer turns up at the last moment, is that generally the fault of social services not investigating, or is it just that it comes absolutely out of the blue? Judge Swindells: Local authorities are now much better in having family group conferences at the early stage of the proceedings. They generally do flush out those family members who do want to put themselves forward, and so they can be assessed. It is one of those human things where, quite often, there is someone who would like to put themselves forward but they do not because they do not want to scupper the chances of the birth family. So they really leave it until the last moment when they see that probably the birth parents are not going to be caring for the children, and that is when they put themselves forward. That is human nature. However carefully the local authority has those family group conferences, that does happen. Baroness Morris of Bolton: Not all local authorities do have family group conferences, do they? Do you think it would be helpful if there was an obligation on them to have gone through that process before they actually then come to court? Judge Swindells: I certainly think it is very important that it should be at the early stage of the proceedings. That enables the local authority to carry out proper and effective assessments of those family members. Q772 Viscount Eccles: Lord Justice, you mentioned that behaviour was changing. Would it be your general position that the system is okay and it is the behaviour within it that really matters? Lord Justice McFarlane: Certainly. That is what Norgrove identified, that changing the structure is not going to alter the attitudes and the mindset of people. What is needed is—a hackneyed phrase now—a cultural change for everybody to realise that we are only going to help families effectively, if people work together and in communication with each other. Mr Justice Ryder: It is worth adding, my Lady, that the last 12 months have seen a very significant change in working together between the statutory agencies. The collaboration between the Association of Directors of Children’s Services and Cafcass, which we are now seeing, is outwith our experience over the last two or three decades. It is partly sponsored by the new Family Justice Board and their local boards, but in part takes on board good practice initiatives that are being piloted and researched at the moment. Family group conferencing is a classic example but there are other examples of pre-proceedings working together. There is a Cafcass initiative in Warwickshire and Coventry, for example. These are beginning to show some very significant cultural changes, which means that people are making decisions earlier. That is the real key. It is identifying the issue to be decided and then making the decision and pursuing it. We are beginning to see that filter through to the courts. Judge Hindley: At the local level the designated Family Judges—such as Judge Swindells and myself—do have ready access to Cafcass managers, to legal services, senior solicitors within the legal services, and also with senior local authority managers. So if there are problems, which are frequently recurring in cases, then we do have ready access to try to troubleshoot those. Long before the Local Family Justice Boards were set up, in most regions we have had local performance improvement groups where those people met to try to deal with the problems.

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Lord Justice McFarlane, Mr Justice Ryder, Her Honour Judge Hindley, and Her Honour Judge Swindells—Oral evidence (QQ 770–804) Q773 Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top: How do you feel the current legislative framework—as interpreted and applied by the courts—strikes a balance between the rights of the birth parents on one hand and the rights of the child on the other? Do you think this balance has altered, in the light of emerging evidence on the delay to the child? We would appreciate your view of how this is working through. Lord Justice McFarlane: We have divided the labour as to who is going to start on some of the questions, and Judge Hindley is going to start on this. Judge Hindley: We start with the starting point for us, of course, which are the two checklists within the Children Act and the Adoption Act itself. We balance those rights. Of course, children have a right to family life—article 8—and so it is important that we bear that in mind. Of course, the parents also have a right to family life under article 8, but the article 8 right of the child trumps that of the parent. However, the birth parent has a right to a fair hearing under article 6, so inevitably we consider all of the evidence in the case in balancing those factors. So I think we have sufficient powers to enable us to balance the competing rights in the case. As judges, we are now very alert and attuned to the impact of delay on children. At the Judicial College we have had many lectures from experts about neurological damage for young infants and so on. So these are factors that we bear in mind throughout the time that we are dealing with the cases in question. Judge Swindells: The section 1 principles in both Acts contain the no delay principle, so that is a key factor that we have to take into account when we are weighing all those key factors in the balance. As Judge Hindley has said, even though we now regard delay as an imperative to be avoided, because the no delay principle is there in both Acts we simply accord it importance in that balancing exercise. So it is not necessary to alter the balance; we have the key factors already there. Mr Justice Ryder: If we regard the balance in law as being right—as we do—it is the practical decision that might lead to delay that is behind your question, if I may say so. That practical decision is usually an application for an adjournment for more expert evidence. What we are putting in place is something that is sufficiently rigorous to make sure that the voice of the child is heard, on every one of those applications, so that the balance of detriments and harms is examined. There is no right to a second opinion in a parent giving that evidence, but there may well be a right of the child to be heard as to whether any additional evidence is required at all, having regard to the time that might take. We are asking Cafcass to produce that as an analysis for us in every case. We think that will fundamentally improve the quality of the analysis that the court receives. Q774 Lord Warner: Brain research on damage to young children is advancing at quite a considerable rate. Could you venture a view on whether, given the trajectory it is on, it is likely to mean that, particularly with younger children—the children under four—it is going to mean the balance of scales are tipped more against parents where there are real concerns about their behaviour? Lord Justice McFarlane: If the evidence becomes even more clear and striking than it is already—and, as has been explained, we are kept up-to-date with it—then I think that will affect decision-making. These decisions are very, very important decisions. You are changing the whole setup, the whole status of the child’s life and doing so for life. There is a need to have

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Lord Justice McFarlane, Mr Justice Ryder, Her Honour Judge Hindley, and Her Honour Judge Swindells—Oral evidence (QQ 770–804) information, to assess the situation in the family to see what on earth has happened and then decide what on earth you do about it. There is a limit to how much you can truncate that process. Since the Children Act came in delay has been on the checklist, and it is something we have been trying to avoid. The difficulty we have—and the research runs alongside it—is fitting what is a very important process into a proportionate timescale. The proportion is changing but it will not alter the need for a thorough and fair process. Mr Justice Ryder: We may have an answer to Lord Warner’s concern, which is that judges must be aware of the evidence-based good practice, which includes peer-reviewed research. That is one of the rather more significant parts of the modernisation programme we are going through at the moment. This is not just emerging research now; this is research that is well rooted in empirical material. We think it right that judges should be well aware of the accepted research in the field, to the extent that it is referred to in court. It is part of their training. It is part of a skills framework that we will be giving them. You will see changes, but the changes ought to be firmly based in evidence-based good practice. Lord Justice McFarlane: To put that in context, in the Norgrove Report you will have seen that we recorded a number of judges saying, “If there is no expert in a particular case telling me that this child is going to be harmed in particular, by a particular delay or option, then I cannot act on the knowledge that I have developed from cases over time”. The Norgrove group felt that that was an unhelpful state of affairs and that, therefore, there was a need for—what Mr Justice Ryder has described—a body of accepted research, which judges can turn to without having to instruct an expert to tell them what will be to them, I suspect, pretty obvious from their experience of other cases. So what has just been described is a real change that will affect the way judges can get on with the case. Q775 The Chairman: That rather shocks me, because I thought years ago there was a general understanding about issues of attachment, issues of damage to young children and so on. So the idea that, in the last few years, judges have been saying that they cannot deal with it unless they get expert evidence seems to me extraordinary. Lord Justice McFarlane: The bedrock understanding is clear, and we have not moved away from the understanding that you have. It is more the development, which Lord Warner has referred to, in just how crucial a child’s environment is in those early months, particularly, that is new and is not something all judges will have. It is going to be very helpful to have this body of material they can turn to. The Chairman: That will cut out a certain number of experts? Lord Justice McFarlane: Yes. The Chairman: Good. Q776 Baroness King of Bow: I wonder if there is a limit to the number of questions we can ask you on delay; possibly not, so I will continue. You have basically answered my question, but I want to pick up on an aspect of it. Judge Swindells, you highlighted the need for expert witnesses as one factor for delay, as have others. We heard evidence from a social worker perspective, that they felt sometimes the social workers’ work should be taken in lieu of expert evidence; sometimes, not always. Do you think there is scope for doing that? How else can we reduce the need for expert witnesses? You have mentioned one possibility there of the body of 704

Lord Justice McFarlane, Mr Justice Ryder, Her Honour Judge Hindley, and Her Honour Judge Swindells—Oral evidence (QQ 770–804) evidence. We always want our top three. We are politicians. We want a top three bullet point list. What are the worst issues that lead to delay? Is it expert witnesses? You gave us a list but we would like to know what you think are the worst issues that lead to delay, within your boundaries. Judge Swindells: Yes. Where we have parallel criminal and family proceedings, I think it is the delays in relation to police disclosure. In terms of experts, we are quite robust in terms of case management. We are assisted because, under the Family Procedure Rules 2010, we have a practice direction 25A, which is specifically looking at the issue of experts. It includes the very point that you were saying: that the judge has to ask themselves, when looking at the practice direction, “Is this an assessment that I can rely upon the social worker, together with the children’s guardian, who of course is producing an independent child-focused view?” and that is a specific question that we have to ask ourselves. In terms of parenting assessments, more often than not my answer is, “Yes, I can. I can rely upon the work, the parenting assessment by the social worker, and the children’s guardian’s analysis”. There are other areas of expertise. In the non-accidental injury case, we cannot do without the paediatrician and the radiologist, but what we can do—again it is catered for under the rules— is restrict the experts to those who are absolutely necessary. That is a case management issue for us. We can identify the issues that we feel are key to determining whether the injury is nonaccidental or not, and then we can target and have just that expert rather than a range of experts, because often the advocates say, “We would like a haematologist. We would like an ophthalmologist”. The rules are there for us to robustly case-manage and say, “No, we are restricting it, reasonably and proportionately, to those experts that we need”. The Chairman: Could we have copies of the relevant practice directions? Obviously we can see the rules—that is quite easy—but I had rather overlooked the practice directions. It would be very helpful to have them. Lord Justice McFarlane: They are now annexed as part of the rules, so it is the same practice directions but they have been given a new number. The printers have made money out of it, but it should be readily accessible. We will very happily provide them. The Chairman: Thank you very much. Mr Justice Ryder: The new rules will come in towards the end of January, so the new part 25 and the new practice directions on experts will be effective from then. There are some significant changes. In future the test will be necessity, not “reasonably necessary”. That may change practice. Lady King asked for a quick three. Baroness King of Bow: I am very excited by the suggestion. Mr Justice Ryder: To use the mantra, it is quality assurance, quality assurance, quality assurance. The tri-borough project in London does not need as many experts; 42 out of the 46 cases—and I hope the statistic is still correct—are coming in at under 26 weeks within that pilot already. It is because of the quality assurance of the evidential material of the key social workers in the team, by the management and by the consultants they have specifically brought in. The difference is quite significant. You then have quality assurance of pre-proceedings work, and you apply the same quality assurance to whether your expert is necessary. You will remarkably quickly see a sea change in the way in which cases develop. I think that perhaps is an indication of where we might go. 705

Lord Justice McFarlane, Mr Justice Ryder, Her Honour Judge Hindley, and Her Honour Judge Swindells—Oral evidence (QQ 770–804) Lord Justice McFarlane: Can I add a different perspective? After Baby P, you will have heard from a number of people that the volume of casework went up. It was not simply a wave or a tsunami: the water table has risen and we now have 50% more cases—it was 20,000, now 30,000—in the system. I think I have that statistic correctly. The cases that have come are obviously not the ones where a child has gone to casualty and been injured, because we had those anyway. They are the cases that sat on the social work books for years and the social workers have understandably decided, “We are not taking the responsibility for keeping this family together. A judge can make that decision”, and that is a perfectly honourable and understandable situation. Those cases have come and they are much harder for the courts to digest, because there will be reams of paperwork, none of them having single points that will decide the case but all a picture of neglect and poor parenting. Typically, among the parents in that group, there will be people who are of very low IQ and perhaps lack capacity, and a real problem we have is that, rightly, those people have to be represented through the Official Solicitor. His office is overwhelmed with this caseload and there is a delay in being able to progress the case, because these people need to be represented and we need to decide whether they are going to be in need of someone to act as their litigation friend. That can stall the process for months and it is a feature of this new body of cases, in particular. The Chairman: Lady Knight, that rather conveniently goes to your question. Q777 Baroness Knight of Collingtree: Yes. I have a feeling it has been answered to some extent, but we are extremely concerned about what we have heard of the effect on young children of a very long wait. It does seem to be a major disaster. Lord Justice, you said a moment or two ago that it was all done in 26 weeks, but that is more than half a year. A year is a whole lifetime to a child, so forgive us if we are very concerned to locate where these delays come from and try to make sure that they get less. I am also concerned, because I have always trusted the courts much more than I trust the decision of a social worker. A social worker has a dozen, 20, 30, 40 or 50 cases to look after, but you can look to the courts for absolutely fair treatment. Here is where, rather like Viscount Eccles, I tend to put in other questions because, as individual Members of this Committee, we have a duty to satisfy ourselves about questions in our own minds. While we are on this particular question where I feel we have gone around the whole area of delays, I would forgive you for not really answering the question as to whether you thought the courts were one of the major causes of delay. Is it not the case that somehow some kind of uncertainty and unhappiness is creeping in when stories get about—I do not know whether they are true, and I am asking you whether they are or not—that, unlike every other case that comes before a court, parents or family members are not allowed to know the case against them and cannot speak in their own defence? I ask you whether these are true or not, because they are the kinds of things that undermine the public view of the courts. Lord Justice McFarlane: I am very glad you have asked that question. As you say, it was not one that was on the sheet but it is one that is in the mind of the public, particularly reading reports in the media as to what goes on in the Family Courts. The answer I give is absolutely plain. It makes absolutely no sense to me to hear that parents can go through this process and be ignorant as to the evidence. The whole process involves very, very careful disclosure to the parents of what the case is about, both before it starts and once it gets going. They are all

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Lord Justice McFarlane, Mr Justice Ryder, Her Honour Judge Hindley, and Her Honour Judge Swindells—Oral evidence (QQ 770–804) represented for free, through the legal aid scheme, with skilled, experienced and trained childcare lawyers. It is not the case that these decisions are taken with the parents being in ignorance. In the course of the next week, the Court of Appeal is handing down a decision, where we have taken the unusual step of publicising the two judgments in the case that was heard by the lower court to show just how thoroughly the process has been gone into. There is a public concern about this, but it is not one that we recognise. The fact that this concern exists is part of a bigger debate as to quite how open the Family Courts can and should be, because the journalists who are reporting these matters—although they have the right now to attend cases—often only hear about the cases after they have finished, from one or other of the parents who feels that they have been hard dealt with by the system. I hope I can reassure you, with utter certainty, that what you have described is not the way things are undertaken. Baroness Knight of Collingtree: I am most grateful for the evidence you have given us on that. Q778 Baroness Walmsley: Most of my question has already been answered, but just in case you have anything to add I will repeat it. I would like to extend it a little by picking up on something that Judge Swindells said a few moments ago. The question is: do the judiciary place heavy reliance on the reports of independent experts in adoption proceedings, and is there a lack of confidence in the reports from social workers and Cafcass guardians? Can the use of independent experts be reduced without compromising necessary safeguards for the child and the birth family? As I said, you may wish to add something to what you have already said about that but, if I could just extend this a little, a few moments ago, Judge Swindells said something about delays getting the appropriate funding for a witness that the court requires. Could you say something about that, and also, if there is any difficulty getting the right experts to come forward and do the job for the money that is being offered, how do you ensure quality? Judge Swindells: In relation to the quality of the experts, we always ask to see the CVs of the experts so that we have some knowledge as to what their experience is. Quite often, it is a small group of experts—say, paediatricians or radiologists—and we see them as experts in a number of cases. So, through those cases, we are able to form a judgment as to their quality. That comes from a culmination of that written material that we can take into account, but nothing actually beats seeing the expert being cross-examined and forming a view as to whether they are a good expert or not. I think that was one of the questions that you put. Mr Justice Ryder: To add to that, Lady Walmsley, out for consultation at the moment, there is what is known as the experts’ standards document. That is a way in which the judiciary have co-operated with the Family Justice Council to come to a minimum standard, so that experts are all members of their relevant professional bodies and they are all still in practice—whether it be forensically or clinically—within the appropriate descriptions of their professional bodies. That will be an additional touchstone. We hope that that will be in place by January, so that there will be a further gateway to try to quality assure the experts who come before the Family Courts. There is no doubt that, in some fields, we are short of experts and that we do have to wait for some experts to come forward. Without a doubt, some of those experts will tell you that funding may be a problem. It works in a number of different ways. The private practitioner will have a market rate, and the Legal Services Commission may not be offering his or her market

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Lord Justice McFarlane, Mr Justice Ryder, Her Honour Judge Hindley, and Her Honour Judge Swindells—Oral evidence (QQ 770–804) rate. Also, there may be an expectation of the time that will be taken, which again the Commission may not agree with. That is a decision for them, not the judiciary. We can make recommendations, we can appoint experts, but the funding is a matter entirely for them. Beyond that I cannot go because there is a judicial review, in which I have dealt with the principles of this, and I have yet to give judgment on it. Whether or not it is lawful for the Commission to have taken the stance they have, and what should happen as a consequence, lawful or unlawful, we are about a month off knowing. The Chairman: Will you send us a copy of your judgment? Mr Justice Ryder: I promise I will. Judge Hindley: Can I follow up on some of the comments that have been made? One of the ways to ensure that experts report promptly is we have devised—certainly in the Midlands, and it is being disseminated throughout the country nationally now—a protocol that experts must report within a very tight timescale, a three-month timescale. Generally, that is being adhered to, so we feel that has been very helpful. The other thing is there have been real worries about the courts having too much psychological evidence—too many psychologists being required to tell us what social workers, perhaps, should be doing. Our experience is that social workers are not backing their own judgment. They have lost a bit of confidence in their own skills, and I think they need to be encouraged to use those sound, practical skills that they have. Of course there are cases where we need a psychologist, where a parent may have a personality trait that the social worker cannot themselves identify or diagnose precisely, which may require us to understand what it is about that parent that is preventing him or her from parenting the child, and whether that parent can change within the child’s timescale. Sometimes we need a psychologist to help us about that, but in general I think social workers are more than up to giving us the sort of information that very often is being commissioned from psychologists. Q779 Viscount Eccles: It is sometimes said that there are lots of experts in this House. They seem to have an amazing capacity to disagree with each other. How often do you get conflicting evidence that creates an issue about time and an issue about making a decision? Lord Justice McFarlane: Judges judge and determine, and part of the process is typically that experts do disagree from time to time. My own experience is that in the main body of the cases, unless you have an expert with a particular cause that they want to prosecute, most professionals looking at a family pretty well have the same view as to where the fault lines are, where the strengths and the weaknesses are, and what the risks are to the child. You may get different shades of perception, but it is not often that the experts are absolutely at loggerheads about matters. It sometimes happens on these very difficult cases where you have really unexplained injuries to a tiny child and the child may have some systemic difficulty in forming bones, or whatever, that might explain matters. There you might get experts who have different views. I do not know if I am talking out of turn, but my experience is, by and large, the psychological or psychiatric assessment produces a pretty unified picture of the family as it is. Q780 The Chairman: Some of the evidence we have had has suggested that one of the important elements of experts is to deal with the parents, rather than experts in relation to the 708

Lord Justice McFarlane, Mr Justice Ryder, Her Honour Judge Hindley, and Her Honour Judge Swindells—Oral evidence (QQ 770–804) child. Judge Hindley was making the point. It might be helpful for us if one of you gave us a very brief outline of when experts are really needed. For instance, they are needed to deal with particular problems that the parents may have; clearly they are needed for non-accidental injury, particularly battered babies and so on. Could you give us a little list of the circumstances in which you think experts are usually needed? Lord Justice McFarlane: We might have to work as a team on this. Mr Justice Ryder: Could I start? I will do the easy bit and start with a generality. Experts fall into three categories if they are going to be necessary, as they will have to be from January. The discrete issue expert: how did this particular set of bones get broken? What does the bruising mean? Quite often it is a discrete medical issue that is clearly identifiable. In the more complex cases, you have overview evidence where you are covering two or three disciplines. Historically, that was a psychiatrist who had the ability to look at the clinical, medical and the social care aspects and bring them together, in a way that other individual witnesses might not be able to because their skill and expertise did not extend that far. Then for us there has been a tendency—rightly in my view—to have evidence that fills gaps. Where you have poor preproceedings practice or poor social work practice or even sometimes—much more rarely now—poor Cafcass analysis, you have to bring in somebody to fill a gap. That may be an urgent gap caused, for example, by the late-appearing relative who just needs to be assessed quickly. Those are three general categories and they relate either to the threshold, which is the jurisdictional gateway, usually the factual precipitating circumstances and background, or they may relate to the general welfare considerations as to placement and contact long-term. From that general analysis you can see that psychology relating to parents, rather than to children, is a difficult area. You may need to know quite a lot about children to get their needs right. So having an expert for a child may well be something that everybody, including the guardian, is saying, “We need to know more about the really difficult behaviours that we have seen being presented”. But when you come to the parent, you are asking the question: is this parent capable of looking after this child within the child’s timetable? That is a question that can often be answered by social-work evidence. It perhaps does not need the weight of psychology that is offered to the courts quite frequently these days, and is perhaps more often being rejected by judges as they say, “This evidence is already available to us; well, we do not need more”. Judge Swindells: With mental health difficulties, where one of the parents has mental health difficulties, the diagnoses and prognoses are well beyond a social worker or, indeed, a guardian and certainly the court. In those circumstances, we do need psychiatrists to help us on those two issues because, ultimately, we have to form a decision as to the management of risk that may flow from those mental-health difficulties. So that is one area where we do need psychiatrists and they are necessary. Lord Justice McFarlane: I suspect a side group of that is drug and alcohol problems and problems with violence in the family. You need to be assessing the parents for that, but if the child has lived in that setting for a period measured in months or years, then the child will be presenting with behaviour that is worrying, so you probably need to have the child assessed as well. Often the question for us is: there is this problem, but can the parent change to become a safe enough parent in the timescale during which the child can afford to wait? That takes time to assess.

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Lord Justice McFarlane, Mr Justice Ryder, Her Honour Judge Hindley, and Her Honour Judge Swindells—Oral evidence (QQ 770–804) Q781 Baroness Knight of Collingtree: I think the worry in the public mind is that there have been—and the press love this sort of thing, and we take it with a pinch of salt—many, many cases in recent months, and indeed years, where experts have been found to be wrong. To what extent is it possible to use the child’s evidence? Although obviously a baby cannot speak, quite soon, at four or five or so, perhaps they would be able to. How many times does doubt come into your minds as to whether the medical evidence is absolutely correct? We have read of several cases, and that is worrying. If there is a doubt in your minds, are you able to check with the child? Lord Justice McFarlane: Cases where the medical evidence is often the only evidence in the case, or the primary evidence in the case, will be the cases where the child is a baby. Something awful has happened, there are very significant injuries, and the child cannot speak. You do your best to look at the whole jigsaw of evidence that you have: what the parents say, other evidence, but the medical evidence is there. The sorts of cases that you are thinking about are obviously older children. If there is a physical injury to the child or, sadly, often it is sexual abuse that is being suspected, what the child says there has great prominence in our determination in trying to understand, firstly, what the child has said, because often the first time they said something it does not come to you in a clear form but from someone’s memory of what was said. Then they may be interviewed by the police and that is more accessible, but you listen very carefully to that. Sometimes the children may give evidence in family cases directly, but that is still a rare occurrence. You do listen to what the children have to say, and in different cases it will have a different degree of prominence. That is certainly evidence that we look for if we can have it. The Chairman: Could you explain, when you say that you hear from the child you are actually hearing either, I assume, through the Cafcass guardian or probably through the psychiatric social worker or someone who has interviewed the child where allegations, say, of sexual abuse are made? Lord Justice McFarlane: Yes. As you will know, Lord Chairman—and I think Baroness Knight was contemplating—where children have complained about something happening to them, the first time they say something is often the most important piece of evidence a judge can have. That typically does not come from a psychologist, a social worker or a guardian further along in the process. It may come from a foster carer or a school teacher. To get clear evidence of that is very important, but then there is a whole process. You do not want the child being seen too often. The perceived wisdom is the more often they are asked about these matters, the further away from any actual event their memory might be. It varies so much with the different children, on their age and their intellectual ability. Q782 Baroness Walmsley: Lord Justice, I want to go back to something you just said about drug and alcohol abuse. Is this a case where the evidence of the damage to children, of severe and long-term drug and alcohol abuse in the home, is such that you can almost dispense with an expert evaluation of the effect on the child, as long as you can establish the extent of that drug or alcohol abuse? Referring back to what we were saying earlier about the neurological research, is this one of those cases where the evidence is so strong that we know that the child is damaged, even if the child happens to be one of those rather resilient children

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Lord Justice McFarlane, Mr Justice Ryder, Her Honour Judge Hindley, and Her Honour Judge Swindells—Oral evidence (QQ 770–804) who does not really demonstrate overtly extreme disturbance as a result of it, but we know that down the track it is going to happen? Is that one of those cases? Mr Justice Ryder: We would have great difficulty saying that there is a paradigm drug and alcohol case. Those of us well used to doing inner-city cases—and both of our colleagues are very well used to doing those cases—will know that there are resilient families, despite a member of the family being the most appalling repeat abuser of substances. Children can be very resilient as well within those families. It remains fact-specific. It is another example of where the judicial knowledge of the research in the field is critically important, because some of the material in the field will show you, with clarity, the extreme damage that can be done in that circumstance. A judge must always have that in the back of his or her mind and be asking the social workers and the Cafcass guardian about that, so that you have direct evidence on the facts of the case about the likely harm that has been caused or, indeed, may well yet be caused. That future element is often the one that is most critical in the drug and alcohol cases. Judge Hindley: We are very cautious about substance abuse, because if a parent has been taking drugs while the mother has been pregnant, and if she has not come off drugs by the time the child is a few months old, then the prospects for the future are not good. So we are very cautious about substance abuse. Q783 Lord Warner: We have had a pretty good canter around the course on experts, so could I move us on to guardians? At the same time, I would like to ask a supplementary to Lord Justice McFarlane on the very important point he made a couple of answers ago. Are children’s interests effectively represented by guardians in adoption proceedings? On the systems issue, Lord Justice McFarlane mentioned this big surge in cases from 20,000 to 30,000. Two supplementary questions: is that a one-off clearing of the cupboard, or is the water table seriously going to be up at a new level? Secondly, is there a very significant geographical skewing in the cases that have come out of the cupboard, or is it across the country as a whole? Lord Justice McFarlane: Can I deal with those supplementaries? Then I think Mr Justice Ryder is going to deal with the guardian side as he may have more information. The water table has risen. I think it is almost four years to the week that Baby P’s case came into the public headlines. There was an almost immediate increase and it has stayed at that level. Cafcass figures recently show that we have continued to have record months where proceedings have been issued. My feeling is—and Mr Justice Ryder will have more up-to-date information—that it is across the country. There will be a bigger caseload in the bigger cities. Judge Hindley, who sits in Birmingham, will see a big volume of cases. Smaller centres in Worcester or Derby will not be so busy, but I think it is across the board. Mr Justice Ryder: I would agree with that. We need to make it clear that the increase is in the number of children in care proceedings from just under 20,000 in 2008 to just under 30,000 in 2011—that water table has remained as high as that. There are geographic hotspots and some of those hotspots relate to particular areas of deprivation. They may also relate to local authorities that had not taken enough steps to look at their child protection issues before Baby P and subsequent to that. I think in the social care profession there is a general acceptance that the threshold at which one considers child protection processes is now reduced. The public profile of these cases is such that there is a much more careful examination of issues than perhaps there was pre-Baby Peter. I do not think that geography is important in any other

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Lord Justice McFarlane, Mr Justice Ryder, Her Honour Judge Hindley, and Her Honour Judge Swindells—Oral evidence (QQ 770–804) sense. We have seen the general raising of the level, which has not gone back down from 2008 onwards. Lord Warner: That is very helpful. Q784 The Chairman: I think you are going to deal with guardians. Mr Justice Ryder: So far as guardians and adoption proceedings are concerned, again we need to make the clear distinction between the adoption hearing at the end where the guardian plays no additional part, and the guardian who will be in the placement order proceedings and who will be the same guardian as in the care proceedings. By and large, in good practice courts they are heard concurrently. The moment that the test is satisfied that an adoption is being considered by the local authority, the placement order application will be made. The same guardian is in both sets of proceedings and the court would expect advice on both tests from the same guardian. Our general experience is that these guardians are working well and, although there have been issues in the relatively recent past—the Select Committee reporting on Cafcass made those issues very clear—the practice at the moment is improving. It is improving to the point where I can fairly freely tell this Committee that what Cafcass is going to put in place as its analysis documents for the next year, is perhaps the most impressive product I have seen in three decades. If that comes to pass, there will be some very significant quality analysis available to courts. I have no doubt it is coming to pass. They have taken expert advice on how to do it and they are just about ready to start to discuss these in the public domain. Q785 Baroness King of Bow: Sorry to go back to the heightened water table, but it is a seismic shift, is it not? You said that a large part of it was due to a picture of poor parenting and neglect. Is there a price tag associated to dealing with that? Presumably, if we want to protect those many more vulnerable children suffering poor parenting and neglect, within your sphere of work what are the increased costs? For instance you mentioned solicitors dealing with parents who have low IQs, and said that they were overwhelmed and so on. Are there clear areas where we should be flagging up that, if we want to protect Britain’s most vulnerable children, there is an increased cost attached or are you not allowed to answer that? Mr Justice Ryder: We have to be very careful, if we may. Resources, save in respect of the judiciary and Her Majesty’s Courts and Tribunal Service, are not for us, they are for the individual agencies. Some of those will undoubtedly have flagged up the inevitable resource issues from increasing volume and increasing complexity of cases. I think we can certainly go that far. There plainly must be resource issues. So far as the courts and judiciary are concerned, over the last two years you will see the resource problem as being satisfied by the use of 8,000 more judicial sitting days over the last two sitting years. That is an extraordinary number of additional sitting days to allocate, a decision made by the Lord Chief Justice and Her Majesty’s Courts and Tribunal Service board. That is the equivalent of 40 circuit judges, even more district judges, and that was reassigned to Family in order to cope with the increased volume. Baroness King of Bow: That is very helpful. Q786 Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top: Do you think there is a clear link between neglect and all the knowledge and understanding of brain development? My feeling is that at one

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Lord Justice McFarlane, Mr Justice Ryder, Her Honour Judge Hindley, and Her Honour Judge Swindells—Oral evidence (QQ 770–804) stage neglect got neglected because people were not sure about that link, but I think they now are. Lord Justice McFarlane: It was always there, but it is much clearer now and it really does not need explaining. Q787 Baroness Walmsley: To what extent is it common practice for placement order applications to be heard with care proceedings or immediately afterwards, and could you say what are the advantages and disadvantages of hearing placement order applications with or immediately after care proceedings? Lord Justice McFarlane: It is very common. You are here looking back at how the Act has worked in the seven years that it has been in, and one of the real boons of this legislation is the invention of the placement for adoption order. Under the old system, the court would simply make a care order, the child would be placed for adoption by administrative decisions some time later, and then there may or may not have been a freeing for adoption application that would pop up into the court arena at some stage. Often, at that time, the parents would be faced with a fait accompli, because the child would already be with the adopters, and the court had little role to evaluate the quality of that decision. Now that all happens before the child is placed and, typically, it does happen within the care proceedings. You will know the structure of the decision-making, and I do not need to explain that to you. Sometimes the local authority will come to a view about adoption fairly late on in the life of the care proceedings, and the court may be persuaded to adjourn the termination of the care order to allow the adoption process to catch up. More often they have managed it within the timetable that has already been set for the care proceedings. We think this is a good move: it reduces the emotional toll on the family; it gets to an earlier final decision for children; it is a better use of resources. Looking at it now with eyes that have seen the Norgrove Report and having lived through the Norgrove Report, in the Norgrove Report 26 weeks is mentioned as the target. The average case length in the County Court now is still 50 or 60 weeks. When I am saying that the placement application comes within the life of the care proceedings, it comes within the life of a 50- or 60week case. If the care case is being heard in 26 weeks, which is the aspiration now, we are not at all sure that the decision-making process, which will lead to a placement for adoption application being dealt with within the 26 weeks, is going to be possible in most of the cases. If it has to have the placement order application determined a fairly short time after the care order will have been made, then that is not too much of a burden because it achieves a clarity of the placement order being made. Having mentioned Norgrove, the 26 weeks was aimed at care proceedings. The real difficulty with all of these delay factors is the care decision-making processes. For the reasons that I spelled out in my opening statement, the adoption decision is of a much higher order than simply: is the child going to be in care under a care order? There is merit in the court having a bit more time to make that decision and focus on that decision alone, and for the parents and the local authority and the guardian to have a bit more time, perhaps to take into account the findings of fact that the court has made in its earlier hearings. So it is not a bad thing. Finally on this—and perhaps to help the Committee more generally—looking at cases, as I do now, that come up through the appeal system, there is some danger of some judges eliding the 713

Lord Justice McFarlane, Mr Justice Ryder, Her Honour Judge Hindley, and Her Honour Judge Swindells—Oral evidence (QQ 770–804) test for, “Is the child going to be subject to a care order?” with the test, “Is the child going to be adopted?” They are two completely different decisions, and to separate them by a few weeks—not much at all—will prevent this elision of the two decisions and allow the placement order to be made in a timely way, but in a way that gives respect to the fact that it is a different decision. Q788 The Chairman: In your modernisation scheme, Mr Justice Ryder, how is the placement order going to be seen in connection with the care order? Mr Justice Ryder: We envisage continuing the best practice that Lord Justice McFarlane has described. That is, at the point where a local authority are satisfied that adoption is a realistic prospect—which is meant to be four months into looking after the child in accordance with the regulations—they start their placement order proceedings. We run them concurrently. The best practice would be to have both proceedings started at the same time, but we accept that there are cases, on the facts, where that cannot happen because the family were not known to children’s services until the emergency arose that led to the child coming into care. We will run them concurrently as far as we can; we will strive to deal with placement at the same time as care, if that is the right thing to do. Where it is not and there is good reason for staggering placement to be slightly later than care, then that is what we would wish to do. There is a statutory obligation to timetable both proceedings, so we will be looking for judges to abide by that statutory obligation and set the timetable for each, whether or not it is slightly staggered at the end point. Q789 Baroness Hamwee: I do not know whether you will feel you should answer this question. On your reference to the danger of courts eliding the two decisions, do you see problems for the courts in parallel planning and concurrent planning for fostering for adoption—the different models that are being developed? The Chairman will stop me if I am going— The Chairman: I would just say it is another question, actually. Baroness Hamwee: Is it? I am so sorry. The Chairman: If you would not mind, it is going to be mine. Baroness Hamwee: I think that is probably a hanging offence. Lord Justice McFarlane: Not to answer your question at all, can I add a little bit of information that the Committee might need to know, if they have not heard it from others? As you know, the need to go to the adoption panel has now been taken out of the process before a placement order application is made, and it has been replaced by “the local authority decisionmaker” making the decision. We understand, from courts up and down the country, that that has led to the local authority decision-maker, in some local authorities, having to book a date in their diary when they are going to make the decision, and the reports have to come in to that person. There is potential for a delay, which we had hoped would disappear, with “the need to go to the panel” problem coming back into the equation in another guise. That may be something you want to hear from other witnesses about.

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Lord Justice McFarlane, Mr Justice Ryder, Her Honour Judge Hindley, and Her Honour Judge Swindells—Oral evidence (QQ 770–804) The Chairman: We have been concerned about it but it has been so recent—only in September—that we have not had any evidence as to how it is working. We have been niggling away, trying to find out the point at which— Lord Justice McFarlane: I simply flag it up because it is early days, but that is something that people are mentioning. The Chairman: You are absolutely right, Lord Justice. It is a point that we have been very concerned about. Mr Justice Ryder: The best practice that I have come across—Lady Morris of Bolton will be pleased to hear—comes from the local authority in Bolton. They have developed a timeline for a consortium of 22 adoption agencies, whereby you can get the agency decision-maker’s decision properly made within a similar timescale to the currency of care proceedings as recommended in the new primary legislation. We are taking soundings on that at the moment, to see if that can be used generally across England and Wales. Q790 Baroness Morris of Bolton: Before I ask my question, can I declare an interest, because I do know one of our witnesses, Mr Justice Ryder, as he is himself a famous son of Bolton. Can I ask, from your experience, are many placement orders refused? Mr Justice Ryder: I can say with clarity—but I would ask the two circuit judges, who do the volume of these, to confirm this—that for a placement order to be refused is a very rare event indeed. Where you have the care order decision made, quite often with a very clear care plan at that point, and placement order proceedings have persisted so you are not seriously then looking at a family member, it frankly is a rarity not to have one. Judge Swindells: I agree with that. It is certainly my experience. It is a rare thing to refuse a placement order. As Lord Justice McFarlane was saying, the exercise that we have to go through, before we make a placement order, does require very vigorous judicial scrutiny, because when we are making a placement order, there are different welfare checklists that we have to take into account, particularly section 1(4)(c) and 1(4)(f) of the Adoption and Children Act. Those are specifically in the Act because they are tailored to taking into account the important decision that you are making, in terms of parental consent and placing the child for adoption. It is an important and vigorous judicial scrutiny that has to take place before we do say that there should be a placement order. It is important to emphasise that. Particularly, for the reasons expressed by Lord Justice McFarlane, we must not elide the two checklists because they are different and have different objectives. Q791 The Chairman: I am going to ask the next two questions, but I will take them separately. Having very well in mind the requirements of the Lord Chief Justice—in the next question I am going to ask I will put it as generally as I can—we are very interested to know whether there are any obstacles, as a matter of law, to placing a child with potential adoptive parents in a foster parent capacity before the placement order is made. Sometimes they are called the Coram group of concurrent planning, and sometimes we are told about parallel planning. Looking at the broad principles, do you see any legal problems in relation to that? Lord Justice McFarlane: We do not, and it happens at the moment through the Coram project—the Manchester project and also the one in Brighton—and there have been no legal problems with it. We would suggest the important aspect of the process is clarity as to what is 715

Lord Justice McFarlane, Mr Justice Ryder, Her Honour Judge Hindley, and Her Honour Judge Swindells—Oral evidence (QQ 770–804) taking place, particularly for the foster parents and the family, to understand this is a foster placement at this stage that might develop into an adoptive placement. The decision as to whether it is one that develops into an adoptive placement will be taken by the court, at the end of the day. In some cases, the judge might decide that it is appropriate for the child to be placed back in the family on some basis or other, and in which case that is the order. The court retains the decision-making as to whether to make that placement into a placement for adoption and change the status, but we cannot see there is any legal hurdle to that model. Judge Hindley: That model would be particularly helpful in the case of what we sometimes describe as “relinquished babies”. There are not very many of them nationally, but these are the babies of mothers who sometimes come from ethnic communities, where it would bring shame on the family if they kept a baby out of wedlock, and they have made a considered decision to have the baby adopted. What we would like to see is that that baby moves immediately into its adoptive home, but it does not happen. Very often the baby is moved to a foster placement and then to the adoptive placement. So the child is not getting its best chance at the earliest point of being able to bond with the adoptive parents. We do need to focus a lot on relinquished babies. Baroness King of Bow: On that point, I was lucky enough to adopt a relinquished baby last year, and she was placed with me. I saw her when she was four months and I got her when she was five months, which was incredible. I think this would be even more helpful—I wonder if you agree—in areas of alcohol and serious substance abuse. My two older children’s birth parents were both heroin addicts. They were never going to be able to keep those children. Neither of them was placed with me until they were 13 months old, although they were never going to go back to the birth mother. Is that not an area where this would have a really significant impact? Judge Hindley: Yes. It may be that there should be some sort of protocol that enables us to deal with those sorts of cases in a reasonably short timescale. Mr Justice Ryder: There is a very good example of best practice. Two courts—I think they are around the Reading area—have a fast-track baby court. It is amazing, if you have a judge concentrating on the youngest children, it really does focus the mind. Q792 The Chairman: Concurrent planning obviously requires wonderful foster parents prepared to give them back. But there will be children, where the local authority as the decision-maker has said, “This child can now be placed for adoption”, and makes the placement application. At that point, if the child is then placed with foster parents, who would be the adoptive parents, is there any legal problem in relation to that, so far as the courts are concerned? Lord Justice McFarlane: We do not think so. The Chairman: Those are probably older children that I have in mind. Lord Justice McFarlane: That timescale envisages two big decisions being taken by the local authority in a short space of time. One is: is the child a candidate for adoption? As we have discussed, typically, that occurs during the course of the care proceedings with a deadline for the end of those proceedings in the book already. They also have to move on and find foster parents, who might be the right prospective adopters for that child and, as you will know, often

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Lord Justice McFarlane, Mr Justice Ryder, Her Honour Judge Hindley, and Her Honour Judge Swindells—Oral evidence (QQ 770–804) that is a very tricky task. So we wonder whether there will be very many cases that get through to us, in the course of ordinary care proceedings, where they have managed to find foster parents who are a suitable match as adopters. We certainly do not see any legal objection, and I do not think there would be any judicial objection to it. Q793 The Chairman: Moving on: in the 2002 Act the child’s religious persuasion, racial origin, cultural and linguistic background is a significant factor that the courts have to give consideration to in the placement. In the cases that you try, do you find it an issue commonly raised by the parties or one that is particularly significant? Judge Swindells: In Lincolnshire we have a number of children who come from the Baltic States, Portugal, Ukraine and Poland, and yes, we do take into account their cultural and linguistic features. It is part of the decision-making. It is extremely important to go back to the section 1 principles, under the Adoption and Children Act 2002, because there is a clear distinction made between the no delay principle, the welfare considerations and looking at the whole range of options. That is where the court and the adoption agency must have regard to those factors. In section 1(5) it is the adoption agency alone that has to give “due consideration” to those factors of religious persuasion. Those words, “due consideration”, were included in that way to give a clear signal that, in relation to the other principles—and in particular the no delay principle—those have a higher precedence in the section 1 principles. There should be no reason for there to be delay, if the adoption agency is simply giving due consideration to those factors. The Chairman: Perhaps I might ask you, Judge Hindley, since I know you sit in Birmingham, which is a multiethnic city now, is it not? Judge Hindley: Yes. The Chairman: Do you find the parties raise these issues at all before you in the court? Judge Hindley: Not unduly. There is a high level of awareness that the judge has to balance all of the factors and not give pre-eminence to one. Plainly, if there is an issue about delay, then that must accelerate the process for the child, and other factors have to give way; I think that is the approach. In terms of when one reaches the adoption order itself, then we will have a report from the local authority. There will be a section in that report setting out the child’s religious background, and sometimes birth parents will have said to the adoption agency, “I would like my child to be placed with a Roman Catholic family, or a Jewish family”, or whatever it may be. It is recorded what the birth parents may have wanted for that child, but it is not necessarily an issue that will be implemented. Baroness King of Bow: A very quick point: do you think it should remain one of the factors that are taken into account? Lord Justice McFarlane: I think that is probably outside our scope. Baroness King of Bow: I am sorry. I wondered why you had not asked it. The Chairman: Sorry, it is because that moves into what the Government is proposing, which the judges cannot possibly comment on. Lord Justice McFarlane: We could give you a Sir Humphrey answer.

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Lord Justice McFarlane, Mr Justice Ryder, Her Honour Judge Hindley, and Her Honour Judge Swindells—Oral evidence (QQ 770–804) The Chairman: I am sorry to stop you. Lady Hamwee, and this time you are going to be able to comment; I am sorry about that. Q794 Baroness Hamwee: I do apologise for the confusion before; I was so involved in what you were saying. Can I turn to contact arrangements? I am not sure who is going to lead on this. You talked in your opening statement about one end of the spectrum of your work being fine-tuning of contact arrangements. This is perhaps broader than that. First is, before the placement order, section 27(4); I am turning to it to make sure I get it right for the record. Where the court must consider the arrangements that the adoption agency has made, or proposes, for allowing anyone to have contact with the child and invite the parties to comment, what impact has that had and how effective is it? Do you have concerns about contact during this period? Judge Swindells: It is important to recognise that the making of a placement order, or an order authorising an agency to place a child for adoption, is a very significant watershed in relation to contact arrangements. One of the consequences of making a placement order is that any contact order under section 8 of the Children Act, or section 34 of the Children Act, ceases to have effect. The whole issue of contact is governed by section 26 of the 2002 Act. Another important feature is that, under section 34 of the 1989 Act, there is a duty upon the local authority to allow a child reasonable contact with his parents. That presumption goes upon the making of a placement order, so that we are in a new regime, and the 2002 Act is recognising that this is a child who is now en route to adoption but—and this is where I think that section 27(4) is important and is effective—it still gives scrutiny for the court to look at the arrangements, the frequency and the management of contact arrangements in this transitional period from placement order to final adoption. The sort of case where we have to think very carefully as to what regime of contact there should be is where you have an older child who has an attachment with the birth family, and who has been having frequent contact up until the making of the placement order. Simply to turn off contact at that point could be very damaging for the child. What we would strive to do is to have an incremental reduction, so that the child is doing work with the social worker in preparation, during this transition period, to being placed with their forever family but, at the same time, wean them off from that attachment—and they have had a close attachment—with the birth family in a way that helps them and is in their interests. There are some critical issues that we do have to consider at that stage, and section 27(4) enables us, as the judge, to weigh in the balance those matters and set a pattern that is appropriate for the child in that difficult and sensitive transitional period. Baroness Hamwee: Would this be one of the areas where you do look to the social workers as the experts, as to the impact of contact on children? Judge Swindells: Yes. That is very much their area of expertise. Of course, they will advise the court as to what they think is the appropriate frequency, given that complex situation. Q795 Baroness Hamwee: Can I turn then to section 46(6), which provides that, before an adoption order, the court must consider whether there should be arrangements for allowing contact, and must consider existing—you have talked about that in the other context—and proposed arrangements and get the views of the parties. Can you say something about that?

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Lord Justice McFarlane, Mr Justice Ryder, Her Honour Judge Hindley, and Her Honour Judge Swindells—Oral evidence (QQ 770–804) Judge Swindells: On Section 46(6), I think probably the expectation was that we would see something of a sea change in relation to post-adoption contact. At that time the research was pointing towards the importance of open adoption, but my experience is that in fact the law— and our approaches—has remained very much as it was under the old Act. There is very little evidence that we have direct contact post-adoption. In the majority of cases, we are looking at indirect, letterbox contact. So that envisaged sea change has not happened. It is very much the position that it is the prospective adopters, and ultimately the adopters, that have the controlling hand in relation to post-adoption contact. That was very much the previous law and it has continued under the new Act. Judge Hindley: Could I add a word about sibling contact? It is one of the big challenges, because one’s siblings are the longest relationships one has in life. It is a particular challenge for social workers to consider what contact there should or should not be. Plainly if there is an adoption of one sibling and another sibling is placed elsewhere, then how do you cater for that particular problem of ensuring that those children have some sort of contact? Every case is one that has to be dealt with on its unique circumstances. Sibling contact is very important and it is something that social workers do look at very carefully, we understand. Q796 Baroness Hamwee: It has been suggested that contact with a birth family is used as a bargaining tool to obtain parental consent. It does not sound, from what you have said, as if— Judge Swindells: It is not my experience at all. Mr Justice Ryder: It is worth saying that that assertion comes from good research about what happens behind the scenes during the currency of care proceedings, rather than placement order proceedings. There is a tendency for advocates to try to negotiate contact for birth families during the currency of care proceedings. There is the research, which we have already referred to more than once this morning, that suboptimum contact—I am sorry to use the jargon—is very damaging for those children and, therefore, as judges we must be very careful to scrutinise agreed proposals that are put before us at an interim stage in care proceedings. I think there is validity to that but not within the placement order process. Lord Justice McFarlane: Also, the thought within that is that determining the long-term contact at the same moment where the parent has to answer, “Do you consent to the adoption or not?” is probably the worst time from the parents’ point of view. For understandable human reasons, they may see the case as hopeless but they do not want to be seen to be giving their child away by consenting, so they are not consenting to the adoption. Often the social-work response will be, “We are not happy about any contact because they are opposed to the adoption. They are not giving it their blessing”. I think parents are in a difficult position there, so it may be perceived that, if they were consenting to the adoption, the contact would be more willingly given. But that is certainly not the way it is set up before us. Q797 Baroness Hamwee: To go back to the issue of delay and your comment about weaning the children away, I suppose there is no single answer that applies to every child but, if the processes are speeded up, in your view is this likely to cause any problems with that transition, the weaning away? Judge Swindells: I gave that as an example. There are other examples of issues that can arise at that stage. Social workers are astute to these difficult problems, sensitive problems for these

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Lord Justice McFarlane, Mr Justice Ryder, Her Honour Judge Hindley, and Her Honour Judge Swindells—Oral evidence (QQ 770–804) children, and I am confident that their practice as to how to handle that situation will adapt to the timescale. Lord Justice McFarlane: The timescale to speed up the decision does not mean that the working out of the decision, which may spread over some weeks and months to wean the child off, has to happen in a tight timescale. The other short point to make is that we are all describing these contact decisions as we have taken them over the course of time and will continue to take them, but they now occur in a world of Facebook, email and blogging, and it is extremely tricky for adopters and for children in those circumstances. Q798 Baroness Eaton: Judge Swindells mentioned special guardianships and potential delays. I do not want to talk about the delays, but I would like to pursue the role of special guardianship a little more. We have heard and understood that special guardianships were largely to be used for babies and young children. Whether that is in fact the use that is made of them we are not too certain, because I think it has been extended. In what circumstances are special guardianship orders typically made? Are there any grounds for concern, such as special guardianships perhaps being used inappropriately as a compromise solution, to secure the cooperation of the birth family, when adoption would be better for the child? Judge Hindley: Shall I take that? It is still in its relative infancy and we are looking forward to the research that is being done about outcomes and so on, so really it is our anecdotal experience that we can help you with. It has become a very useful permanency outcome for many families, and now that we have the benefit of more kinship family carers coming forward then we are getting more cases where that might be an option for us. Many children, in spite of the depredations of birth parents, may have very strong relationships with other members of their families, whether it is aunts, uncles, cousins or grandparents, and sometimes those members of the family have very strong commitments to those children. Sometimes they are totally unaware that the birth parents have not been looking after the children as well as they might, and suddenly they come forward totally dedicated to retaining the child within the birth family. So they are then the subject of a very careful assessment— what we call the schedule 4 assessment—where the social workers look very carefully at all of the positive factors, negative factors, the protective factors: can these special guardians protect these children from any risk elements within the birth parents, and so on? We find that in fact we are making special guardianship orders for a whole range of children, not just young children but older children too who may have stayed with Grandma at times when parents have been under stress, for example. What we are looking at, very carefully, is the ability of a special guardian to provide for any potential risk to the child, and the ability of that special guardian to be able to manage the emotional problems that that child may have. We look at them very hard, and we are finding good outcomes. It seems that it is working. Baroness Eaton: Thank you. We have heard of occasions when the child sometimes has had no previous contact with special guardians. Is that likely or does that happen very often? Judge Hindley: Occasionally it happens, and we have even had special guardians come from abroad, which again presents huge challenges when it comes to assessment and whether they really are robust candidates. Again, it is horses for courses. There may be an aunt who lives up in Yorkshire and the child lives down in Brighton but, nonetheless, that aunt has a strong 720

Lord Justice McFarlane, Mr Justice Ryder, Her Honour Judge Hindley, and Her Honour Judge Swindells—Oral evidence (QQ 770–804) reason or commitment to the child, so we look very carefully at motivation and whether they can really cater for the child’s identity needs. They may know the child’s family history, which is something that a good foster parent, an adoptive parent, cannot always give, so it can cover that particular situation in some cases. Q799 Lord Warner: This brings us to what we might call “the scorecard question”. Scorecards have become rather fashionable, as you know. To what extent, not covered already, do you consider that the Adoption and Children Act 2002, as interpreted and applied by the court, has met its key aims, which in summary are basically: speeding up the adoption process by the introduction, among others, of placement orders; the widening of the pool of prospective adopters; making the child’s welfare paramount throughout the adoption process; ensuring contact arrangements with birth family members are given careful judicial consideration at every stage of the adoption process; and extending the range of permanence orders to find the best long-term solution for the child? We have already touched on special guardianship. What is your sense, from the perspective of the courts, of how it works in achieving those key aims? Lord Justice McFarlane: Our perception is extremely positive. These reforms took a long time coming. I think for most of the professional life of the four of us there has been an adoption law review on the stocks, and it never came and never came. So, once it was delivered in the Bill that became the Act, it had been thought through and chewed over in a very thorough way, and so it is no surprise that it is working. I have already said that the placement order process brings the decision-making to the right stage, for the child and for the family, and an effective stage where the court can determine the adoption issue. It has moved away from the difficult concept of the “reasonable parent” when dispensing with consent, and it is now a welfare-based question, albeit loaded to whether adoption is required for the child. That seems to set the test correctly. Special guardianship is working and I think—as Judge Hindley’s answer indicated—it has been used creatively for a wider band of cases than had been imagined when it was developed. The pool of prospective adopters has been made more flexible. I do not think we are seeing large numbers of folk who were not going to put themselves forward before because of this, and the different categories—for example, same-sex couples—were putting themselves forward for adoption, but it was a difficult legal process to make one the adopter as a single person and the other partner achieved a residence order, which never seemed a satisfactory outcome. Now it reflects the reality of the situation in those families. Contact arrangements we have dealt with. It is an effective, modern piece of legislation. The terminology dovetails in with the Children Act but establishes its own focus, which is on the lifetime decision for the child in a way that again reflects matters—and it is items (c) and (f) in the welfare checklist that Judge Swindells has mentioned—that really for the judge tee up the question they have to answer in a helpful way. That helps the judges, because we are giving the decision, as the Chairman indicated in the beginning, now to a wide range of judges. I think there are 600 judges ticketed now to do this work and magistrates as well, so it is helpful. There is a “but” in what I am going to describe, but it is not something that I think we would suggest needs changing. The “but” is it would be easy to think that the placement for adoption order does what is says on the tin; it simply gives the local authority the authorisation to place

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Lord Justice McFarlane, Mr Justice Ryder, Her Honour Judge Hindley, and Her Honour Judge Swindells—Oral evidence (QQ 770–804) the child for adoption. In fact, it makes the adoption decision. Once the parent’s consent has been dispensed with, or given at that stage, the parent cannot come back in again at a later time to oppose the adoption, or revoke the placement order, unless there has been a change in circumstances, and the legal test is that, even where there has been a change, the child’s welfare justifies letting them back in, even to argue it, or they have a reasonable case and the child’s welfare is compatible with that. So those are going to be very high hurdles for a parent to cross, and a worry is that the throughput of these cases through the courts does not necessarily respect the fact that the decision is being made at that time. For my part, I do not see how you can change it. It is part of the structure, but it is pretty punchy and it makes it absolutely crucial that the quality of the court’s analysis, at that placement for adoption stage, is based on evidence that is as clear as can be and a reasoned process that allows the parents to have their side effectively, efficiently, but thoroughly evaluated before this life-changing, lifetime decision is made. Lord Warner: Is it your sense, though, that all the parties involved realise that that is what is happening now? Lord Justice McFarlane: I think they do. We obviously only see what goes on in our own courts. I hope that the Magistrates’ Court level approaches matters in the same way, and we are certainly not seeing appeals from the Magistrates’ Court on these sorts of points. Q800 Lord Warner: Can I probe it a bit more on special guardianship? When we looked at some of the data from the Department for Education, it did—for those, like some of us, who are nerdy enough to go through this data—look a bit as though, in some parts of the country, there was a substitution effect with the appearance of special guardianship vis-à-vis adoption, and that some people were moving away from adoption to special guardianship. That is what it felt a bit like, looking at the data. Do the courts have any sense of that? Lord Justice McFarlane: I am not sure that we have seen the data. Judge Hindley: No. It is difficult to know what underlies the figures. It may be that certain local authorities are better at identifying family members or convening a family group conference to identify those who might be or come forward as special guardians. It is very difficult to know what underlies that particular aspect. Mr Justice Ryder: There are Cafcass statistics that indicate that the most successful local authorities—that is, the highest quality social care input that we have available to us—also show a higher than average rate of diversion of cases, so they never come to the court. That must mean that the family group conferences are leading to the identification of family members that may in due course become special guardianship order cases, and we are not then seeing the care processes and intervening process. I know that Cafcass could tell you about that because I have heard them in the public arena, at the moment, talking about those projects. Lord Warner: That is very helpful. Thank you. Q801 Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top: We are nearly finished now, I am sure you will be pleased to know. We did think that Mr Justice Ryder would like the opportunity to say something about his modernisation plans, and this is really the opportunity to let us know how you think they may impact on adoption proceedings in court and what we should be looking out for. 722

Lord Justice McFarlane, Mr Justice Ryder, Her Honour Judge Hindley, and Her Honour Judge Swindells—Oral evidence (QQ 770–804) Mr Justice Ryder: Thank you for the opportunity, first of all. I would not want to dodge what I think is the most important opportunity the judiciary and the statutory agencies have had since the Children Act 1989 came in. We are about to look not just at that Act but the 2002 Act, with a perspective that I think is one that all four of us have been looking for, for the 30-plus years in family justice that we have all had, and I know that many of you will equally have experienced. The impetus given to us by the Norgrove panel is very significant. It has moved things up the public agenda in a way that the judiciary could not, or perhaps should not, expect to achieve. We have our own clearly defined roles, but we have thought it important to respond to that independently. When the President and the Lord Chief Justice asked for a response to the Norgrove Report we decided we would put one in, within an effective timetable, describing what the judiciary needed to do to respond to the questions raised in that report. I do not think there will be a significant change to adoption processes. I ought to make that clear. Our general view is that those processes and placement order proceedings are sufficiently good that, provided one gets to the good practice—which we have been identifying all morning—it is right. Those are the right decisions in the right cases. There are neither too many of them nor too few of them, but the one thing that we can say is that they are delayed too long. Placement order decisions are delayed too long because of the care proceedings, and so a fundamental look at what influences those proceedings was absolutely right. Therefore we have a two-year programme and we will work two streams in parallel. One is the creation of the new statutory Family Court, once Parliament has come to its decision about that; and the second is the welfare legislative arrangements in the draft Bill that is receiving prelegislative scrutiny elsewhere. Putting those two things together, and anticipating what the judges will be working with, we see a need to retrain judges, so all 600 judges will be retrained this coming year, in a skills framework that will be very heavy on research. So all of the matters which Members of this Committee have rightly been concerned with will be reiterated with the 600 judges, and then every single specialist magistrate as well and their legal advisers. By the end of 2013 we will have completed that process of training in a new skills framework. All of that material will be publicly available. It will be transparent and available for anybody to criticise and/or to add to and comment upon. We are also going to change the leadership framework for judges. All four of us are used to leading other judges. That is why we have the jobs that we have as distinct from just sitting. We are going to train people to manage workload, to prioritise cases, to give direction in cases in a way that judges perhaps hitherto have not been used to, and to use data. I am afraid we are all going to move into Lord Warner’s nerdy corner, so that we understand the figures, we understand what works and what does not, and which adjournments are right—and there should be a lot fewer of them—and which are wrong, which will be very carefully managed by the case management judges. Those two frameworks will change some practice in the courts. For my part I have said before, and I will say again, it is the way in which we deal with cases in court that is going to change. Advocates are going to have to start to think very carefully about—what I describe as—an investigative system rather than an adversarial system. All the protections that there may need to be about fact-finding and allegations will still be there, but we have to learn that these decisions need to be made in the timetable for the individual child who is the subject of the proceedings. That means advocates learning to address their skills in a way that benefits the child, at the end of the day, not just the party that they represent. 723

Lord Justice McFarlane, Mr Justice Ryder, Her Honour Judge Hindley, and Her Honour Judge Swindells—Oral evidence (QQ 770–804) That is a very short summary, but that is what we are doing for two years. Q802 Lord Warner: Could you go on a bit further and say what steps will be taken by the judiciary to ensure that the social work profession, and Cafcass, understands what is going to be different about the courts and the way they behave after 2013? Mr Justice Ryder: We hope to have multi-disciplinary training with them. We have sorted our own training out but we now need to move into joint training, because those opportunities are fundamentally important. I think the best way that I can describe to you what judges will get, and what they need to have, is that we are presently coming to what I would call expectation agreements with each of the statutory agencies: Cafcass, local authorities, Legal Services Commission, Official Solicitor and HMCTS. Those agreements will be what the good practice is that the court expects of the individual professional coming before it, so it will be the quality assurance that I have previously referred to. We are asking the Family Justice Board, chaired by David Norgrove, to approve the whole structure. The judges can come to agreements about what we want in court, but we want the agencies to be bound into each other and to Government in respect of the deliverability of those agreements. You will probably see a dozen very specific detailed sets of materials about what we expect from social workers, Cafcass guardians, lawyers in court, decision-making by the Legal Services Commission and so on, and judges will be referring to those materials day-to-day in their case management decisions, and again we will publish them. Q803 The Chairman: I have two questions on that. One is, are you involved—I hope you are—in the training of magistrates who sit in the Family Proceedings Court? Mr Justice Ryder: Yes. The Chairman: Good. Mr Justice Ryder: We are going to continue to deliver their training the way that they are used to, so it will be a key legal adviser within the region, and also within the clerkship, delivering the training to the magistrates on the ground. We have made it very clear that the full-time judges, and to some extent the part-time judges, who will receive the residential training in April and June must be available to the magistrates as well as to other professionals to hand on their expertise, so they must get involved in that training process and the Judicial College is with us on that. Lord Justice McFarlane: A key change, with the introduction of the single Family Court, is that all of those who sit in judgment in it—magistrates and professional judges—are judges of that court. The aim for the magistrates to be joined up as part of the cohort, who are sitting in the court in one team, is a great benefit that we hope will come from this, so that there will be training and conversation, and even people knowing each other in the towns in which they sit and dispense family justice. Q804 The Chairman: The last question—positively the last question because you have been terribly good, answering so many questions—is: will you put into this a review of how it is working within a relatively short time? Mr Justice Ryder: Yes, we will. We understand that there are a number of trigger points. We will have the completion of training in 2013. We need to review then whether we have

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Lord Justice McFarlane, Mr Justice Ryder, Her Honour Judge Hindley, and Her Honour Judge Swindells—Oral evidence (QQ 770–804) achieved our objectives and published the right materials and given them to everybody. Perhaps most importantly somewhere, between April and the summer of 2014, the new court comes on line, the new structures are there, and we have to make sure that again what we said we would do we have done. We have asked—and we very much hope—that out there in the objective research communities there will be those who would like to tell us how we are doing 12 months and two years on, because I think this is a five-year project and we need to look at it sequentially over time. The Chairman: Thank you all very much indeed. We are extremely grateful to you for the openness of your responses to our multiplicity of questions, and it has been very valuable for us. Thank you very much, all four of you.

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Professor Eileen Munro CBE—Oral evidence (QQ 383–411)

Professor Eileen Munro CBE—Oral evidence (QQ 383–411) Evidence Session No. 6.

Heard in Public.

Questions 383–411

TUESDAY 9 OCTOBER 2012 Members present Baroness Butler-Sloss (Chairman) Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top Baroness Eaton Viscount Eccles Baroness Hamwee Baroness King of Bow Baroness Knight of Collingtree Baroness Morris of Bolton Lord Morris of Handsworth Baroness Walmsley ________________ Examination of Witness Witness: Professor Eileen Munro CBE, Department of Social Policy, London School of Economics

Q383 The Chairman: Good morning, Professor Munro. We are extremely grateful to you for coming. We feel it very important to get your view on this. I ought just to warn you that there is one question that we failed to warn you about, which Viscount Eccles will ask you at the end, as to your views on the current legislation, if you have any, so you could possibly be thinking about that in the back of your mind while we go through the others. I think you wanted to give us some opening remarks. Professor Munro: Yes. Well, it was because I did my homework before coming here, so I have read the evidence that you have received so far. I was very struck by how you have been getting evidence from people who are extremely expert in practice of adoption and research of adoption. I wanted to make it clear that I do not claim the same kind of expertise. What I can bring is the work I did within the child protection system as a whole, which captures issues that are just as prevalent within the adoption part of the safeguarding process as within the rest. The criticisms I made around trying to improve lives through targets and performance indicators, through trying to drive up professional practice by having heavily prescribed

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Professor Eileen Munro CBE—Oral evidence (QQ 383–411) procedures and assessment forms, was that that had become imbalanced so that the overall effect was of creating this very defensive compliance culture where people are more concerned with pleasing Ofsted than meeting the best interests of a child. My recommendations were trying to shift that and, by bringing in change on several different points, hoping that they would have a cumulative effect to start driving from being compliant to actually learning whether we are helping children. Because that, to me, was the saddest finding of my review, that we really do not know whether all that effort that we put in is having a beneficial effect or not or how much harm we are doing, which is equally important to find out. That was what I wanted to say. The Chairman: You may have noticed that the current questions, which you have gone through, reflect to some extent your executive summary. For many of those questions, I think your executive summary is an absolutely crucial part of it because, as you say, there is a readover. Professor Munro: Yes. Q384 Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top: Good morning. I ought to introduce myself in that I trained as a social worker a long time ago, and then when I was Minister for Social Exclusion with the Prime Minister in 2006-07 I had another look at children in care. It does seem to me that you were looking at the pathway that a child follows during their journey through the child protection system. I wondered how you thought the Government’s renewed focus on timescales in care proceedings helps or hinders that journey. Professor Munro: It worries me because targets and timescales may well have a place in certain areas of work, but in reality what has happened in the way that they have operated in children’s services is that they have become the goal themselves. I think the introduction of timescales as a performance indicator is based on a totally invalid inference. If you are looking at good-quality practice, then people meet these kinds of timescales because they are concerned about the child’s needs and meeting them in a timely way. They then made the invalid inference that, if you meet the timescale, you are doing good practice, and obviously you can meet the timescales through a number of ways, of which I have seen far too many. Given that they have become such a dominant feature of how people have structured all their work at the moment, to keep them in part of the system reduces my chances of being able to persuade people to think about timeliness plus quality. I heard from far too many social workers that you call an assessment complete because you have met the deadline, not because you feel you have a decent understanding of the family. I would be horrified to think that a child is forcibly adopted because you have hit a timescale. It goes against justice. Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top: Yes, very interesting. Q385 The Chairman: Perhaps I could just add to that. You may know I was a judge, and the judges have now put together some timescales because the current waiting time, particularly for care proceedings, is over a year. Are you concerned about that? Professor Munro: I am concerned about timeliness. I just do not think that giving a timescale has in practice been the effective way of speeding things up. Q386 Baroness King of Bow: What would be an effective way to reduce delay?

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Professor Eileen Munro CBE—Oral evidence (QQ 383–411) Professor Munro: Well, a clearer focus on what is happening to the child while you are waiting. I would like to see it happen that, for instance, every time you looked online at the case file you saw how many days the child had been waiting in a state of uncertainty, because that is an influence on you. Otherwise, what we have at the moment is people moving cases down the line to a new team, so it is always starting at the beginning. They do not think, “Well, this child first caused concern two years and six months ago, and we are still faffing around and they are not in a stable, happy placement”. It is things like that that can nudge, to use that rather trendy word. It is just realising that timeliness matters because it matters for that child, not because it matters because otherwise some Ofsted inspector will criticise you. Q387 Baroness Walmsley: Has the recent work on the effect of the waiting on children and remaining for longer in a possibly abusive, dangerous, unsettled, violent or whatever situation had any effect on your view? I heard a very interesting comment on Radio 4’s “The Listening Project” recently where a parent and the adopted child were discussing things and the child wanted to know why he had been adopted. The parent said, “Well, your mummy understood that you could not wait for her to get better”. She was an alcoholic. It is the child’s timescale, really, is it not? Professor Munro: Yes. Baroness Walmsley: Has that affected your view at all about that real understanding of that? Professor Munro: Yes. That understanding has been around for some time, and it links to the question you put in at the end around Section 31. I think one of the problems that we have created is that, in interpreting children who are suffering or likely to suffer significant harm, there has become de facto an interpretation that means “in the fairly immediate future”. It does not handle well the cumulative harm of poor-quality parenting. Because of the extreme end of care orders being much more skewed towards incidents of abuse, you find that in practice a lot of the times when you have had a family that has been causing concern for some years, it is when you have some bruises or a broken bone or something nice and physical that you can talk to the court about that you actually start care proceedings. That to me reflects partly a lack of expertise in the workforce to do the proper assessment, but also a belief that judges will not care about that; they want to see the bruises, and they want that kind of firm evidence. This is what I am thinking social workers think, not what I think judges think. It actually takes a very detailed case to provide the evidence to say that there is a high probability that if this child goes on getting no decent eye contact, no sensitive emotional response, then these are going to be hazards that they are likely to face in adult life. Whether the current law can be used that way or whether you need to change the wording I do not know, but I think we have to become much more concerned about cumulative harm rather than what is happening on this one day. Q388 Baroness Knight of Collingtree: Having read the evidence, as Professor Munro obviously has, perhaps she would like to comment on the case that we discussed about a child who had been adopted very successfully and the parents wanted to adopt another but they had to wait another two and a half years before they could adopt, although the child was the sister of the boy already adopted. In that circumstance, would she consider that to go right back to the beginning again every time is perhaps a little unnecessary? Professor Munro: Yes. It is a good example of how stupid things can become when you have a heavily prescribed process so that there is only one starting point. What you need is to be able 728

Professor Eileen Munro CBE—Oral evidence (QQ 383–411) to say, “We have already assessed them. They are doing a fantastic job. It is really important for both these children to be together”. What are you going to find in another assessment? Q389 The Chairman: I think the Government have actually said they are going to stop that. One of the proposals is that for foster parents and previous adopters there will be a fast track, I think. We move rather neatly then into the key challenges facing the social work profession. A particular thing I would like to ask you about is the read-across to adoption from social work challenges. In particular, two groups I rather had in mind were, of course, the relationship between the principal child and family social worker, whom you are recommending, and the adoption decision-maker. Because we are being told that now the adoption panels are no longer going to decide whether it is in the best interests of a child to be adopted, it is going to be a decision-maker within the local authority. The other, of course, is you are talking about a chief social worker. Professor Munro: Yes. The Chairman: Do you think the chief social worker, who presumably would be based in the department, should have experience of adoption? Professor Munro: No, the chief social worker will be based in the Department of Health and the Department for Education. It is chief at the national level. The Chairman: Yes. Would you expect that person to, or should that person have some adoption experience? Professor Munro: Adoption obviously is part of a social work range of responsibilities, so it would certainly be covered by them. It seemed to me that the last Government kept trying to solve the problems of inadequate front-line skill by adding another layer of oversight. None of the oversight actually alters the fact that the front-line service is poor quality. To me, it is much more important to be trying to drive up what is happening at the team level so that we have less concern about the quality of that decision. It obviously needs to be scrutinised by a higher management person, but it should be fundamentally their responsibility, because they are the people who know the child and it should be something that is within their competence. In terms of the principal social worker, I have deliberately made very little specification about what the job should be, because I want people to have the flexibility to build their own organisation in creative ways; I am not wanting to set it in stone, because you end up with all sorts of unintended consequences. But the key point, I think, is that we should start giving people higher pay because they become better at helping children rather than because they become better at managing people or keeping IT systems up to date. I think we somehow lost confidence that social work can be a skilled job that requires a good salary and decent status. Q390 Baroness Morris of Bolton: Can I just ask something on the status? Lady Butler-Sloss and I both sat on a rather counterintuitive Conservative review into social work. The Chairman: With Tim Loughton. Baroness Morris of Bolton: Yes, with Tim, where we were looking exactly at this. How do you raise the status of social work, because I think this is very much at the heart of an awful lot of what we are talking about?

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Professor Eileen Munro CBE—Oral evidence (QQ 383–411) Professor Munro: Well, part of it is that they need to earn the status. There are enough stories in the press that are shocking, so one at least has to admit there must be some bad people around. At the moment the Social Work Task Force and now the College of Social Work have been doing quite a lot in the way of trying to give the public greater understanding of what social workers do. The latest opinion poll of the public was far more positive about social workers than particularly immediately after the Peter Connolly death. I think there are some slight changes of view and one of the things you have to do is be a lot more public about what you are doing. One of the big problems when we have something like the Peter Connolly incident is that the police talk openly, the health sector makes a comment, and the social services say, “No, we cannot say anything for confidentiality reasons”. You can say a lot, in fact; that is, not about that one unique child, but about the way that you make decisions and the type of evidence you consider. You can show that you are open to being scrutinised, and I think that is something we have to get better at. Q391 Baroness Walmsley: We now move to the issue of rights, sometimes perceived to be conflicting rights. Do you think that the people who are working to safeguard children are getting the balance right between the rights of the child and the rights of the birth parents? Do you think Section 31 of the 1989 Act strikes the right balance for entry into the care system? I get the impression that the law is as it is but that practice moves depending on what has been happening recently. Professor Munro: Yes. Baroness Walmsley: I am aware that, for example, after the Baby P situation the number of children put forward for entry into care suddenly rocketed because people realised that the child has rights. Can you tell us whether you think we have the balance right both in legislation and in practice? Professor Munro: I think at the very abstract level I would say you never get the balance right; you just try never to go too far off-balance and catch it quickly. Around the world you will see this problem. If you think of the two extremes being about preserving the family and rescuing the child, what you can see particularly in the Anglo Saxon countries is this continual lurching from one extreme to the other. I would like it to be much more of a small lurch around the centre. I think some of the current adoption strategy is very much in the child rescue extreme. I suppose it is because it is presented in an isolated way; it is not so well linked to improving our ability to strengthen families. In practice, I have seen lots of examples where the rights of parents take precedence. It comes down to the quality of work and the quality of supervision, because when you visit a family home on the whole it is the adults who attract your attention. They are the ones whom you talk to and, therefore, when you are thinking about the scenario, they are the ones who come first to your mind and most vividly to your mind. If you think of the Peter Connolly case, the social worker visiting spoke to the mother and did not really pay attention to the children and how well they were or what injuries they had. To me, this is where good social work is incredibly difficult, because it is about keeping in mind the needs of the children and the needs of the adults; it is about keeping in mind that you see both good and bad in that family, that the parents have some fantastic qualities and some dangerous qualities, and actually managing to hold both in your head. Human beings like to think people are either nice or nasty, and we deal

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Professor Eileen Munro CBE—Oral evidence (QQ 383–411) with people who have imperfections—we all have imperfections—but they possibly have a few more than average. To me, we do not do it well at the moment, but to do it well is partly an emotional issue and partly an intellectual issue of keeping in mind the whole complexity and not simplifying it. Q392 Baroness Walmsley: Is it a matter of access in some cases? Do you think social workers should always have the right to see the child alone even if the parent does not want it? Professor Munro: If you are talking about the right to do it, there is the practical ability to do it as well because, in fact, they can always ask a police officer to come along and demand the right; they could exercise it that way round. It is about being able to say to a parent, “Look, I have a lot of respect for you. I want to help you, but I am also here to be concerned about the child. I want to see her alone and I have to reassure my supervisor that I have seen her alone”. It worries me that we have so many young, new people doing this kind of work. Baroness Walmsley: Do they have the confidence to say that? Professor Munro: Well, I do not see they can have. Baroness Walmsley: Quite. Professor Munro: The best use of authority is because it comes from your personality, not because you can wave a piece of paper. That takes time and maturity and it takes good supervision to coach you in how to say it in a way that does not get you thrown out of the house entirely. Q393 Baroness Morris of Bolton: Thank you very much. I really enjoyed that—I was very much looking forward to this evidence session this morning because I have read a lot of the work that you have done. When you were conducting your review, did you encounter an attitude among professionals, including social workers, that adoption is seen as part of the safeguarding agenda? Was it treated as a last resort, or is it seen as something very separate to be encouraged from a very early stage? Professor Munro: I thought about this. I do not remember anyone mentioning adoption, to be honest. Baroness Morris of Bolton: Right—that answers the question. Professor Munro: Because I worked some time ago, adoption was part of my case load; it was not a separate service. So it did not occur to me that it had become quite as separate as I realised later that it had. I dealt with adoption as well as with care orders. Baroness Morris of Bolton: Is there a culture among some social workers that they really do not want to think about adoption at all? Professor Munro: There is an emotional dimension, and to give up all hope on a family is a painful decision, so I think some people shirk it. You have to face that in order to say, “We should give this child a permanent place elsewhere”. Q394 Baroness Hamwee: I think you have gone a long way to tell us what your answer is going to be to this. We have heard in evidence that social workers are governed by a culture of optimism, keep on keeping on, hoping that things are going to get better with the parents and

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Professor Eileen Munro CBE—Oral evidence (QQ 383–411) that their capacity to change will become evident. They are trying too hard to keep birth families together. Do you think that that is the case? Professor Munro: Yes. Optimism itself, I think, is a good thing. If we did not have some optimism that people could solve problems, could make progress and mature, I would be a bit depressed about myself as much as anyone else. So a degree of optimism is needed, but it again comes back to the quality of practice and about being realistic about what is there. I have a student doing a PhD who is studying a lot of assessment forms. He has developed in his analysis a little category of statements including “I hope that”, because it kept appearing so much. He could not see how they thought it was going to happen, and that is what worries me—that people hope but do not say, “I hope that sending them to this service will help and this is how I think it will help”. It is just that they vaguely hope time might tell. Q395 Baroness Hamwee: It is more that human reaction, is it, than a feeling about parents’ rights, influence from the media and so on, or do they all go together to make up the mix? Professor Munro: They all go together and I think there are points where the media has been so hostile because you have left a child in danger that you get this swing-back so that they will be removing more children and giving up hope. I was really impressed by the Drug and Alcohol Court evaluation. One of the things that I thought it handled well was that by offering very skilled help to families from the beginning you gave them a fair chance to improve, so it seemed to me to be just, but also what you found was that they decided that they had to give up quicker than they otherwise would have done so that children were removed permanently at an earlier stage. It seemed to me that with good practice and trying to help families you can reach a quicker decision about whether they can use help, whereas if you are not actively trying to engage them in change, then you cannot work out whether they can change or not. Q396 Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top: One of the things that we have had evidence given to us on is the damage that is done, particularly to very young children, by exposure to going back to see the parent and so on. It seems to me that, in our care system, children are in and out much more than they would be in many European systems, for example, and that in our system birth parents are not as involved in the care work as they would be in other systems. Do you think that that is one of the problems and that this will to make the family work is sometimes unrealistic about the ability of the parents to change and that, therefore, the child is pushed in and out too often? Or do you think that permanency of placement— Professor Munro: The point that they are distressed when they see their birth mother reminds me of the Robinson films, which I was shown as part of my training—children show distress because they are separated from their attachment person. The hospitals had stopped contact between parents and children because the children got distressed and what they then saw was that the children settled but, in fact, what they are doing is getting depressed and giving up hope. I would be cautious in interpreting distress as a bad thing. It would suggest a degree of attachment. I think the two are separate. If you have a realistic uncertainty because you have not looked enough or a realistic hope that these parents can change, then maintaining the relationship is really important on both sides. If you start to restrict contact, you actually start to tilt the balance towards, “We are going to give up on you however much you strive”. We are giving that message that we are not expecting you to succeed. There is a danger there.

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Professor Eileen Munro CBE—Oral evidence (QQ 383–411) Q397 Baroness Walmsley: Do you think some family social workers see placing a child for adoption as a failure on their part because they have not succeeded with the family? Professor Munro: Yes, I think that would be the view—failure, but also a sadness. Q398 Lord Morris of Handsworth: Is there a looming crisis in maintaining the current levels of experts in social work? If that is the case, how might this be effectively addressed? For example, should recommendations from the Social Work Reform Board’s professional capability framework include reference to adoption? Professor Munro: I did not know that it did not, but it should—certainly, the capabilities framework. The issue around the recruitment and retention problem is more optimistic at the moment. It is helped, of course, by having an economic recession; there are not that many jobs to go to. A lot of the work done by the task force is starting to show effect, so the quality of people going on degree courses is going up. The number of people doing the step up to social work—coming in with some good, older, mature people with some good skills—is improving. There is much less use of agency staff, so that people are employing people and retaining them better. There is a shift towards creating a better career structure for people to stay and be rewarded for staying as social workers and not becoming managers. I think there are a lot of little flickers of reason for optimism. The other reason I have for optimism is that some of the local authorities have made wholehearted reforms on the basis of my review. They have done a whole system change around making effective help towards children their primary concern. Within those agencies, when I visited them the director and the other senior managers say one of the most striking things is how enthusiastic the staff become. Giving them the chance to actually work with families, giving them work that respects their values of what they want to do, and giving them support to do that work, you very quickly alter the morale. When I worked in social work I thought it was a fantastic job. I gave it up because of having three kids and being attracted to academia, not because I did not like the job. Q399 Lord Morris of Handsworth: What could be done to raise the status of social workers in the public’s mind? Professor Munro: More good-news stories would be great. There is always the difficulty of not wanting to actually name a family because it is bad for them, but perhaps there should be more efforts to do that. I think it is partly that we have to earn it. The latest public opinion polls were much more positive that social workers are doing a useful job and an important job, but it would help as well if politicians did not blame them the next time there is a tragedy. Q400 The Chairman: I wonder if I could just ask you about recommendation 11 in your executive summary, because the Social Work Reform Board’s professional capabilities framework is what I was looking at. I just wonder the extent to which social workers are taught about adoption. We are going to get directors of social work services coming, but I am not sure what training the social workers get in adoption. I have rather had the impression they do not get very much, which is really why I added that to that question. Professor Munro: Basically, I do not think they get enough on child and family social work in their basic training, which is why I had the additional sections in my report. It probably is a

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Professor Eileen Munro CBE—Oral evidence (QQ 383–411) feature of the fact that there is too much that is potentially relevant in the training. I think we do need to move towards a basic training and a qualifying specialism in the long term. There is that route that has come into existence, but it has rather stumbled along rather than becoming a fully fledged standardised career path. I am hoping that my recommendations and the actions that people are taking are going to make people realise that being good at social work is difficult to achieve and valuable to achieve, and being a good manager is a different job. I think the decision back in the 1970s to make management the only promotion option was a disaster. Q401 Baroness Hamwee: Can I come back on this? This is a problem in a lot of areas of work, is it not? The Chairman: Educationally, too. Baroness Hamwee: Yes. I know people who have moved out of all sorts of practical types of work because they have been expected to undertake management. Have you spotted any professions, or any areas of work, that social work could learn from in this, or is it just a matter of changing perceptions completely? Professor Munro: Medicine does it differently. If you are ever going to have an operation, the slightly more experienced surgeon is a better bet. I think it comes down to having confidence that your skills are difficult and important. They are the more intangible skills, but if you watch a video of a social worker talking to a family and asking challenging questions in a way that keeps them engaged and motivated, it is very high skill, but it is not the sort of thing that people who have done a management course can easily see and record; it does not lend itself to people who think it has to be on a computer to be real. The Chairman: It seems a very sad aspect of it that the senior social worker who is really good on the ground gets a management post and does not have any children to look after. Professor Munro: Yes, but they get indirect involvement. The Chairman: What I meant is they are not directly on the ground with families. Professor Munro: It gives the message that that ability to work with a family is only for lowgrade people, and that to me is where the skill is. Being able to do the work is what matters. I prefer to talk about people moving into the back office in management rather than going up. It is to do with having confidence that we can do something useful. Q402 Baroness Knight of Collingtree: This question comes very neatly after what has been said, because to some extent answers have already been given. Particularly, Professor Munro, you spoke of a chief social worker at national level. This is really what the questions have been swirling around about, because during our sessions of listening to witnesses I think some of us were concerned to be told at one stage that there were professionally trained social workers in adoption and then to be told by different witnesses that there were not. I wondered whether we can actually get some clear evidence on this—in particular, your own opinion is extremely valuable. Do you think that the reforms that are set out in the Family Justice Review are going to, for instance, even start to improve the levels of trust and confidence between social workers and other childcare professionals, or is that not very important? Social workers seem to me to be given the most appallingly difficult job, because it is so wide and covers so many different aspects of difficulties in human life. When people criticise social workers they

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Professor Eileen Munro CBE—Oral evidence (QQ 383–411) seem to have very little understanding of what an impossible job we are asking them to do. When we look at the question of adoption, as we must, the specific expertise is not always forthcoming from someone who is a social worker. Could you suggest to us that it would be a good idea if there were some very specially trained in adoption social workers in perhaps every local authority, so that they could be given the job that every social worker has to do instead? Professor Munro: That is a leading question, is it not? I am not at all attracted to our current system of a social worker with a case load. For the reasons you have stated, a family is so diverse; there are so many people that you have to pay attention to. I really like the model developed in Hackney of having a social work unit dealing with it. If you have, as they have there, a unit of five, including an administrator who knows the cases and, therefore, can do an awful lot more of the data entry, you can within that expect to have somebody with adoption competence. I think that, given the scale of the work and the amount of research knowledge that we now have as well, it was much easier when I trained because there was not so much around. There is now potentially so much valuable information that you need a degree of specialisation. When I did most of my family work, it was in the days when it was popular to do joint work. I would visit a family home with a psychiatrist or with a psychologist or a fellow social worker, which gives you an awful lot more confidence in dealing with a large room full of angry people. Q403 The Chairman: I wonder if I could just add to that. One of the problems in the courts is that judges ask for experts but so do the parties. Generally, the parents’ lawyers ask for experts. The real question is that a great deal of the expertise that is asked for could actually be provided by the social worker, if the social worker had the appropriate training and also the confidence. Professor Munro: That is right. The Chairman: The judges, I think, need—and I think they recognise it now—to rely less on independent experts and more on social workers, but how do we get to that position? Professor Munro: Again, there are some flickering signs of hope because some of the boroughs that have redesigned their assessment process—the Hackney model of working in a unit—have been getting more positive feedback from the courts that their assessment forms make sense and that the judge can understand why they are asking for a care order. You can have a recommendation that people do good-quality assessments, but I always think you should judge the value of a statement by thinking, “Would anyone ever say anything else?” You are right: we should be working towards judges knowing that what they are getting is a well-reasoned assessment and that when a social worker asserts that something is a fact it is based on some fairly solid evidence that it is a fact, not just a bit of hearsay gossip. But I do not think we can leap there immediately, and that is the problem. That is why I think some of the reforms in the past have happened; politically, it is much more attractive if somebody says, “Look, just send out all these orders and everything will be okay”, whereas what I am trying to do is nurture a different kind of environment, so it is a slow build-up. Q404 Baroness King of Bow: I want to ask about adoption targets and the use of adoption scorecards. You have said that they are confusing, or they could create confusion, in that they are also mildly inconsistent with your review. Obviously, at the end of the day what we are

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Professor Eileen Munro CBE—Oral evidence (QQ 383–411) trying to establish is whether or not there is poor performance and to remedy it. What system could do that more effectively than the current one? Professor Munro: The scorecards, I think, are a good idea. The issue is how they are used in practice. Because they are intended to give you a set of evidence that you then interrogate as to why we have got here, rather than saying, “If you show this score, then you are definitely a bad person or you are definitely a good person”, in principle they could operate very well indeed. If you put them into a culture that is used to league tables, and that is used to trying to hit numbers rather than quality, then they could get distorted. I know that already the media have taken them and turned them into league tables, which is not what is intended. It is not the idea of the scorecard in itself; it is the scorecard entering the current rather defensive compliance culture that I worry about. That part I like; I think that is the right way to go. You have to look at the evidence and then say, “Why is it going that way? Is it because of poor practice, or is it that we had one particularly large family of an ethnic minority that is hard to understand?” or some features like that. For me, we had adoption targets before; they created a great deal of public anxiety because people started to fear that babies were removed because people wanted to hit the target and then were rushing to make a decision about removal because of the target. Timeliness is what matters, but not saying there is a precise number of days regardless of how well you have prepared the case. Q405 Baroness King of Bow: Looking through your report, one of the main things you say also is about prevention and about early intervention. How can we measure that? Professor Munro: It can be done. My colleague Martin Knapp has done a lot of economic forecasting on the evidence on improving certain factors and what it would save society later on. There is obviously quite a lot of hypothesising in that. It is easier to prove something positive that you have done rather than something that you have prevented. When you look at the amount of money and social work time that is taken up at the moment in keeping families out of the system, I think it would be much better used actually offering them a service. Q406 Baroness Walmsley: That takes us rather nicely to the next question because I want to ask about feedback, monitoring and quality assurance. You, of course, mention in your review that feedback is very important, but do we have enough data on the success or otherwise of placements? How do you think that crucial decision to place a child for adoption can be assessed? Over what length of time should that decision be assessed? It can be very difficult if the child moves to a different local authority. It could go anywhere in the country if you choose a long period. Professor Munro: Yes, and they have a right to privacy as well. Follow-up would need to be on a voluntary basis. Baroness Walmsley: Do you mean anonymised in the way it is presented? Professor Munro: Yes, but you could ask them whether you could keep in touch, because it is important for you to learn and then develop a system that could be an anonymised central post. The other thing that we do not collect at the moment, which seems to me very simple, is that if a child gets referred into the child protection service and is considered at risk of significant harm or anything else, we do not record whether they were adopted or not, so we do not actually see that a previous decision has turned out bad. I think also you have to remember that 736

Professor Eileen Munro CBE—Oral evidence (QQ 383–411) it could have been a good decision to place that child for adoption and still have a bad outcome. You cannot predict the future perfectly, so a bad outcome does not mean a bad decision. The other area of feedback I think we should collect more is from children and from the parents as well, because it is one dimension of knowing what the service is doing as well as more objective information. Q407 Baroness Eaton: We have spoken a lot this morning about social workers and professionals. My background is local government, and I used to be, many moons ago, the lead member for social services. I wondered how important you felt the involvement of lead members—lead councillors—is in the issue of child protection and possible adoption in driving forward change in the system. Do you think that leadership in this area is usually left to frontline managers and to staff? Professor Munro: In the areas that I have seen making quite radical reforms in the past year, the lead membership is very important, because if you move from basically being highly defensive and compliant to actually focusing on children, you have to take a lot more responsibility. The difference between a rule and a judgment is that you are responsible for the judgment you make and with a rule you can duck it. When you think of how much blame and anxiety play a part in this system, taking more responsibility for what you are doing is something where you need the political back-up because, if your councillors are going to drop you in it if anything goes wrong, you are immediately going to scuttle back into being defensive and compliant. They talk about risk avoidance, but it is always risk displacement. Somebody else carries the risk if the professionals are not prepared to, and it is usually the child. There is a need for political endorsement—and at the national level. Tim Loughton was great that way and I hope his successor is equally strong, and Michael Gove has made some lovely statements about backing the judgment of professionals in difficult situations. I think that is really important. The Chairman: Viscount Eccles is going to ask you about legislation, which was not a question, I am afraid, that we gave to you in advance, so you might want to duck it—but wait out a little bit as to how he asks it. Q408 Viscount Eccles: Our Select Committee is expected to make some recommendations about legislation, so your view would be helpful. Do you think that there are changes to the present legislation on adoption that could be helpful or should we, the Committee, concentrate on culture and performance within the present legal system? Professor Munro: I would have needed to be able to check with my daughter before answering that. To me, the issue is not so much in the adoption end of law, but at the care order end. There is a need for a greater understanding of cumulative harm, whether in the wording or in the spirit and interpretation. The impact of the current interpretation is that people think they have no authority to challenge poor parenting if the parents are not actually hitting the children. A lot of people are so concerned about engaging the family and not alienating them that they cannot ask the difficult questions. It is that sort of ripple effect that I think has had a harmful effect, but the adoption one I do not feel competent to speak on. Q409 Baroness Walmsley: Can I ask a follow-up on that? I was particularly interested when you mentioned earlier on in your evidence the cumulative harm issue. It must be very difficult to gather evidence and present it to a court in a way that the court would see that something

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Professor Eileen Munro CBE—Oral evidence (QQ 383–411) needs to be done. In those situations, are they not the families where family support, teaching parenting, providing models of parenting and all that kind of thing are very relevant? Professor Munro: Yes. Baroness Walmsley: What do you think we should be doing more of? Do you think there is anywhere near enough of that kind of work going on in order to prevent that cumulative harm in order to enable that family to stay together and it being in the best interests of their children? Professor Munro: Yes, I agree you need to offer the service, but I was thinking that there are a number of them where, because the social worker is afraid of losing contact as they feel they have no authority to be there, they then do not actually talk about the bad parenting. They get focused on the strengths and building up the strengths without also trying to address the dangers. You hear social workers saying, “I do not like to be judgmental”, which strikes me as absolutely bizarre. Baroness Walmsley: They have to be. Professor Munro: When they feel they do not have the back-up, they are afraid of being an authority figure who challenges. A more experienced worker knows they have that authority, but I think the youngsters do not, so they try to be too friendly, which means you do not actually talk about what is wrong. Q410 The Chairman: Could I just pick up on that? There are two areas of abuse that it has always seemed to me the social workers find very difficult to provide the evidence on for the judges. One is neglect, and so you end up with cases where the neglect is absolutely appalling before they take any steps. The second, of course, is emotional abuse; that is very difficult to prove, but this is part of your cumulative harm, is it not? Professor Munro: Yes, it is, yes. The Chairman: Should there be more training of social workers on those terribly important areas of abuse? We all know about sexual abuse and we all know about non-accidental injury, but these others are terribly important. Professor Munro: Yes, and this is where I would like people to use some standardised forms in terms of rating scales. There are some measurement scales that are fairly well validated that can help a social worker to identify and measure what is going on. I have done case reviews where with a neglect family you have seen the children coming in and out of care over the years and I could not tell from the records whether anything had actually changed in the family setting or whether it was just that the professional had changed and so the judgment had changed. People are recording in a way that does not give you the solid evidence. Q411 Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top: Let me just very quickly say that I wish to goodness that a lot of the recent work that has been done, particularly by neurologists, about the development of the brain had been around when I had been training because it gives you much clearer evidence about the effect of neglect in all sorts of ways. Do you think that social workers are catching up with that?

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Professor Eileen Munro CBE—Oral evidence (QQ 383–411) Professor Munro: I am actually writing an article with a neuroscientist on that work at the moment because I am worried about its over-interpretation. Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top: Yes, I agree with that. Professor Munro: In the study that a lot of people cite there were two groups. There were people who had had the most extreme neglect, like children in Romanian orphanages who had had little human contact, really, and then the chaotic neglect, which is what we see. Of those, only two of the 19 actually showed any damage on brain scan. I think people are turning to that because natural sciences have this great status and social sciences do not, but actually the social science evidence on the psychological and social damage is very strong. It is good enough; we do not need the neuroscience to back it up. Neuroscience is parasitic on that. They only know that this damage means that the child cannot relate well because of the social science knowledge. It is like denigrating social work because it is a bit fluffy and skill-based. I think we already have that evidence. Yes, putting neuroscience on to a form for the judge does improve the chances that the judge takes it seriously—that has actually been tested in America. Give the same information with neuroscience backing and with a social science explanation, and judges fall for the neuroscience. The Chairman: Does anybody else want to ask any question of Professor Munro? Well, thank you very much indeed. We are truly grateful to you for your most helpful evidence. Thank you.

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Nagalro—Written evidence

Nagalro—Written evidence Nagalro is the professional association for Family Court Advisers, Children’s Guardians and Independent Social Workers. It has approximately 700 full members in England and Wales who represent the interests of children in a range of public and private law proceedings. About half work for the Children and Family Courts Advisory and Support Service (Cafcass). Many also act as Independent Social Workers providing expert witness reports in a wide range of complex cases coming before the courts. They also undertake work in a variety of roles for example with fostering agencies and in independent therapeutic practice. Members have significant experience as managers, chairs of Adoption Panels and other specialist roles as well as practitioners and therapists. Summary 

It is permanence that provides the ‘gold standard’ of security, continuity and a sense of belonging for children in the care system.



Adoption is one among several options for permanence that can all provide a stable upbringing for children. It is most suitable for younger children. Over-emphasis on adoption risks directing resources away from the whole range of looked after children including those for whom other permanence options are preferable. Ofsted reports an overall increase in permanence orders even though adoption orders have reduced.



Cases are increasing in complexity due to factors such as changing family structures, cultural and ethnic diversity, the impact of poverty, substance abuse and other parental problems such as mental health issues, neglect and disability. Growing understanding of how neglect and abuse damage children’s early development is one driver for the increase in applications for care orders.



High-quality, timely assessment of children and parents in parallel with extended family and friends, and non-related carers is required to provide sound enough evidence for courts when making irrevocable life-changing decisions for vulnerable children.



Social work assessment must be front-loaded. For robust, accurate decisions about children at risk of abuse and neglect to be made in a timely way the most skilled, specialist-trained social workers need to be involved early in the process. Local authority performance continues to be extremely variable, under pressure from budget stringency and a workforce limited in experience and training.



Delay is caused in a significant proportion of cases by poorly focused work with families and lack of clarity, experience and confidence in social workers about thresholds and evidence for court. When courts cannot rely on the quality or impartiality of assessments they must commission alternatives.



The Independent Reviewing Officer (IRO) service cannot provide an effective protective mechanism to vulnerable children as it is structurally flawed and not independent of local authorities. It should be relocated into its own ‘purpose-built’ agency outside LAs.

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Nagalro—Written evidence 

Once cases reach court children can lack robust independent safeguarding of their interests due to reduction of standards of experience, time and skills in Cafcass.



Children lack access to independent representation post-care proceedings. Their views and wishes must be heard in decision-making about their lives. Placement orders should be revoked if children have not been placed for permanence within twelve months.



Provision of good quality practical and therapeutic support, including financial support, is essential to enable carers to meet the often challenging needs of children who have experienced abuse and neglect. All types of permanent placement need access to such services because the children will have similar needs on a ‘level playing field’ basis, regardless of which order secures the placement. There should be a duty on local authorities to provide support services in addition to assessment.

Summary of legislative changes proposed in this response  There should be a new legal requirement for the child’s case to be returned to court if the placement order is made but the child is not then placed within twelve months of the order being made. This would help to avoid delay and address the problems of ‘statutory orphans’ identified in the case in which two brothers remained under the freeing orders for 11 years suffering abuse in foster care and multiple placement change but no permanent placement was achieved. ([2012] EWHC 1689 (Fam), Re A &S and Lancs.CC]. 

Greater independent representation for children during adoption proceedings.



There should be a duty on local authorities to meet assessed support needs for children in permanent placement.



Implement s.11 of the Children and Young Person Act 2008 that provides for the IRO service to be removed from local authorities and established with an independent provider.



An amendment to s.119 to ensure the independence of advocacy services would increase safeguards by enabling children and young people to trust the system and to initiate help themselves.



Parents to require leave of the court before being able to make a contact order in special guardianship.



A review of the regulations relating to adoption support agencies provided by small providers comprising fewer than six practitioners with a view to making them more appropriate and reducing the bureaucratic element.

Background a. Do we have the right structure for adoption? 1. When a child comes in to public care the current approach embodied in law remains a sound one: a return to parents should be considered first, followed by care with extended family members or

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Nagalro—Written evidence friends, and then care by non-related carers, adoptive or foster parents. Research and practice provide evidence about the comparative outcomes, costs and benefits of these options for children taking into account a range of factors such as age and background history151. 2. It is permanence that provides the ‘gold standard’ of security, continuity and a sense of belonging for children who have to go through the loss, disadvantage, damage and distress that children in the looked after system experience. Whatever the avenue used to provide permanence or the legal order which secures the placement, those caring for the child should have a similar level of entitlement to support services, including finance. They will require support as the children often need a higher level of care because of their early experiences of abuse and neglect. The order alone should not determine the level of support. 3. Adoption needs to be seen in context as just one of the options for permanent care. It must be carefully considered for each child whose needs may be best met through adoption. An overemphasis on adoption can direct attention and resources away from the very varied needs of the whole range of children looked after by local authorities. Adoption is not a realistic option for many children for reasons such as their age, other needs, their wishes or sense of family identity. The other permanence options - kinship care, long-term fostering, and less frequently residential care also successfully provide loving, stable care for very many children. The children in these placements need access to skilled support and proper financial provision just as much as children who are adopted. 4. The Children Act 1989 remains a sound piece of legislation, whose careful drafting has meant it has stood the test of time. Adoption comes as a second stage in the legal proceedings, after the initial decision that a child cannot be cared for within their own family. The two-stage legal process is appropriate for such a fundamental decision, affecting a child’s core identity as well as the human rights of child and their family members. Recent government focus on adoption reflects concern about the delay in children achieving their permanent adoptive placement. There is always likely to be some tension between the desire to achieve speedy security for children and ensuring the decision is a fair one that is soundly based. 5. One of our overriding and unifying concerns is that legislative safeguards put in place to protect children and their interests should be sufficiently robust to be fit for purpose. In order to do this the whole system must dovetail together to form a coherent working whole which is informed by, and compliant with, the principles laid down for the welfare and rights of children by international convention and domestic legislation.

b. Should we be concerned about the falling number of adoptions? Why are the numbers falling? 6. The reduction in numbers of adoption orders comes at the time that special guardianship orders provide a new avenue to permanence and one that has been very successful. Nagalro members told us they see this as a reason for a decline in use of adoption orders but not necessarily a decline in permanence for children, a view that receives support in Ofsted’s recent report “Right on time: exploring delays in adoption”152 E.g. Characteristics, outcomes and meanings of three types of permanent placement – adoption by strangers, adoption by carers and long-term foster care, Nina Biehal, Sarah Ellison, Claire Baker and Ian Sinclair, Research Brief DCSF-RBX-09-11 (2009) 152 Right on time: exploring delays in adoption paras 5-6, p9, Ofsted 2012 151

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Nagalro—Written evidence

“The number of children placed for adoption fell to 2,450, a decline of 10% since 2007… The decrease in adoption figures has coincided, however, with an overall increase in the use of all permanence orders, including special guardianship orders and residence orders. DfE statistics reveal a 27% increase over the last five years, including a 9% increase since 2010. There was a 35% increase from 2010 in the number of looked after children who became subject to special guardianship orders…” 7. Nagalro would caution against an over-simplistic view of what can be complex situations. Children need timely plans made for their future, based on good evidence and sound professional judgment. Inadequate professional scrutiny from social workers, children’s guardians and judges or over-hasty decisions will risk miscarriages of justice and undermine confidence in the system. Adoption can be favoured as a less expensive option by those holding the purse strings. Skimping on resources for quality assessment and support to placements will fail children and increase placement breakdowns, leaving children to bear the true cost of economies.

Legislation 8. The Adoption and Children Act 2002 has been mixed in its effectiveness. It has provided a broadly sound framework for adoption. Benefits include:  adding domestic abuse to the welfare checklist  providing an adoption-focused checklist for adoption proceedings  requiring local authority (LA) provision of a range of adoption support services  setting out responsibility between local authorities for provision of financial and support services over the long term  the duty on local authorities to assess for adoption support services. 9. Less successful aspects:  Placement orders, which are often perfunctory add-ons to care order hearings. Children’s support needs often receive less scrutiny then they deserve at this stage.  Lack of independent representation for children once the placement order is made, which is often early in the adoption process, at the care order stage. This means a lack of independent scrutiny of the adoption support plans and no independent check at the adoption hearing.  That provision of adoption support services is not a duty on LAs, nor is provision of support services to special guardians.  The regulatory framework for adoption support agencies has been drawn up in a way that has disadvantaged many smaller providers of therapeutic support. The excessively bureaucratic approach has led to a loss of skills and expertise available to adoptive children and families.  Parents can make repeated applications for contact after a special guardianship order is made and the special guardians have to fund their own legal advice.

 S118 Adoption and Children Act 2002 introduced the IRO service as a safeguard for children looked after by local authorities. In the event of breaches of children rights the 2002 Act enabled IRO’s to refer cases directly to Cafcass legal which has only been used nationally 8 times between 2007-11. Cafcass legal could bring an action on behalf of the child under the Human Right 1998. To date there have been no such applications and there is considerable evidence to demonstrate that the capacity of the IRO service to identify drift and act as an effective independent safeguard in the system is being

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Nagalro—Written evidence effectively and consistently undermined by the potential conflict of interest between the local authority and the interests of individual children in its corporate care.  Similarly, although s119 Adoption and Children 2002 established the right of looked after children to an advocacy service it did not stipulate that that service should be independent of the care authority. There is evidence to demonstrate that children do not trust in-house services. 10. Nagalro would like to see the following changes:

 There should be a new legal requirement for the child’s cases to be returned to court if the placement order is made but the child is not then placed within twelve months of the order being made. This would help to avoid delay and address the problems of ‘statutory orphans’ identified in the case in which two brothers’ contact with their family was severed but no permanent placement was achieved. They remained under the freeing orders for 11 years suffering abuse in foster care and multiple placement change. The judge HHJ Jackson found that both the local authority and the IRO had failed the boys. ([2012] EWHC 1689 (Fam), Re A &S and Lancs.CC].    

 

Greater independent representation for children during adoption proceedings. There should be a duty on local authorities to meet assessed support needs for children in permanent placement. A review of the regulations relating to adoption support agencies provided by small providers comprising fewer than six practitioners with a view to make them more appropriate and reduce the bureaucratic element. Implement s.11 of the Children and Young Person Act 2008 that provides for the IRO service to be removed from local authorities and established with an independent provider. The model for Children’s Representation Units established alongside each care centre proposed by Nagalro and the Interdisciplinary Alliance for Children to the Family Justice Review offers one possible structure.153 An amendment to s.119 to ensure the independence of advocacy services would increase safeguards by enabling children and young people to trust the system to initiate help themselves. Parents to require leave of the court before being able to make a contact order in special guardianship.

11. Overall, however, we think it is better practice rather than more legislation that is likely to improve the situation for children. Piecemeal legislative change too often brings unintended consequences that confound the good intentions. Reducing court scrutiny is problematic for children, especially those where adoption being considered who are among the most vulnerable, because they lose statutory independent safeguarding mechanisms that provide the means to challenge inappropriate decisions. 12. The best legislative framework may be ineffective if there are not sufficient human and other resources to implement the provisions effectively. Both local authority social service departments and Cafcass continue to be under enormous and unremitting pressure and this has an inevitable impact on the quality of the decision-making and the service received by individual children.

153

Attached as appendix: IAC Child Representation Units diagram (final) 17 Dec 2010

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Nagalro—Written evidence

Time taken in placing children a. Is excessive time taken in placing children? Do some groups of children take a disproportionate length of time? 13. Delays can occur at any stage in the adoption process. The causes of delay are complex and a ‘blame game’ is played with local authorities blaming the courts and vice versa for delay. There are also considerable variations between local authorities in all aspects of their practice. Clearly the children with more complex needs take longer to place. These tend to be children with special needs such as those due to disability, emotional and behavioural difficulties, those with foetal alcohol or parental drug use-related conditions, sibling groups and children with minority ethnic heritage. 14. In Nagalro’s view the search for process-driven solutions is inevitably flawed. Professional expertise and effective independent judgment are the core essentials together with sufficient resources to provide them early on and at key times. Thorough, skilled and well-informed assessments of all the options for permanence for each child come too late into the system. If this work was undertaken at the start of cases by social workers with experience and appropriate specialised training it would provide a more secure foundation to the subsequent decision-making of the local authority and could be presented to courts with confidence. b.

What aspects of the adoption process, including pre-process care proceedings, take most time?

15. The experience of Nagalro members is that too often there is considerable delay for children before a decision is taking to initiate proceedings. In Ofsted’s inspection in nine authorities154 they found significant delay in 26% of cases. Causes include inexperienced social work staff who lack the specialised training and skills to assess complex cases and make accurate judgments about the possibility of parental change, workload pressures and budget cuts which lead to a reactive, ‘firefighting’ culture in hard-pressed local authority teams, uncertainty about thresholds, and lack of confidence about what constitutes evidence. ‘Start again syndrome’, identified by Brandon et al in their review of serious case reviews155, comes from social work lacking confidence and purpose combined with frequent changes in personnel and allows children to remain in neglecting and abusive families for lengthy periods. There will also be parents who would be more able to make changes within the timescale of their children if skilled parental support and therapeutic resources were available locally and in a timely way.

c. Do the various parts of the system – local authorities, adoption agencies, courts and others – work effectively together? 16. Nagalro members report situations where local authorities inappropriately seek to avoid legal proceedings, possibly to reduce costs. This can be by use of sec 20 accommodation or by encouraging relatives to seek private law orders. Both these options can be valid responses to children’s needs in the right situation. Nagalro’s concerns come from the cases where children drift for lengthy periods in s. 20 care without proactive or purposeful assessment and planning for their future. Children lack the independent safeguarding of their interests that court proceedings Right on time: exploring delays in adoption paras 18, p12, Ofsted 2012 DCSF (2008) Brandon M et al Analysing child deaths and serious injury through abuse and neglect: what can we learn? A biennial analysis of serious case reviews 2003-2005 154 155

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Nagalro—Written evidence offer through the Children’s Guardian and the court’s scrutiny. The Independent Reviewing Service has not acted as an effective protection for children in these cases and too often fails to provide robust challenge to poor local authority practice as the recent judgment in [2012] EWHC 1689 (Fam) Re A and S156 illustrates. 17. Some relatives who express interest in caring for children where there are safeguarding concerns report being put under pressure to seek a residence order when care proceedings would be more appropriate. Children will not necessarily have their voices heard in such proceedings, and they lack their own solicitor and guardian who together will safeguard their legal and welfare interests in care proceedings. Public law proceedings enable thorough assessments of the ability of relatives to protect children and to manage contact with parents safely. 18. The longer that children are left in situations of emotional abuse, serious neglect and domestic violence the greater the damage to their emotional and physical wellbeing. Recent research157 has shown that early neglect and abuse can permanently affect children’s brains and all aspects of their subsequent development. The task of looking after these children will be much more complex and challenging for those who take on their care.

d. Could the adoption process be speeded up, whilst ensuring that necessary safeguards are preserved? 19. Once care proceedings start the court needs adequate evidence and assessments on which to base their decision. If rigorous, analytic and patently trustworthy local authority assessments were consistently available to the courts at the start of cases court timescales would be significantly reduced. Since 2003 and particularly with the Public Law Outline of 2008, protocols have been in place identifying local authority assessments that should be undertaken prior to proceedings. This has so far not been achieved. One major reason is the lack of social work expertise early on in the process of work with families. Too often the initial work is not found to be of sufficient quality and has to be redone. Options for friends and family care have not been adequately, if at all, assessed. Sometimes local authority staff get stuck in entrenched conflict with parents and/or the wider family, which can lead to intransigent views and arbitrary decisions. 20. There are those who could provide the level of expertise required. Many of them work as independent social workers (ISWs) some within the family courts; others run their own practices, work as sessional workers for voluntary agencies, or for local authorities. Many Nagalro members are ISWs in the family court sector, although many have recently withdrawn from this work because of the Legal Services Commission’s attitude to social work expertise and savage fee reductions of 30-50%. We have written to ministers158 to alert them to the significant spare capacity in this sector that is not being deployed because of structural barriers. We believe this valuable part of the workforce need to be ‘stitched in’ to the system in order to stem the loss of the most experienced ISWs and redirect their skills to enable courts to meet new targets. 21. Recent research by Dr Julia Brophy and her team at Oxford University159 refutes many of the assumptions made about the work of ISWs. The research found that: http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/Fam/2012/1689.html For example Glaser, D. (2000), Child Abuse and Neglect and the Brain—A Review. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 41: 97–116. 158 See appendix: Letter 2 May 2012 to Tim Loughton and Jonathan Djanogly from Nagalro, BASW and CISWA-UK 159 Brophy, J., Owen, C., Sidaway, J. and Johal, J., (2012) The Contribution of Experts in Care Proceedings: Evaluation of the work of independent social work assessments University of Oxford 156 157

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Nagalro—Written evidence

      

There was no evidence that ISW reports cause delay to court hearings ISWs produce high quality reports to tight deadlines ISWs provide new information to the court There was no evidence of routine duplication with a current local authority core assessment ISWs have ‘added value’: they are independent, highly skilled and experienced (median 24 years in child protection work) They are child focused and successful in engaging parents with a history of non cooperation with local authorities Most instructions were joint, involving parents, the local authority and the child/children’s guardian and ISW appointments rarely result from parents seeking second opinion evidence based on human rights claims.

22. Nagalro, BASW and CISWA-UK wrote to Ministers Tim Loughton and Jonathan Djanogly on 2 May 2012160 to say:

“This shows ISWs have a positive contribution to make towards the government’s modernisation agenda for improving the operation of the family courts. Without them, it is more likely that court timetables will be extended by a lack of evidence, e.g. core assessments, and work from inexperienced staff that has to be redone: wrong decisions for vulnerable children and miscarriages of justice are more likely. Far from causing delay, the use of ISWs in complex cases can play a significant part in assisting courts to reach timely and sound decisions.”

e.

How widely used is concurrent planning? What are its advantages and disadvantages?

23. Concurrent planning is well-established across the country as a principle although its operation in practice can be haphazard so that the intention to undertake concurrent planning is not translated into robust action, allowing delays to occur. 24. Concurrent placement projects or ‘fostering to adopt’ schemes, in which the government has recently expressed interest, are very rare. Such schemes clearly can benefit children because they minimise disruption to their attachments. In suitable cases, where issues of contact can be managed safely, and where potential adopters are able to act in a way more akin to foster carers in supporting the option of rehabilitation and living with some uncertainty about the outcome while remaining emotionally open to the child, fostering to adopt has much to offer. There are considerable training issues for potential adopters, who will have to face more complex issues about what sort of parent they are for a child at different stages of the process, and also for social workers running such schemes. 25. Concurrent placement raises the question of how accurately the permanence plan for a child can be identified at an early stage, because ‘fostering for adoption’ schemes would not be best suited to cases where there is a reasonable possibility that a child will be cared for in a family and friends placement. There will always be a proportion of cases which change outcome in unpredictable ways. It will be an option in only a proportion of cases, and will require

160

See letter attached as appendix

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Nagalro—Written evidence sufficient safeguards and expertise in place to handle properly the legal, practical, and human rights issues as well as the complex family dynamics. f.

What are the reasons for the variations in time taken to place children by different local authorities?

26. Nagalro has consistently drawn attention to the very great disparities between local authority performance in relation to all aspects of their work. Even within one authority there can be considerable variation between teams.

The number of potential adopters 27. There are not enough adopters available and new and imaginative ways are needed to recruit the right kind of people who can provide what children waiting for adoption need. For example adopted adults tell us how important sibling relationships and their loss are for them. Specialist agencies have had success in recruiting families able to take on sibling groups. 28. We are concerned that too much stress may be laid on the issue of transracial placements. Feedback from adopted people helped social workers to realise that sensitivity to issues of ethnicity, colour and culture is a crucial attribute to be assessed when considering potential adopters. With each placement a balanced view needs to be taken of what is the best that can be achieved in finding a placement that will meet as much as possible of a child’s needs within a reasonable timescale for the child. 29. It is right that some people considering adoption will drop out during the assessment process because the process has helped them to realise that adoption is not right for them, or to be counselled out. Some may realise that “love is not enough” on its own and that adopted children often bring challenges requiring a therapeutic approach, high level parenting skills and considerable determination and persistence without apparent reward over a long time. 30. Adoption agencies have pioneered new ways of working while retaining very skilled practitioners in frontline practice. The fact there are a number of smaller agencies may well contribute to the retention of a skilled workforce in this field. Smaller units are better able to provide a more flexible, personal and responsive service, which many people prefer. A range of different agencies provides choice for potential adopters and the chance for some specialisation between agencies. We would be cautious about moving too far towards centralisation or uniformity as there is much to be lost, as is apparent from the difficulties with Cafcass. Some functions may be provideable on a national basis, as with the adoption register, and a clearing house for prospective adopters may assist. 31. Greater knowledge about early development may be contributing to the increase in care applications as social workers better understand the harm children suffer from exposure to neglect and emotional abuse. This knowledge needs to inform practice and influence the timing and purposefulness of social work and legal interventions with parents. It may be making potential adopters more cautious about coming forward as more becomes known about the challenges of caring for children damaged pre-birth by substances as well as afterwards by neglect and abuse. It becomes all the more important that society invests in preventive work, to educate parents and others about harmful behaviour and increase parenting support programmes as well as specialist interventions like Parent-Infant Psychotherapy and the Family Nurse partnerships.

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Nagalro—Written evidence Court proceedings 32. Often court proceedings do take undue time in the adoption process but there are many causes of delay and there is no single solution to the problem. A core problem is the poor quality or lack of availability of an adequate core assessment to inform care planning and court decision-making. This in turn may be the result of poorly supported workers lack of training, experience and expertise or sheer pressure of work. It is not possible to legislate for experience or ensure that the services and resources are in place to support the assessment of the child’s needs. 33. The welcome recommendations for improvements in social work training made by the Munro review of child protection will take a decade to have any perceptible impact. Moreover, the evidence on outcomes for looked after children do not support the proposition that external scrutiny of local authority decision-making is superfluous. 34. We are extremely concerned about the FJR recommendation aimed at reducing the level of court scrutiny of local authority decision-making. We say this because we fear that it will constitute a significant weakening of the safeguards available to children in proceedings. 35. Following from the above there would be a concomitant reduction in the involvement of the children’s guardian in court proceedings. This means that another core safeguard for children will be substantially weakened. 36. The provisions for the representation of children by children’s guardians are legislatively sound but as the Chief Executive of Cafcass said in his oral evidence on 17 July, although cases may be allocated, the time that guardians can spend on each case is limited and the quality of the Cafcass case analysis needs to be improved. The Cafcass Operating Framework introduced on 1 April 2012 legitimises a restricted model of proportionate working which is at odds with the legislative framework and which makes it clear that this is now a different and much more limited service.161 37. The quality of the Cafcass analysis is likely to become an increasingly significant issue given the drive to reduce the number of experts in proceedings.

Post-adoption support a. How, if at all, has the 2002 Act impacted upon the provision of post-adoption contacts and support? 38. The 2002 Act has led to greater awareness of and a framework for post-adoption support, although its provision is patchy and limited. It is hard for adopters to find appropriate support services in many parts of the country because specialist services are still scarce and inadequately resourced. 39. Centres such as the Post Adoption Centre and Family Futures have done much to raise awareness of specialist training and to make it accessible to practitioners whether employed by local authorities, voluntary agencies or independent practitioners. The unnecessarily bureaucratic process for registration for smaller adoption support agencies has discouraged many trained and skilled practitioners from continuing to offer adoption-related services.

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O guardian, where art thou? Martha Cover, article in Seen & Heard, Vol 22 Issue 2 – sent with response

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Nagalro—Written evidence b. Are measures needed to enhance post-adoption financial and other support for (i) adopted children; (ii) adoptive parents, (iii) birth families? 40. A major drawback is that local authorities are only under a duty to assess for support services, and Nagalro would recommend that there should be a duty to provide such services. Funding of services is a major limitation to availability. 41. The framework for registration should be reviewed with the aim of facilitating a wider network of well-trained individuals and good quality smaller therapeutic agencies with a sound understanding who can provide skilled help for adoptive families, adopted children and birth families.

Inter-country adoption 42. We think the three-tier system is clear. It is good that countries that had poor practice, such as Guatemala are no longer providing children to be adopted in this country. 43. The legal process is quite straightforward at the moment. There need to be enquires to safeguard the interest of the child. 44. In Russia it is illegal for contact to be made with the birth parents after an order is made. An adopted adult may have the expectations that their position will be similar to that of an adult adopted through the English system and experience frustration in adulthood. Adopters will need to explain this as they provide information in an age appropriate form as the child matures. Children coming from war torn regions where there may be histories of genocide may need help to develop a positive self-image and not to internalise a sense of being rescued.

Access to Information 45. The Act has enabled a cultural change in that it is now viewed as quite normal to seek to “put the jigsaw together” and go on to seek to meet birth relatives. Birth mothers now have the right to request a service. However, Facebook, social media and other means of internet communication are now presenting challenges to parents of adopted children and can mean adults proceed without the benefit of post-adoption advice.

Other permanent placements a. What has been the effect of the introduction, in the 2002 Act, of ‘special guardianship’? 46. Special guardianship has provided a very useful avenue to permanence for children within the extended family or with foster carers. In so doing it can meet children’s needs in relation to both attachment and identity, as it can provide ongoing relationships with birth parents within a secure family. This is why it has been a successful option, with the explicit guidance that special guardians are “in the driving seat” for all important day to day decisions about a child’s education, schooling and so on, with the few exceptions clearly identified.

b. Is special guardianship an effective alternative to adoption, especially for those of school age (ie 5 and older)? 47. Special guardianship does provide an effective alternative to adoption for children who retain a sense of family loyalty and could not therefore contemplate the severance that being adopted

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Nagalro—Written evidence would involve. The weakness of special guardianship is in relation to contact, as it can leave special guardians open to challenges from parents via repeated court applications where they are liable for legal costs. 48. There are anecdotal accounts of a few situations where dysfunctional parents have been allowed to resume close relationships with children either because of collusion by special guardians or where parents have exerted inappropriate influence over special guardians. 49. A more frequently voiced concern is that local authorities apply pressure to long-term foster carers to apply to become special guardians for children in permanent placement. Such pressures often do not appear to be child-centred but are an attempt to limit LA expenditure on fostering allowances and responsibility for monitoring and supporting the placement.

c.

What is the best way to ensure permanent and consistent placements for children?

50. Having the right kind of support available is key to ensuring placement stability, especially where children have challenging needs. Research shows that financial support and ready access to help with contact and managing children’s complex emotional and behavioural needs are the major pressure points for long-term placements, both kinship and unrelated foster and adoptive placements. Special guardianship families need just as much skilled help and practical, financial support in place. We agree with much in the Family Rights Group submission in this area: the children’s needs are similar and their carers should receive an equivalent level of support regardless of the type of order securing the placement. Good preparation and assessment of adopters, foster and kinship carers and availability of ongoing support from well-trained social workers is vital. d. Would earlier interventions in cases of children with difficulties have an effect on the number of children who need to be adopted or otherwise permanently separated from their birth family? 51. Each child and each case needs to be considered on its own unique circumstances. Practice needs to be based on evidence and learning from research about what works. Early intervention and access to skilled family support should be available to parents to enable more children to stay in their birth family but on a time-limited basis so that consideration of permanence outside the birth family takes place before children suffer significant damage. Those undertaking direct work with families tend to be less well-qualified staff even though the task is particularly complex.

Monitoring a. Do ‘adoption scorecards’ provide an appropriate means for monitoring the performance of local authorities with regard to adoption? 52. The question is not whether or not enough children are being adopted but whether or not the right children are being adopted within a timeframe which meets their needs. For this reason we would be against the introduction of ‘adoption scorecards’ which could skew the focus away from the needs of each particular child in order to meet the targets imposed by an overarching management objective. This also runs counter to the whole thrust of the Munro report. 53. Scorecards risk being a blunt instrument that leads to a ‘one size fits all’ culture and a disregard of significant differences between areas. A system could be instigated as in the case of local authority audits where a ‘family’ of authorities could learn from one another about good practice.

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Nagalro—Written evidence

b.

How robust are current systems for monitoring the i) number of adoptions made, ii) the number of children awaiting adoption, and iii) the amount of delay experienced by those awaiting adoption?

54. Statistics in this area of practice are notoriously complex and open to manipulation by those with an ideological axe to grind. The system needs to provide information about how long children wait at all stages of their journey through care to permanent placement. How delay is assessed and measured will affect the results. 55. Information about placement breakdowns also needs to be collated and to take account of the wide range of ways in which this may happen. Children may go to live informally with other families, they may make their own way back to their birth family, they come back into care – which should be readily captured although this does not appear to happen at present, they may go to live in 52 week a year education-funded placements such as boarding schools for those with emotional and behavioural difficulties, or in mental health facilities or in youth offending accommodation.

24 July 2012

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Martin Narey, Government Advisor on Adoption—Written evidence

Martin Narey, Government Advisor on Adoption—Written evidence TAKING CHILDREN INTO CARE The recent fall in the number of adoptions in England is best understood in the context of the policy and practice around taking neglected and abused children into care. Despite a recent rise in numbers we take many fewer children into care now than a few decades ago. Additionally, that intervention, when it comes, often comes too late. That unwillingness to intervene in family life provides the backdrop against which adoption has begun to slip out of fashion. A brief history of the numbers in care After the Second World War the number of children in care fell steadily, dropping to a little over 50,000 in the mid fifties and stayed at a relatively low figure into the sixties. But, in the seventies, the numbers began to climb steadily as the reality of child neglect and abuse began to take hold in the UK. By 1981 there were 92,000 children in care in England, an increase of almost 50% or 30,000 children on the figure just twenty-five years previously. Of this 92,000, almost two thirds, about 58,000, lived in residential homes. So there were almost as many children in children’s homes in 1981 as there are in all forms of care now (that needs to be remembered when it is argued that the current care population is too large). Inevitably, the costs of almost 60,000 children in residential care were seen as unsustainable and in any case, a number of high-profile abuse scandals brought the residential sector into disrepute. The large institutions began to close as the voluntary sector rapidly abandoned its orphanages. When I arrived at Barnardo’s in 2005 I observed a culture which saw care as something to be avoided. Within the Department for Children, Schools and Families, those local authorities which had relatively low care populations were lauded. Care was seen as something to be avoided. Reservations About Care In my report on adoption, published by The Times in 20111, I identified three reservations about care which I believed had contributed to this large fall in the population of looked after children:  

interpretations of attachment theory that encourage a view that, at almost any cost, the relationship between birth mother and child must be maintained; a belief on the part of some practitioners and academics that in deciding whether a child should be taken into care, there is a need to balance the interests of the child with those of its parents; and

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Martin Narey, Government Advisor on Adoption—Written evidence 

strongly held views about the negative consequences of a decision to take a child into care: best summarised as a belief that however bad things are at home, local authority care makes things worse.

I believe all three reservations are misconceived. But their cumulative effect in delaying early intervention in a neglected child’s life in the UK means that when it does take place it may be too late to achieve the stability a child needs. This is illustrated most strikingly by the reality of the long-term outcomes for children taken into care at different ages. Very few children who first enter care under two are still in care at sixteen. They have either returned home or become adopted. But children older than two when first entering care are more likely to be in care at sixteen and those entering care after the age of five are commonly still looked after when they are aged ten to fifteen. Late entry into care has an devastating effect on the prospects of adoption: fewer than half of one percent of children first taken into care after their fifth birthday later become adopted. Over optimism about the capacity of families to become safe and stable There is some recent evidence of a change in approach. But generally, the current system remains gripped by an unrealistic optimism about the capacity of deeply inadequate parents to change. Making the birth family successful should be our first option, and I am not arguing that mothers should not be given a second or even a third chance, just not a fourth, fifth and sixth. But an unjustified optimism in the capacity of deeply inadequate and sometimes uncaring parents to change, condemns children to a childhood of neglect and sometimes abuse and damages their chances of leading a successful life in adulthood. We should help parents to change and when that is successful that is a great achievement. But we have to tackle the naïve optimism that paralyses the system. And we have to stop letting children down by returning them to parents only for them to be neglected once again. Professor Elaine Farmer has followed the fortunes of 138 children who had been taken into care and then returned to their parents. She discovered that: 

[There was] a tendency over time for abuse and neglect to be minimised so that referrals about harm to children [did] not lead to sufficient action to protect them.



Plans made during care proceedings did not work out in three fifths of cases, often when children were returned to parents because of an over-optimistic view of the possibility of parental change by guardians and expert assessors, in the face of long histories suggesting the contrary.

And, most troublingly, she found that two years after those children had been returned to their parents three in every five (59%) had been abused or neglected once again.

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Martin Narey, Government Advisor on Adoption—Written evidence Professional antipathy to adoption The fall in the care population does not, on its own, explain the fall in the number of adoptions. In addition to a reluctance to intervene in family life I have observed an additional antipathy toward adoption. In the eyes of many practitioners and academics, it is seen as appropriate in only the most exceptional circumstances. As one practitioner put it to me, adoption is now viewed as a failure, a failure to make the birth mother’s parenting a success. And there is sometimes a marked unwillingness to view the adoptive parents as the parents. One local authority says this on its website: It is an important part of an adoptive parent's role… to help a child or young person deal with their feelings about being part of two families and it is essential that efforts are made to keep a child's birth family "alive" for that child. This view of the adoptive child as having two families, the adoptive and the real family, even when adopted as a baby or tiny child, is not uncommon but must offend and hurt those who raise adoptive children unequivocally as their own as well as sometimes confusing and distressing the child. It certainly acts as a disincentive to those contemplating adoption particularly when it leads to an expectation of continuing contact between child and birth family even when the adoption has been finalized for many years. The recent history of adoption numbers Although when compared to numbers in the seventies, adoptions are now relatively few in number there has been a measurable recovery since 1999 when Tony Blair made increasing adoptions a personal priority. In 1999, there were about 2,200 adoptions from care and this number rose steadily, reaching about 3,500 by 2002. But as the sense of this being a Prime Ministerial priority began to waver, so too did the rise in numbers. Very modest growth continued until 2004 and then began to flat line and from 2006 numbers began to fall, dropping by about ten percent in two years. A modest recovery in 2008 was not maintained and the 2011 figure was just over 3,000. I greatly admire the leadership which Tony Blair brought to adoption and the statistics show that he achieved a significant recovery. But as he and Number 10 moved onto other priorities, the numbers have begun to slip back. My advice to Number 10 and Department For Education Ministers is that in this latest push on adoption we have to do things which will lead to a sustained recovery in numbers. I think that change is underway and is reflected in an increase in the number of children obtaining placement orders. But reform of the system is needed to translate additional placement orders into additional adoptions. I think the Government will achieve that. The current reform programme includes: 

the launch in a few months of a new adopter assessment process including fast track arrangements for past adopters. This was and remains my absolute priority as the gap

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Martin Narey, Government Advisor on Adoption—Written evidence between numbers of children cleared for adoption and the number of approved adopters has widened; 

local authority adoptions scorecards which, despite a negative response at the time of publication from the Local Government Association (LGA) and the Association of Directors of Children’s Services (ADCS) are beginning to have an impact already;



a commitment to a radical reform of the law and statutory guidance about ethnic, cultural, religious and linguistic factors when matching a child with prospective adopters;



an obligation on local authorities routinely to consider placing children with adopters in advance of the placement order.



a lot of progress on post adoption support which is working toward a clarification of local authority obligations to provide assessments and respond to such assessments and examining other barriers to high quality and effective support for adopters. The concept of an adoption (support) passport is being considered.



The creation of a new Adoption Gateway which will provide would be adopters with all the information they need to consider adoption and then help in finding the adoption agency which is right for them.

Additionally, the government are exploring the reform of adopter leave and adopter allowances to match maternity leave arrangements (the effect of which should not be underestimated), and are considering advice from me on child and birth family contact, both before and after adoption, the challenge of achieving adoption for sibling groups, and market reforms of the adoption process (to give a bigger role to voluntary adoption agencies such as Coram and PACT). Additionally, I am working with voluntary adoption agencies, with ADCS and with DfE in developing proposals for the better marketing of adoption. I owe Ministers one remaining piece of advice about how the matching process between adopters and child can be safely accelerated. I believe these reforms, which involve some changes to primary legislation and greater changes to statutory guidance will lead to a significant and sustained increase in the number of adoptions in England. I shall be disappointed if the annual number does not pass the peak reached after Tony Blair’s reforms at the turn of the century. 18 July 2012

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Martin Narey, Government Advisor on Adoption—Oral evidence (QQ 309–353)

Martin Narey, Government Advisor on Adoption—Oral evidence (QQ 309–353) Evidence Session No. 5.

Heard in Public.

Questions 309–353

TUESDAY 24 JULY 2012 Members present Baroness Butler-Sloss (Chairman) Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top Baroness Eaton Viscount Eccles Baroness Hamwee Baroness Howarth of Breckland Baroness King of Bow Baroness Knight of Collingtree Baroness Morris of Bolton Lord Morris of Handsworth Baroness Walmsley Lord Warner ________________ Examination of Witness Martin Narey, Ministerial Adviser on Adoption.

Q309 The Chairman: Good morning, and thank you very much for coming. We are extremely grateful to you for your splendidly short note of written evidence, which we have all read, and I hope you will know the sort of questions that we are going to be asking you and one or two slightly different ones. I will start by asking—and I think I know the answer—does the current adoption system work effectively? The interesting aspect of it, it seems to me, is whether the number and size of adoption agencies presents a problem. How could the system be streamlined, for instance by a greater use of regionalisation and standardisation of resources, policies and procedures? What do you think is the overall picture on this? Martin Narey: The first answer is the system has not been working well. I see signs of recovery, but I have seen few things in public life quite so dislocated and quite so poorly managed as the adoption system I first started to examine last year. In part, but only in part, 757

Martin Narey, Government Advisor on Adoption—Oral evidence (QQ 309–353) that is possibly due to the fact that we have 152 local authorities and more than 20 voluntary adoption agencies. I do not think that is central to it. I think the main problem with the adoption system is that too many people who have been managing it have not had any sort of measures of how they are doing. I have found since first doing some work for The Times last summer and in my work as adoption adviser I have constantly come across a lack of crucial evidence about what works and how quickly it works. My experience as a manager for 30 years is if you do not have measures of how long things take and what they cost and what effect they have you cannot manage them. Q310 The Chairman: Do you think the problem does not really lie with regionalisation and streamlining? Martin Narey: If I was to start now I would not design the system that we have. When I was doing my research for The Times, and in the early months of my advising Ministers I was asked on a number of occasions whether or not we need to nationalise this and have a national adoption agency that would manage the whole thing. I have not been persuaded of that. I think there are some things in adoption, of which I am sure we will speak later, such as post-adoption support, which need to be delivered locally. Also I think if we were to try to replace local authority functions and go through a huge reorganisation and create a national body then we would not see adoption pick up for many years. I believe we have a crisis with adoption right now, and I do not use that term lightly. We need to make the current system work much more effectively. I have every confidence that it can. I have seen a significant change in attitudes from almost everyone in the system in the last 12 months and a real awakening of awareness that what we are doing now is not good enough. Q311 Baroness Knight of Collingtree: Can I question you about the problem, as we sometimes are told, of the falling number of adoptions? Is that because there are not so many babies for adoption? Why do we not look at the number of outcomes that are not adoption but do give permanency to the child, for instance foster care, special guardianship or residence orders? There are other methods to be used. Could you have a word about that, please? Martin Narey: Certainly, Lady Knight. I think the answer is we should look at all of those things, but I make no apology for saying that I think adoption offers something unique in terms of outcomes. It is more successful than the others. It is the only thing that lasts for ever. Fostering finishes at 16 or 18, special guardianship finishes at 16, and a residence order at 16. My guess is that many Members of the Committee are like me and have children that are much older than that. I have children in their late 20s, and they are still my kids. I still get phone calls that start with the words, “Oh, Dad”, when you are still supporting them emotionally and financially. Adoption does that. It is unique. I am not suggesting adoption should be measured on things like educational outcomes but certainly in terms of breakdown it is more successful than anything else. Adoptions are disrupted much less than long-term fostering. We do not know about special guardianship yet. In terms of children growing up into rounded, satisfied, reasonable adults, adoption is very successful also. I think it is unique. Sometimes it is very hard to suggest that there is not much difference between adoption and long-term fostering, but there is.

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Martin Narey, Government Advisor on Adoption—Oral evidence (QQ 309–353) Q312 Baroness Knight of Collingtree: No, I am not suggesting there is no difference, but you are saying that the far preferable system would be straight adoption? Martin Narey: I think adoption is only ever likely to be appropriate for a minority of children in care. There are 66,000 children in care; I think there could be many more than 3,000 adoptions. I do not think it is ever going to be other than a minority activity, but I think it can and needs to recover, not to the sort of figures for adoptions that we had in the 1970s but if I were to put a finger on it I think there is scope for 4,000 or 5,000 adoptions a year. Q313 Baroness Knight of Collingtree: Finally, is the age of the child not very important here, that if it is a young baby it would possibly work better than an older child? What is your view on that? Martin Narey: I think it is absolutely crucial, Lady Knight. If we delay in intervening and taking a child into care, and then because the system that considers what should happen in care can take so long, that can have a very significant impact on the likelihood of adoption and on the success of adoption. There is a very clear and direct correlation in terms of adoption success between the age at which the child is adopted and the likely disruption to that adoption. It is sometimes said that we have no data on this. That is not true. We have incomplete data and I have urged Ministers to commission fresh research and they have done. But there is quite a lot of data, nevertheless, which reveals that, for example, adoption disruption for adoptions that take place after five years of age might be around 20%, for ages between 12 months and five years probably about 10%, and under 12 months about 2% or 3%. So if we can make the system work more swiftly, always based on what is best for the child, then we will have many more successful adoptions. Q314 Lord Warner: Martin, if you look at the Department for Education data on special guardianship in relation to adoption, it looks very much, to some of us, as though when special guardianship was introduced there was a substitution effect vis-à-vis adoption. What, if any, concerns do you have about the current use of special guardianship and is it being applied, in your view, in circumstances where adoption would have been a more suitable and more appropriate thing to pursue? Martin Narey: Lord Warner, I think that special guardianship is a very important initiative and I think there are particularly grandparents who might be special guardians, so we need to do more to make that possible by making it financially possible for them, for example. But I am worried, and I recognise the proposition you are putting there, that there has been a rather surprising shift of children who might have been adopted into children getting special guardianships. Sometimes that will be entirely appropriate, and we know very little about special guardianships yet to know about the disruption, but some frontline practitioners have written to me and expressed their real concern that sometimes we are making a compromise. I cannot put a figure on it but there are certain instances where local authorities have made a very firm recommendation for adoption but the courts have chosen to go for the special guardianship route. So I am worried about the extent to which in some cases—only in some— special guardianship can be a compromise. Q315 Lord Warner: But is there any evidence that in what you would regard as the highperforming adoption authorities they also have a very considerable use of special guardianship? What do we know about the high performers? Are they also using special guardianship as well?

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Martin Narey, Government Advisor on Adoption—Oral evidence (QQ 309–353) Martin Narey: A number of the high-performing authorities are doing that, not all. It is fair to say that I discussed this issue, the so-called hierarchy of care, with directors of children’s services, and I think broadly speaking they disagree with me. They see a parity between special guardianship and adoption. I do not see that parity. That is not to condemn special guardianship, as I have explained, but I think it is important that we make the right decision for the child. As you will know, when special guardianship was introduced it was anticipated that this would fill a gap for older children. Special guardianships have gone overwhelmingly to babies and to young children for whom when it was planned it was not anticipated it would be used for that age group. Q316 The Chairman: Do we know why that is happening? Do we know whether it is based on the local authorities or more based on the judges? Martin Narey: No, I think it is mainly based on local authorities pursuing that new avenue of achieving permanence, and I stress that might sometimes be the right thing. When we decide a family cannot look after their child we should look at kinship care next and only then adoption, but it is important that we do not make a compromise and go for option 2 when option 3 would be the best for the child. Q317 Baroness Howarth of Breckland: You have made it quite clear that you think adoption is the preferred option but at the moment we do not have the evidence. We are waiting for the evidence to come in relation to the inquiry into special guardianship. But you have been around and about in local authorities and you have talked to directors of children’s services, as you have just explained, who disagree with you and they have mammoth experience, so they must have some reason for disagreeing. I just wonder what you see in a special guardianship on the ground, whether or not that is mainly kinship families and whether, therefore, when they reach 16 they are less likely to be cast into the outer darkness that you seem to think that children who are not adopted are likely to be cast into. You must have some feel about the value of special guardianship, how it is being used, or maybe you have an open mind, like I do, waiting for the research? Martin Narey: I do think we have to wait for the research but I do stress I see special guardianship as being entirely appropriate in lots of cases, particularly when grandparents are caring for a child. I think it is incredibly tough on grandparents who may no longer have very much in terms of income suddenly having to find the majority of the cash necessary to raise another child. One of my recommendations to Government last year was that we need to do more to make sure that special guardianship by grandparents and close relatives is not financially impossible. That would save money for local authorities. We do not know enough about special guardianship. In my experience nearly all of the special guardianships have gone to relatives, mainly close relatives. I have some concern about when efforts have been made to find special guardianship arrangements with relatives who are rather more remote. Q318 Baroness Howarth of Breckland: If I could pursue one more point, and that is that you did say that practitioners have said to you that they felt compromised in relation to the choice between special guardianship and adoption. Was that because they thought that an alternative placement, adoption placement, rather than the special guardianship placement was appropriate or whether it was the order that was an inappropriate order?

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Martin Narey, Government Advisor on Adoption—Oral evidence (QQ 309–353) Martin Narey: The concerns that have been expressed to me have been about compromise, about the fact that sometimes a grandparent or an aunt or uncle is willing to offer special guardianship. That still involves reasonably close proximity to the birth parents. Local authorities, who have lots of other things on their plate, look away when a special guardianship goes through so one does not really know the extent to which the parents who it was considered were not good enough parents are effectively parenting the child again. As somebody put it to me, in some circumstances special guardianship can involve giving a child to another part of the same dysfunctional family. I do want to stress that I do not think that is remotely always the case. There are many special guardianships that are likely to be very successful and I support that entirely. The practitioners believe sometimes they are taking risks with essentially returning a child to the wider family when an entirely clean break with adoptive parents might have had a transformative effect on that child’s life. Q319 Lord Morris of Handsworth: Mr Narey, the proposal from the Department for Education for the introduction of a new national gateway as an improvement to the adoption process has generated a lot of debate, not least of which among professionals and practitioners. Do you see the introduction of this proposed new national gateway as an improvement to the adoption process? Martin Narey: I am a supporter of the concept of a gateway. I think if there is one area of the adoption process where the multiplicity of authorities causes difficulties it is in that initial approach from somebody who is thinking for the first time of adoption. The experience of people who come forward for adoption can be fairly random depending on which local authority or adoption agency they approach. Some of the marketing of individual local authorities, in an effort to tell the truth about adoption—and adoption can be challenging—is very negative and puts a lot of people off, so a gateway that might give initial advice on adoption and then direct people to the right agency, whether in a local authority agency or the voluntary sector, could work extremely well. However, my advice to Ministers—and they may not take it and they have not decided—is I think the gateway will only really be worth its salt if it has an ability also to handle complaints. Q320 Lord Morris of Handsworth: Surely what matters here is the outcome rather than the process and nobody has offered any sort of conclusive evidence that the process has failed or needs to be changed vis-à-vis this adoption gateway? Martin Narey: I think I could offer you lots of evidence, Lord Morris, of the process failing at the moment. My e-mail box for a year has been populated by people who have given up entirely on the adoption process at some point between expressing an interest and seeking approval, and have either gone to huge lengths to adopt from abroad or have just given up entirely. Q321 Lord Morris of Handsworth: Do you think the gateway will solve all those problems? Martin Narey: I think it has the capacity to improve but only, I stress, if the gateway can examine some of the decisions of local authorities. I have told Ministers that I think the reform programme is almost complete. When all the things that I put in my note to the Chairman are introduced I think we will have a much better system. That will not necessarily tackle attitudes, and some of the decisions that I see in the adoption world are frankly a little short of bizarre. People who are affected by those decisions, who are turned down for adoption for sometimes,

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Martin Narey, Government Advisor on Adoption—Oral evidence (QQ 309–353) I find, ludicrous reasons, need to be able to go back to the gateway. I have suggested to Ministers that the gateway should have a very simple power to require the director of children’s services personally to review and ensure he or she is satisfied with the decision made by the adoption panel. Q322 Viscount Eccles: I was very struck by your awakening of awareness, which you mentioned earlier on. In your written evidence—I hope I am getting the figures about right— are there about 60,000 children in care at the present time? Martin Narey: About 66,000, Lord Eccles. Q323 Viscount Eccles: Yes, so even if we accept all the pathways to increasing the number of adoptions from 3,000 to say 5,000, nevertheless this Committee has somehow to fill in the background of the total situation of children in care, I suspect, even if the bulk of the report is about adoption. Do you have any advice to give us about how we might set adoption in context? Martin Narey: I am not sure I follow the question, Lord Eccles, sorry. Viscount Eccles: The national problem is not only about whether there should be more adoptions. The national problem is about 66,000 children in care. Maybe I should declare a minor interest: I have a granddaughter who works in a care home. Martin Narey: I do follow the question now. You are right, adoption will be a small part of it but a significantly bigger part than it is now. If we were to increase adoptions to say 4,500 a year that would be many more children with a life in front of them with much better prospects. I think for the remaining children in care we have to be realistic about the nature of the population. Most children in care are aged over 11, and they have links with their birth parents, which it would be wrong to completely take away. Even if they have been living in neglect, they still have traditionally love and affection for their parents. I think we have to do much more work to make fostering more stable. I think fostering can be simply tremendous, but fostering generally involves quite a lot of dislocation in a young person’s life and we have to do something about that. You mentioned residential care. I think there are a number of children in the care system for whom high-quality residential care is the best option. If you were to visit Germany or Scandinavia, you would see much more residential care. They are much more comfortable with it. Educational outcomes for children in residential care in Germany and Scandinavia are very good indeed. We tend to see residential care for children in care as a last resort and we are stubborn about moving children into residential care. Barnardo’s used to do a lot of it. They had already stopped nearly all of it when I took over at Barnardo’s in 2005, but they have a handful of residential places. On my first visit to one in Belfast in 2006 I met an autistic boy who was aged 11. He was doing quite well in this very small, six-bed residential home with super staff. They could manage him because they were shift workers; no one had to cope with this boy 24 hours a day. But the local authority were about to move him to his 13th foster-care placement. The staff said to me with absolute confidence that he would exhaust the foster carers, however good, within six weeks. Well, he took four weeks. That story happens over and over again and we do need, for a minority of children in care, to look again at the design of high-quality residential care, because the research on what happens to children who are in residential care for a long time is 762

Martin Narey, Government Advisor on Adoption—Oral evidence (QQ 309–353) rather good and it is better for them than being catapulted from foster placement to foster placement. Q324 Viscount Eccles: Could I just come back to the awakening of awareness and press you on what you mean by that? You said in the last 12 months there has been—and I think I am getting the phrase about right—an awakening of awareness and that entails, I suppose, earlier intervention and more sound judgements being made at an earlier age and so on. I wondered who was becoming more aware and in what way they were becoming more aware. Martin Narey: It is perhaps over a longer period than 12 months, but long before I was asked to advise the Government, when I first started saying as chief executive of Barnardo’s that I was concerned about our failure to intervene as quickly as we should with children who are living in neglect and about the optimism in the system that leads us to leave children in neglect for too long, I think— Q325 Viscount Eccles: Can I just intervene there? Is it optimism or is it a lack of certainty about what we are looking at and what judgement we should come to? Martin Narey: I think it is optimism. I could point to a research reference with which— Viscount Eccles: So it is a cultural issue about no matter what, the natural family is the place where this child should be? Martin Narey: There is a belief that somehow you can help this family to work. It is easy to understand how well intentioned that is. If you are a social worker and you are working with a family—to be very clear, you are not generally working with a mum and dad; you are working with some poor isolated mum, because, generally speaking, we are talking about mothers who have been long abandoned emotionally and financially by the men in their lives. If you are a social worker supporting a poor woman with two or three kids, you tend to get desperate to make it successful. In many cases of neglect it is not because the mother does not love the child—she absolutely does—but she cannot provide for the child in a decent and reasonable way. My contention for some years now is that the system has tried rather too hard to make families a success and children have been disadvantaged by that and intervention and removal to care has taken place too late. When I first said that in 2009, everybody said that I was absolutely wrong. The then Secretary of State, Ed Balls, the Conservative education leadership, everybody, every other children’s charity, said that was wrong. I do not think anybody is arguing that quite as much now. On adoption specifically, when my report for The Times was published it was pretty much dismissed by local authorities, and I think that has changed. If I am frank, directors of children’s services, who I think are high-calibre people generally, have an awful lot of pressures, and I do not think they were looking very closely at adoption. In 70% of Ofsted adoption inspections, they were recording a good or outstanding. That does not put it on anybody’s worry list. I believe over the past year or so a lot of directors have started to take a closer look at adoption and realised that it was not quite as effective as they might have thought. The willingness on the part of directors of children’s services to look at reform and to be part of this reform programme has changed very much over the last 12 months. Q326 Baroness Hamwee: I am very tempted to ask you whether you think there might be something close to fashions in these things if thinking can swing so considerably in the period of a year and whether this places a huge burden on social workers in dealing with birth families, 763

Martin Narey, Government Advisor on Adoption—Oral evidence (QQ 309–353) but I will confine my question to something that has come up from other witnesses, and that is concurrent planning. Would you like to say anything to us about whether concurrent planning, placing with foster carers but with a view to adoption, can be achieved? Martin Narey: Chairman, do I have permission to answer the question that was not asked of me as well, just very briefly? I think it is a very important point, Lady Hamwee. The Times have been great allies of mine. They commissioned me to write this report and they have kept up the pressure on adoption, and that has been very helpful. But the truth is that three or four years ago The Times’ approach on adoption and taking children into care was very different. The Times talked frequently of children being stolen by social workers and there was an immense pressure on social workers not to intervene, not to remove a child. It is important that we do not swing back too far the other way and make that fashionable shift that you talked about. On the question that you did ask, Lady Hamwee, I think there are two things. Concurrent planning, which I define as something that is specific for babies and which Coram have been introducing with great expertise into England, I think has great potential. I have been to Harrow and seen it work there, and I hope we will see concurrent planning in most local authorities shortly. The thing that excites me more and that the Government announced just a few weeks ago is based on the principles of concurrent planning, and the Government have called it fostering for adoption, but it will apply to a much larger number of children. This is simply where when the local authority is pretty certain that adoption is going to be the outcome for the child, and for an older child rather than a baby that rarely changes. In those circumstances and in anticipation of the placement order the child should be placed with his or her prospective adopters. That would mean that the child achieves stability easily a year ahead of current timetables in very many cases and it could have enormous benefits for the children concerned. Q327 Lord Warner: Can I go back to one of your answers to Viscount Eccles where you said that you thought quite a few directors of children’s services had started to poke around in their department a bit more on adoption issues as a result of some of this pressure. You are a very experienced public sector and voluntary sector manager. Are we here dealing with, given the huge variability in local authority performance on adoption, primarily a performance management issue that does not need a lot of tinkering with legislation; that this is really about better management rather than anything else? Where do you sit on that viewpoint given what you have just said about directors of children’s services? Martin Narey: I think my answer would be “Not quite”. I think performance is a very important part of it and, as I expressed earlier, I have been surprised about how little we knew about how long things take, for example. I was an advocate of the performance scorecards and I am very glad that they have been introduced and will make a difference, but that is only part of it. There is an attitudinal issue as well. Adoption, over a rather longer time period than I was referring to in my answer to Lady Hamwee, has gone out of fashion in social work altogether. When I did my research for The Times I went to three universities. I found only one of three universities teaching undergraduate social work degree courses that even mentioned adoption. I think in some aspects of social work, and certainly in academic social work, it has come to be

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Martin Narey, Government Advisor on Adoption—Oral evidence (QQ 309–353) seen as some sort of an anachronism, something that we used to use in the 1960s and 1970s and is no longer appropriate. It is not just performance; it is also about attitude and about promoting adoption as a priority in all the things that are on the desk of a director of children’s services. Q328 The Chairman: Do you think this is also a training issue? Picking up on what you are saying, does a change of attitude by social workers require training in the social work schools? Martin Narey: I have spent some time with the College of Social Work and with Moira Gibb who is leading the work for the Government in this area. There is a very real need to inject more education about adoption into basic social work training. Q329 Baroness Eaton: We hear a lot about delay in the adoption system. Could you tell us where you think the main delays occur and why, and what could address it effectively? Do you think adoption panels play a part in delay and also in duplication? Martin Narey: Delay falls into three areas. The first is the initial delay in intervening to take the child into care, about which I have spoken. The second is the local authority decision on whether or not adoption is likely to be the best outcome for that child. That should be taken four months after a child coming into care; the average is 11 months. If that can return closer to the four-month target, it will make a big difference. But I think by some measure the overwhelming challenge for the adoption system now and the greatest cause of delay is the failure to process enough potential adopters. That process is as poor a process as I have come across in public life. It takes an inordinate amount of time. The paperwork is astonishing. I promise you this is not apocryphal. When I went to my first adoption panel in Kent the papers were brought to me in a small barrow because the papers were so voluminous. Typically an adopter assessment is 120 to 140 pages of largely repetitive information with very little analysis. That is being replaced by a new system next year. But the length of time it takes to recruit adopters and get them ready to take children has given us the crisis we have now and is right now the main reason for the slowing down on adoptions. I notice that Shirley Trundle, when she spoke to you a few weeks ago, said there were now 5,000 children with placement orders. I thought it was 4,000 and something but if it is 5,000 it makes the point even more. So, despite all the things that are said about court delays, that is 5,000 children the courts in England have processed and are waiting for adoption. We probably have fewer than 1,000 adopters ready to take children right now. It is as if the system has been oblivious, because it has not happened suddenly. Over the last five years the numbers of annual placement orders have been 3,060, 4,400, 4,600, 4,800 and last year 5,290. This is a very significant and constant rise in the number of children being cleared for adoption, and we have not geared up the recruitment of adopters in any way to meet that demand. Q330 Baroness Eaton: Is it because the different departments in the local authority dealing with it do not tie up, or is it that people are thinking with blinkers? How can that happen? Apart from the bureaucracy, what would be the motivation for getting that changed? Martin Narey: I think there are two reasons. First of all, nationally I do not think there has been a diagnosis of the problem and, secondly, the reality is that courts were processing children for adoption far more quickly than we were recruiting and processing adopters, but it has surprised me in local authorities those two things have not been joined up. It is the case when you go sometimes to a local authority—not always by any means—that you are having 765

Martin Narey, Government Advisor on Adoption—Oral evidence (QQ 309–353) discussions with an adoption manager about his or her budget and there does not seem to be quite the joining-up you might expect with the wider budget. Of course I am not suggesting adoptions should be accelerated to save money, but if we did process adoptions more quickly, local authorities would more than pay for the costs. There are very few things I have come across in public life where you can give a better service to a client group, in this case children, and save money. You usually have to balance one against the other. On this occasion we could process more adoptions, transform children’s lives and local authorities would save a lot of money. Q331 Baroness Knight of Collingtree: You have not mentioned adoption panels to us, but I know that you have views about that. Do you think they are seriously a delaying factor and a duplication? Martin Narey: In my experience adoption panels do contribute to delay but they are not one of the main causes of delay. It is not for me to decide their future, but I would leave adoption panels as they are. Local authorities, in my experience, tend to think they are important. Certainly voluntary adoption agencies like them. I think it is incumbent upon them to ensure that adoption panels in some places are more flexible than they are now in terms of size of their agendas and how frequently they meet, but I have no issue with adoption panels. Having said that, I think the decision to take away the one entirely duplicative role, which is the decision on adoption for the child itself, is right and adoption panels should now concentrate on the processing and the approval of adopters and on the match. Q332 Baroness Knight of Collingtree: Might I ask a quick supplementary on that? Can we link what you have just said, Mr Narey, with the fact that so many would-be and willing adopters are put off by the length of time it takes? Martin Narey: That is absolutely true, Lady Knight. Lots of them are put off. Either they do not enter the system or they give up halfway through. The system has to be rigorous, it has to be robust, and it is going to be sometimes uncomfortable, but some of the aspects of the current assessment process, which I stress the Government will replace next year, are just ludicrous. My favourite example—and I promise you this is true; this is not optional—is a social worker assessing prospective adopters has to go into their garden and check whether or not there is a trampoline. If there is a trampoline they have to tick and say whether or not it has a safety net. This is the example of the depth of detail that we commit professionals, social workers, to get involved in. I think we could have a more robust system that was also simultaneously more welcoming to would-be adopters. If we do not do that, we are in real trouble. Q333 Viscount Eccles: Where did that detail come from? Martin Narey: I would imagine that at some point in the distant past in one local authority somewhere a child fell off a trampoline and we have changed guidance for the rest of the country because of that. Q334 Viscount Eccles: It would have come from ministerial guidance, would it? Martin Narey: No, the current adoption assessment process is largely a creation of the British Association for Adoption and Fostering. They are the owners of the assessment that is owned by most local authorities. I would argue that because there has been very little emphasis on the

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Martin Narey, Government Advisor on Adoption—Oral evidence (QQ 309–353) timeliness of the process, over time we have tended to make the process longer and more time consuming without much consideration of the fact that that is just adding to delay. Q335 Viscount Eccles: There is another cultural issue behind this, which is the aversion to risk? Martin Narey: There is a total aversion to risk. I sometimes say if social workers were manning air traffic control, a plane would never fly over London because of the remote possibility that something would go wrong. Q336 Baroness Howarth of Breckland: Having sat through three child abuse inquiries, one as a director that was of national front-page importance, I understand about the irritation of taking risk and the difficulty social workers have. I would like to link that to the question I have that is concerning me. In your discussion about adoption you have said it is one small part of the whole system, and I wish that during your deliberations you could turn your attention to the whole system where not a lot of time and emphasis is given to good work on the preventative side. Social workers do not know any more how to intervene in critical situations, firmly, strongly, with behavioural or therapeutic or interventionist processes, in order to ensure that the child’s needs are paramount. You say all the time—and we all agree who work in childcare—the child’s needs are paramount, but they are seldom in that separate from the rest of their family until the moment comes when they are actually removed. What I would like to ask you is whether or not this balance between the birth parents and the wish to have more children adopted is being looked at firmly in the round, and if you think there are other things that could be done. But if you do believe that more children should be adopted sooner, that could be seen in the outside world as taking some children away without intervention. I agree that social workers, as I say, are not as sharp as they might be at times, but they will be the people who will be scapegoated in the press. How do you see that balance being achieved, culturally and legislatively and in terms of social-work education? Martin Narey: Goodness me, that is a complex question. Can I say at the outset that for the last year I have been doing the job I was asked to do by the Government, which is to advise them on adoption. They asked me to do that, I believe, not simply because I had written something for The Times on adoption but because, as I have explained previously, for some years I had been arguing that, uncomfortable as it was, we might have to intervene more and take more children into care. I let the Committee have the statistics, which often surprise some people, that in 1989 we had 92,000 children in care. I know nothing that suggests that parenting has improved so much in the intervening period that we now have a figure of children in care that is a third lower than that. I have taken a wider view in looking at issues about care, but I am absolutely clear that we cannot possibly be cavalier about taking children into care, and I have never advocated that. Some of the work of which I was most proud at Barnardo’s was the work that we did to support families and help them to get back on their feet. But it is also the case—and I stress I am a lay person; I am not a social worker, but I am a father—that I was deeply shocked at some of the circumstances in which I saw we were leaving children and some of the circumstances where we were about to return children to their birth parents in circumstances that I do not think anybody in this room would tolerate. It was very shocking indeed. That is partly because, as I said earlier, it is optimism about early intervention. In fairness, I do not think there has been

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Martin Narey, Government Advisor on Adoption—Oral evidence (QQ 309–353) any shortage of early intervention. This is not a political statement, I am not a member of any political party, but the last Government poured millions into early intervention. They introduced Sure Start, which is simply fantastic when properly targeted. They introduced family tax credits. They took, measured by inflation, 500,000 children out of poverty—they eradicated half the poverty they inherited from the previous Government. Q337 Baroness Howarth of Breckland: If I can say three things here; if parenting has not improved, what are we doing to improve parenting? As you know, Cafcass did a piece of work when the numbers increased substantially—and I declare an interest of being in Cafcass for eight years as deputy and chair and part of that—that showed that the children were not being inappropriately taken into care. There was a need for them to be taken into care. But at the same time there are other sorts of interventions, as has been taking place in the London court with the drugs court, where they have had some significant success by targeted intervention. The question I am really asking is: are we going to give birth parents enough of a chance because the quality of the work with them is simply not good enough? That means, the child’s needs being paramount, they are going to lose their child. Martin Narey: First of all, let me be clear, all the evidence, including the Cafcass evidence, which I thought was very significant, leads one to the conclusion that we are not intervening inappropriately. That is not to say there are not one or two individual cases that appear inexplicable but, generally speaking, we do not intervene inappropriately. In terms of early intervention, where we can do more—but when I said this before this has sometimes been considered illiberal—is I think we can do more about targeting some of the early intervention we have. As I say, I think Sure Start is an astonishing initiative— Q338 Baroness Howarth of Breckland: But did it target the right groups? Martin Narey: I was very proud to run more Sure Starts than anyone else when I was at Barnardo’s, but I was critically aware that we frequently failed to get the parents who most needed it. That is not a criticism of Sure Start, because it was a fantastic creation, but I think the general philosophy of Sure Start, which was that you put the Sure Start tent up within a buggy push of the most impoverished neighbourhoods and the mothers will come, does not always happen because the mothers who most need that intervention philosophically are never going to make that journey. Indeed, what I observed in Barnardo’s is that I thought some of our most effective Sure Start centres are in rural areas, where there is no question of mothers coming in. We went out to get them, and by doing that we did bring those who most needed intervention. There is the recent initiative on parenting courses, and the evidence base on parenting courses is very encouraging. I have probably presented hundreds of parenting certificates over the last few years. I hardly ever presented one to a mother who I did not think would have made it themselves. We have to do something and make some brave decisions about directing parenting training to those—and again it is generally mothers, I am afraid—who most need it, and if necessary we need to find ways of modest financial inducement to get them to attend Sure Start centres and undertake a parenting course. Q339 Baroness Howarth of Breckland: Do you have any legislative advice for us, or is it process?

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Martin Narey, Government Advisor on Adoption—Oral evidence (QQ 309–353) Martin Narey: I think it is process. I know it was easier to do this in Scotland than in England when I was running Barnardo’s, but we got agreement with the benefits authority in Scotland to allow us to pay a modest sum of £10 to a mum when she turned up at a parenting course, and we were very clear that in that experiment we got a lot of mothers who would not otherwise have come. That is money down the back of a sofa, and it could have a very significant effect on families. Q340 Baroness King of Bow: I am so sorry to have missed the beginning of your evidence. Incidentally, I did not mind social workers asking me about my trampoline that I had in my garden. It was when they wanted me to move my cactus in my living room that irritated me a bit. But I wanted to ask you about transracial adoption. I wondered, in the light of evidence of outcomes for children who have been transracially adopted, do you think that the provision in the legislation, the 2002 Act, which asks decision-makers to give due consideration to a child’s religious persuasion, racial origin and cultural and linguistic background, needs to be amended and, if so, how? Martin Narey: I do. I think that the provision needs significant amendment. That is not, I rush to say, because I think ethnicity, culture, linguistic background or religion are not important. I just think they are four of a whole range of factors that we might need to look for when making an adoption match and their significance needs significantly to be relegated. I have seen lots of occasions—followed cases through, met adopters—where that issue has been seen as a veto on an adoption. Although local authorities would argue, I think, that they have been a little more flexible, and they have, that flexibility has been in the margins. It might be about giving a mixed race child to two parents who are not of a similar mixed heritage. The big move of seeing the colour of skin, for example, as just one of a number of issues and, for example, allowing a black child to be adopted by white parents, happens virtually never. I think the fact that black children wait a year longer for adoption and many black children grow out of adoption is a scandal. What is quite clear is that guidance to that effect—first pushed by Tony Blair in 2001, more recently by Michael Gove—has had very little effect, and I am quite clear we need to go to primary legislation to make that change. Q341 Baroness King of Bow: I agree entirely with you. I think the current situation is a scandal. I said that, as I know you have, and I was contacted by quite a lot of mixed race people who had been transracially adopted, mixed race or black people who had been transracially adopted, who told me that I was not taking into account that it was a very difficult issue for them. They quite often were brought up in a very white environment and that I had not taken this into account. Do you think that the numbers affected by this are quite few, however, or do you think it is a significant number, given that mixed race kids are one of the largest growing groups? Martin Narey: Like you, Lady King, I have had correspondence from people who have told me that I have this wrong, but I have also had correspondence from people who have told me I have it absolutely right. For every person who has written to me to say that they felt they had real difficulties growing up in a white household, there are others who have written to me and who I have met who have said that adoption transformed their lives. We have to be careful how we do it; that is absolutely the case. I have a friend who was a black boy and was adopted and grew up in a rural area of Britain, and my guess is he had a very difficult time. He was literally the only black boy in the area. I am not suggesting we would ever

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Martin Narey, Government Advisor on Adoption—Oral evidence (QQ 309–353) do that now. We have to look at the communities that people will grow up in and the schools that kids will go to, but frankly the proposition that my wife and I could not bring up a black child or you and your husband could not bring up one of my kids because of the colour of their skin I find just outrageous. Baroness King of Bow: No, I agree, and lots of people change their view when you say, “Okay, let us take a white baby and put them in, say, a black, rich Sudanese family”, and they suddenly go, “Oh, maybe that is a bit more difficult”. But I do completely agree. The Chairman: I think we are going to have to move on. I am just looking a little at the time. We have three more questions we needed to ask. Q342 Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top: This is just an aside, really. On early intervention I hope that you will think about the nurse-family partnerships. I think that is a very effective early intervention and, what is more, by the time the child is born there can be an assessment as to how able the mother is to change. Martin Narey: Yes, I would agree with that entirely. Q343 Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top: I think that is what you are looking for. You are looking for how do you enable the family to change, to take account for caring for the child effectively. But I wanted to ask really about the main support needs of adopted children and adoptive parents. I was quite struck in your paper about how strongly you felt the relationship with the birth parents had to be severed and that you say at the end of your evidence that, “Ministers are considering advice from me on child and birth family contact”. We have had other people give us evidence that, given what is happening now on social media, you do have to prepare adoptive parents much more for how they will handle reference to and involvement of birth parents, and I would be interested in what you think about that. But I do wonder whether you think that there is a greater responsibility now on the state, than there has been in the past, to assess and meet the needs, post adoption, of adoptive parents and of adopted children. If you do, would you look at a statutory role for local authorities in terms of supporting postadoption issues and all of that? Martin Narey: On contact, first of all, the recommendations I made to Ministers on contact, and indeed on the need sometimes to contemplate separating siblings more to achieve adoption, have resulted in a consultation process that was launched on Friday. On contact, and looking specifically now at contact at the adoption end of the spectrum—I made some recommendations about contact more widely because it was one thing where I thought one could not just take adoption alone—I do worry about the extent to which adoption is now sometimes presented to adopters as a bit of a muddle. I have been at evenings where potential adopters have attended a local authority and they have been told that their children, if they are adopted, are going to have two sets of parents. I think that is very confusing for children and it is not likely to encourage very many adopters to come forward. I think the research shows there are some real problems with contact. It can work very well but direct contact, after a placement order and certainly after an adoption, is something on which adoptive parents write to me in real distress. Even letterbox contact, the annual or twice yearly exchange of letters between birth families and their children, is not without risks, and the 770

Martin Narey, Government Advisor on Adoption—Oral evidence (QQ 309–353) research is quite clear on that. I would commend the work of a Dr Loxterkamp on contact post-adoption to show how challenging that can be. So I think we have to be very cautious about contact, particularly the capacity to romanticise the birth parents. I would not have wanted to bring my kids up through their teenage years and give them the idea that there were some other different parents around the corner to step in if they did not much like the inconvenience that I was putting upon them. On adoption support, I think this is probably the single most difficult—sorry. Q344 Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top: How do we deal with social media then? Martin Narey: Social media is a challenge, but I do not think, because of the challenge of social media, that we should establish contact as part of the adoption. Although the legal position of adoptive parents is very clear, that they are the parents and they can make decisions, I know countless cases where adopters believe they are honour bound to agree to a deal where they would allow some form of contact, direct or indirect, after the adoption has taken place, even when it causes significant distress to the children. I do not think we should make life for children, and the prospect of adoption, more difficult by establishing that as part of the adoption. We then need to deal separately with issues around social contact. On that, if I can offer one, and it is only a partial solution—but it is a solution that generally appals some audiences when I say it to them—one of the things we should do for all parents when they adopt is if they want to change the name of the child we should allow them to do so. We have a fetish with not allowing parents to do that, and that in due course makes contact through Facebook and other social media much easier. On adoption support, the second part of your question, I think it is the single most difficult nut we still have to crack. We already have a statutory position where local authorities have to provide an assessment of needs for an adoptive family, but of course they are under huge financial pressures. If that assessment takes place, and it frequently does not, but even when it takes place local authorities are not always able to afford the consequences of that. I have become more than ever convinced during the past year that we need to give adopters some sort of guarantee that it might not be for 10 or 12 years, that their adoption might be going swimmingly, but if something happens in the adolescence years where they need help, they will not start at the beginning in having to get that help. There are all sorts of problems there because a child can be adopted in one local authority and then a family can move. I know the county where I live in North Yorkshire is an importer of adoptive families and they have a real challenge with adoption support. But we have to find a way through that financial minefield and allow us to give an absolute assurance to adopters that they will get better support. It is quite clear—and I commend research by the Cass Business School on this—that if we measure the costs of adoption support against the alternative of adoptions disrupting and children going back into care, it would be very cost effective to guarantee it. Q345 The Chairman: Would a passport help? This is one of the ideas floating around. Martin Narey: It is a neat phrase. I rather like it for what I am talking about, which would be some sort of guarantee that right up until the age of 18 years, if a family needs help they can go to the local authority, they will get an assessment very quickly and there will be at least an expectation that the needs of that child, whether it be therapy or whatever, will be met.

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Martin Narey, Government Advisor on Adoption—Oral evidence (QQ 309–353) Q346 The Chairman: Do you think the support should be statutory? That is what is being suggested to us. Martin Narey: I am not sure whether it has to be statutory. I think there has to be an absolute confidence on the part of adopters that they will receive that support if they need it. Whether or not it has to be statutory, frankly, I am not sure. Q347 Baroness King of Bow: On the first part about contact, I would be very concerned and would be grateful to hear your views on whether proposed changes to either guidance or legislation would prevent adoptive parents, who want their adoptive children to meet their birth parents, from having that right. I have spent three years trying to arrange that and it has been a nightmare. There is a sort of theological view among social workers that they must not ever let my adopted children meet their birth parents. Will there be that flexibility? Martin Narey: Absolutely not, and I have heard you speak before compellingly about how important you believe that is. I think the key is to accept that legally the adopters are the parents of the child. They know what is best for the child. If that includes contact with the birth family—and it is often not the mother but might be grandparents or an aunt—they should of course be allowed to do that. They should also not be forced into contact when they think it is damaging the children. Q348 The Chairman: I had a case when I was a judge where the adopters could not take the real parents but they did not have a grandparent, so they adopted, in effect, the grandmother, so it was extremely happy—just exactly what Lady King is suggesting. Martin Narey: Yes. That is very good. The Chairman: We do have to move on. Q349 Baroness Hamwee: Still on support post adoption on the one hand, is there a clear rationale for treating that differently from support where there is a special guardianship or a residence order? Martin Narey: No, I do not think so, Lady Hamwee. It needs to be seen in the round. I spent a little time recently with some kinship carers who are mostly special guardians, and it has been very clear to me that the challenges they face are very similar to those that adoptive parents face. Q350 Baroness Hamwee: As that was quick, I am going to risk incurring the wrath of the Chairman by asking a follow-up to an earlier one. When you said that you were clear that there needed to be legislative change in the case of transracial adoption—I think that was what you were saying— Martin Narey: I was. I am very clear there has to be. Baroness Hamwee: —I was not clear what that legislative change would say. Martin Narey: Without drafting it, I think that it should achieve the position that ethnicity, linguistic background, religion and culture are factors to be taken into account but they have no greater precedence in the adoption than a wide range of other factors, such as age, the sort of house that people live in, and so forth, and it should not be used as any form of veto on adoption.

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Martin Narey, Government Advisor on Adoption—Oral evidence (QQ 309–353) Baroness Hamwee: It is more a tweaking and nuancing of the current position than a dramatic change. Martin Narey: It is a tweaking of the legislation. It is a significant change to practice because the spirit of the legislation is thwarted by current practice. The Chairman: Lady Eaton, I think you are going to ask about scorecards. Q351 Baroness Eaton: Yes, I am. You indicated in your written evidence that you are a fan of scorecards and you say they have already made a difference. I would like to know how that difference is demonstrated, first of all. But I would also like to ask you whether you think adoption scorecards are a fair representation of the comparative performance of adoption agencies, because particularly local authorities often work across boundaries. Is it a fair way of judging in the way they are at the minute? Martin Narey: I should own up to being an unreconstructed fan of targets and measures of success. I think it is the only way you can get a handle on how well you are doing. At the beginning of this process, Kent County Council were brave enough—before I was the adoption adviser—to ask me to come and spend five weeks with them looking intensively at adoption. A very enterprising cabinet member was very unhappy with the system, even though they had got good Ofsted scorings. What I found there, and later found in other local authorities, is that whenever I asked any question about how long things take or what things cost nobody ever knew. That basic operational information is very important, so the scorecards can make a big guaranteed difference. They are not a commentary on their own on how a local authority is doing, and there will always be some measures on the scorecard that do not match experience. For example, Harrow, which I think is a small but excellent local authority, do not come up particularly well on the scorecard, and you have to go and look and find what the reasons are. But they provide an indication of success and an indication of how well a local authority is doing, and they are very important. Why I think they are a success is because I was in Somerset on the day the first scorecards arrived. Somerset is a high-achieving authority. Just a few weeks before I had arrived it got an outstanding from Ofsted. I was very impressed with everything I saw there. But they leapt upon the scorecards eagerly because they wanted to get better. I was there as they were going through the scorecards, and they were asking who might do things better than them in particular areas and were wanting to send people to go and find out why. It is a matter of understanding how well you are doing and finding that sometimes there are quite simple things, which a local authority 100 miles down the road are doing, that you can copy. Q352 The Chairman: Can you avoid the downside of The Times league tables? Baroness Eaton: Yes, exactly, that was my next question. The Chairman: I am sorry. Baroness Eaton: That is quite all right. Martin Narey: I know there is sometimes a downside to league tables, but sometimes it is a downside worth paying. Although the Government have not translated the scorecards into league tables, I personally would not find that too distressing because, at the cost of causing some discomfort for local authorities, I can tell you that league tables rapidly change behaviour. I had league tables for prisons. They were crude, but I can tell you that the governors of those 773

Martin Narey, Government Advisor on Adoption—Oral evidence (QQ 309–353) prisons who were at the bottom worked very hard to get themselves off the bottom and to improve their performance. Q353 Baroness Eaton: Can I just follow on then? Some local authorities will do much more sibling group adoption, and that does not necessarily register on the scorecard, but then the delay would give the perception that they are not particularly efficient. The downside might be one of a number of things, but you also might put off people who are family adopters, because they will look and say, “Well, this authority is actually incompetent. We will not go to them”. You might find it quirks the outcome for people who are wanting to adopt. Martin Narey: That is why I stress that these are indicators and you need to look beyond them. I do not take the scorecard as a commentary on any local authority, and you need to look beyond that. But it is a beginning for telling you where to look and for authorities it is a beginning for them looking at comparative performance elsewhere and learning where they can improve. I accept that there are some downsides to it. I do not think the scorecards are likely to put adopters off. If I were to suggest where adopters will be discouraged it is much more likely to be from information on the websites, from what has happened at their early information evenings. I am not suggesting for a moment that we do not tell potential adopters the truth about the challenge of adoption, but we do not need to be quite so keen to tell people all the negatives without telling them simultaneously that adoption can also be a joy. The Chairman: That is a very good word upon which to stop. We have given you, I am afraid, a real going over, Martin, but we are extremely grateful to you for coming and for giving evidence. We have taken an hour and a quarter, which is longer than we usually do. It has been extremely valuable. Thank you very much indeed.

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National Adoption and Fostering Service, South London and Maudsley (SLAM)—Written evidence

National Adoption and Fostering Service, South London and Maudsley (SLAM)—Written evidence Introduction We are a National Tier 4 service for adopted and fostered children, including those in kinship placements or who are subject to care proceedings. We are an NHS CAMHS multidisciplinary team comprised of child and adolescent psychiatrists, clinical psychologists, and specialist mental health practitioners with social work backgrounds. We see adopted and fostered children across the age span from infancy to adulthood. Our eligibility criteria for referrals are broad because we recognise that many adopted children experience a range of complex problems which may not fit easily into standard psychiatric diagnoses or the associated care pathways. As a result there can be a high level of unmet need in adopted families because their child does not meet standard CAMHS referral criteria even though they may present with a high degree of complexity, for example with a constellation of sub-threshold or emerging difficulties. We offer assessments and evidence-based interventions for any adopted family, at any stage of the adoption process, designed to increase the chances of children achieving permanency in their new homes and their best educational outcomes. We work closely with the academic departments within the Institute of Psychiatry and the National Academy for Parenting Research, King’s College London, and several of our senior clinicians hold joint clinical and academic posts. This joint way of working has been a central part of our mission to translate the evidence base into clinical practice for the benefit of adopted children and their families. As part of this mission we have begun working with third sector organisations, to translate research evidence, new models of working and best practice beyond the NHS into settings where they can help the greatest range of families. We have been asked to comment upon five specific areas, as below. We are happy to address these issue or others tat may arise in more detail and in person if this would be helpful.  Most common problems & estimates of prevalence  Causes of problems  Addressing problems  Service accessibility & Costs  Future & recommendations Most common problems & estimates of prevalence Most specialist clinicians, social workers, researchers and commentators are in agreement that adopted children are at significant risk of a range of complex problems spanning mental health, education and social adaptation. However, the quality of the data for the prevalence of UK adopted children’s problems is currently weak. Furthermore, drawing on evidence from international data is problematic because different countries have different adoption polices. For example, in contrast to the UK, much of Europe has few within-country adoptions from care but high rates of inter-country adoptions, and the States has a mixed profile. Therefore generalising from international data to the UK is not straightforward. In addition older

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National Adoption and Fostering Service, South London and Maudsley (SLAM)—Written evidence research is less useful as the profile of UK adoptions has changed. There is clearly a need for a systematic assessment of the current mental health needs of adopted children, using wellvalidated mental health screening and assessment measures. However, there is much better evidence about the mental health of UK looked after children thanks to the Office of National Statistics (ONS) data from 2003 (see Ford, Vostanis, Meltzer & Goodman, 2007; Meltzer, Gatward, Corbin, Goodman & Ford, 2003). As many UK adoptions are from care, these data can guide us to the broader rates of difficulties that might present in adopted children. This study also serves as an exemplar of the kind of research that is needed for adopted children to guide policy and service development. Our own service conducted an audit of 100 cases (both looked after and adopted) and compared the rates of problems identified in our specialist multidisciplinary assessment with the ONS data for looked after children. As we are a National Tier 4 Service we were able to compare these rates with the problems identified from local services who had made the referrals in to our clinic. Some of this data is presented in Table 1. It is notable that the rates of problems are very similar for both adopted and looked after children presenting to our National Clinic and that for most disorders, the rates we saw in the clinic were very similar to the ONS data for looked after children. The exceptions being for conduct disorders and hyperkinetic disorders, both of which were much higher in the clinic sample than in the ONS data (for adopted children 38.9% vs. 61.2% and 8.7% vs 34.7%, for Conduct Disorder and ADHD respectively). In part this reflects the types of manifest, externalising problem that drive specialist referrals. However, in Table 1 it is notable and very concerning that only 4% of referrals had noted conduct problems in their initial referral. This pattern represents a gross under-diagnosing of the rates compared with the ONS data (38.9%) and also with the specialist clinical diagnosis (61.2%). A second point to note is that the rate of attachment disorder was low and equivalent in the clinical assessments and the ONS (about 2%) but much higher in the referral letters. This persistent trend in non-specialist services to over-estimate attachment problems at the expense of more common, treatable disorders in adopted families is well recognised by the research (Chaffin et al, 2006; AACAP, 2005; Barth, Crea, John, Thoburn & Quinton, 2005), and is a significant barrier to making effective and timely treatments available to those children and families who could benefit. Finally, on a similar note, no cases were referred to the clinic with identified neurodevelopmental problems, while the rates identified in the clinic of 12% were equivalent to the 12% found in the ONS data. Again, neurodevelopmental problems are a common presentation that is well documented by the research literature as being relevant to children who have been adopted and fostered (see below), but which tends to be ignored by non-specialist services. In our experience adopted children frequently present with complex but subtle problems that do not easily fall into a single classification, but which rather require a careful formulation to disentangle the interplay of phenomenologically similar presentations. A typical example is given in the diagram below (Figure 1) with an unusual phenotype (i.e., symptom presentation) representing the overlap of attachment, behaviour, autism spectrum disorder and ADHD presentations, all of which may be present at sub-threshold levels. This form of clinical presentation can be a significant barrier to adoptive children and their families receiving accurate and timely diagnoses and management plans (see case example, below). Of course,

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National Adoption and Fostering Service, South London and Maudsley (SLAM)—Written evidence other issues are frequently overlaid onto this pattern of problems to further complicate the specific formulation of any individual child.

Attachme nt

ADHD

???

Be havioural

Autism Sp e ctr um

Figure 1: Complex behavioural presentation in an adopted child Causes of problems There is no single, common cause that can best account for the range and diversity of difficulties that adopted children may present with. Developmental psychopathology (Cicchetti & Cohen, 2006; Sroufe & Rutter, 1984) provides the best scientific model for the various processes underlying emerging problems from infancy through adulthood and recognises the diversity and interplay of factors that contribute to problems, in varying degrees, in different individuals. Consequently, it is essential that a proper formulation of an individual child’s strengths and difficulties is made within a bio-psycho-social formulation to account for the range of individual-specific factors likely to be at play. However, there are several areas of emerging and established science that can guide us to the range of possible factors of which we should take particular note. We will consider some of the important factors below, but this is a list that cannot be exhaustive given the available space. However, these factors have been selected because we believe they are often currently misunderstood by services to the cost of adopted children and their families. Children adopted from the care system may be subject to a range of biological risk factors, including genetic risks. Genetic risks may take the form of heritability of frank mental health disorders as well as subtler risk profiles, such as a thrill seeking or anxious temperaments. Modern understanding of genetic risks has developed to go beyond the simple mapping of risks to specific genes, or artificial distinctions between nature and nurture, to recognise the role that genes can play in exacerbating the impact of environmental risks as well as the role that environments can play in turning on or off specific genetic risks (e.g., vanIJZendoorn, 777

National Adoption and Fostering Service, South London and Maudsley (SLAM)—Written evidence Bakermans-Kranenburg, & Ebstein, 2011). It is also essential to note that the presence of mental health problems in birth parents does not necessarily map onto high levels of risk in their children. For example, the risk of a severe mental disorder in a child for whom one parent has a mental heath disorder is 7% compared with 2% percent in children of parents with no mental health problem (Uher, 2010) and even if both parents have a severe mental health problem most children will be well with neither severe nor common mental health disorders. Thus the genetic risks inherited from birth families for frank mental disorder is perhaps not as significant as prospective adoptive parents might fear, nor to the extent that some services might present to prospective adopters. This data can be useful to help parents and services understand the complexity and subtlety of predicting risks from birth family indicators. There is increasing evidence of the impact of maltreatment and neglect upon the developing brain and body systems (e.g., McCrory, DeBrito & Viding, 2010), which is important to recognise, but again the impact on one system (e.g., the brain) is intrinsically influenced by other biological systems (e.g., genetics, physiology, immunology etc) in complex ways which do not permit us to predict with confidence what any particular experience of maltreatment / neglect will have on a specific, individual child. Indeed the severity of pathological experiences may well be unrelated to the extent of psychopathological consequences in two different children if one child is intrinsically more susceptible to specific risk events. Such ‘differential susceptibility’ to risk may be inherited or indeed may be shaped by earlier experiences in the pre- or post- natal environment (e.g., Belsky & Pluess, 2009). It is also important to recognise that the influence of early maltreatment / neglect may at times be understood as a biological adaptation to risk environments rather than over simplistically as ‘damage done’. The impact is often transactional (i.e., dynamically and reciprocally influenced by other biological systems and the child’s environment), may be plastic (i.e., recoverable) and, once again, likely to be specific to individual cases. It is important to understand the role of attachment in adopted children’s well being, and to be clear what is meant by a term that is widely used but with vastly different connotations in different settings. The scientific research that underlies the power of the attachment construct describes the operation of one bio-behavioural system amongst many that typically remains latent but is activated in the context of threat to ensure an infant or young child seeks comfort and security from a specific individual other (e.g., Prior & Glaser, 2006; Cassidy & Shaver, 2008). The quality of relationship that becomes established with this attachment figure as a result of this process can be influential for some aspects of a child’s later adjustment and development especially if that relationship is deemed to be secure. A secure attachment to a specific carer is thought to provide some degree of resilience to exposure to later risks factors. However, an insecure attachment to a caregiver is not reliably related to elevated rates of later psychopathology, not least because it is a quite common presentation, seen in about 40% of the normal population and certainly not, in and of itself, pathological. Rather, insecure attachments typically represent an appropriate and normal, albeit non-optimal, adaptation to the quality of the caregiving environment. Children who have disruptions in their early caregiving relationships (e.g., from coming into care) are at risk of losing the benefits that can accrue over the course of their life from developing a healthy attachment to a reliable and consistent attachment figure if they are unable to form a new and stable attachment to a reliable and

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National Adoption and Fostering Service, South London and Maudsley (SLAM)—Written evidence sensitive caregiver. A benefit of the permanence that follows from adoption is the possibility to establish these new, secure and reliable attachment relationships with adoptive parents. Psychiatric diagnostic systems recognise a very rare form of psychopathology related to the failure to develop an appropriate attachment system (whether secure or insecure), which in ICD-10 is called either Reactive or Disinhibited Attachment Disorder of Infancy and Early Childhood (F94.1 & F94.2). Recent evidence has suggested that at least one of these disorders (DAD) is unlikely to be related to attachment per se and is more likely to reflect the neurodevelopmental consequences of early maltreatment and neglect (Rutter, Kreppner & Sonuga-Barke, 2010). There is increasing recognition that there can be an overuse of the term attachment disorder to describe the problems in looked after and adopted child populations (Chaffin, 2006; Barth et al, 2005). Forming new attachments and the legacy of unhealthy early attachment relationships are certainly a central part of the challenges that face many adopted children and their new families. The extent to which this is a problem will vary according to different children, their experiences and also their biology (Bakermans-Kranenburg & van IJzendoorn, 2007). Hence it is important to a) not confuse the process of forming a new attachment relationship with the rare psychiatric RAD/DAD diagnoses; b) to avoid the use of generic but non-specific (and profoundly unscientific) ‘attachment disorder’ labels as they are confusing and potentially meaningless, and such labels can be a barrier to achieving an accurate assessment and effective treatment package; and c) to avoid missing the common disorders that are more likely to be the cause of current problems in this population by, for example, ascribing all problems to a generic ‘attachment disorder’ (see below). Indeed, the international practice parameters specifically recommend: ‘Although more common diagnoses, such as ADHD, conduct disorder, PTSD, or adjustment disorder, may be less exciting, they should be considered as first line diagnoses before contemplating any rare condition, such as RAD or an unspecified attachment disorder’ Chaffin et al, 2006. The uncertainty and instability that characterises adopted children’s journey from their birth family, into care and then into the adoptive home can have an impact upon a wide range of child domains including, but not restricted to, attachment processes. However, establishing a reliable and consistent relationship with sensitive and attuned carers will promote the formation of new attachments and is the ultimate aim of the therapeutic potential of adoption for these children. Attachment is at the heart of the potential therapeutic benefit for adopted children, but the evidence is now very clear that it is very rarely the primary mental health issue. Indeed, clinicians have been cautioned from the science and the evidence against ‘succumbing to the allure of rare disorders in maltreated children’ (Haugaard, 2004). Addressing problems There have been some internationally acclaimed guidelines for the assessment and treatment of children who have been maltreated and neglected and who may have attachment problems. These guidelines have been published in the world’s leading child psychiatry journal and in the world’s leading child maltreatment journal (AACAP, 2005; Chaffin et al, 2006). These guidelines have been developed by committees of world leading experts on attachment, maltreatment, child abuse and adoption/fostering using their knowledge of the available evidence base. They

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National Adoption and Fostering Service, South London and Maudsley (SLAM)—Written evidence are highly relevant for designing effective and evidence-based services for adopted children. However despite the availability of these excellent guidelines, it is our experience that there has been a very low uptake of their recommendations by adoption services (or indeed CLA services). This is particularly odd as the recommendations are very clear and relatively straightforward to implement. Our service model, being committed to the evidence base, is consistent with these parameters, which we summarise below as: • • • • • •

The central importance of a comprehensive, multidisciplinary, specialist assessment, including neurodevelopment aspects More common diagnoses such as conduct problems, ADHD and learning disabilities should be prioritized over rarer disorders Identify and apply evidence-based treatment approaches Promote placement stability with sensitive carers Support appropriate educational provision Avoid unproven therapies, such as those based on ‘regression’ or ‘holding’ as unhelpful & potentially dangerous

Support for adopted children and their families needs to be specific to the individual factors that are identified in a specialist assessment. The scientific evidence is very clear that the exposure to early maltreatment and neglect is likely to have diverse and complex consequences for different children. It is not possible to address this complexity and diversity with a ‘one size fits all’ approach, but rather a detailed, multidisciplinary specialist assessment is needed that is open to the whole range of factors that may apply, so it can identify the specific profile of strengths and difficulties for each child. Thereafter personalised, individually tailored care packages of varying intensity and cost can be specified to best fit with the child and family’s needs. In contrast to the beliefs we have frequently encountered in services, there is absolutely no evidence that traditional treatments do not work for adopted children. For example, we frequently hear the wholly unevidenced assertion that ‘consequences don’t work for adopted children’, but this statement is incompatible with the evidence base and commits a further error of blurring all adopted children into one amorphous, unindividualised category. It should be apparent that the science demands that we take an individualised approach to assessing and treating adopted children’s needs and to think about provision on a sliding scale from no action necessary to an intensive programme of support. Where problems are identified the first line treatment should always be that which is indicated by the evidence base, as it is the most likely to make a rapid and reliable impact on any child and family’s needs in an efficient, timely and cost-effective way. Of course, the impact of any intervention should be monitored for effective outcomes and if these are not apparent then a reformulation should be considered. When working with complexity it is possible to tailor the evidence based approaches to an individual case formulation and to monitor the effectiveness of these modifications (e.g., Woolgar, Bengo & Scott, in press; Appendix 4). An evidence based approach can address a range of problems identified in the formulation, but for some children there will be difficulties that go beyond the usual presentation of problems. These children may need different approaches, and it may well be that one service is insufficient to meet all of a complex child’s needs. In our service we regularly support parents to access

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National Adoption and Fostering Service, South London and Maudsley (SLAM)—Written evidence further help for problems but, importantly as per the international practice parameters, also for educational placements. Given the importance of this role in the practice parameters, it is essential that a specialist service has the expertise and skills necessary to make convincing arguments for appropriate educational support based on both the evidence base and the likely cost benefits. We further recommend that all interventions are carefully monitored and assessed for effectiveness. Such monitoring helps to safeguard against ineffective treatments and the concomitant impact upon the child’s timescales and the associated direct and indirect costs. Service accessibility & Costs It is our experience as a National Tier 4 Centre that there is a great inconsistency in service provision across the country. There are few services that embrace the evidence-based guidelines for assessment and treatment described above. To do this requires a service that has specialism in adoption, but also with attachment research, neurodevelopment, mood and behavioural problems amongst others, including educational support and placement planning. This accumulation of specialisms is hard to host outside of a dedicated multidisciplinary service. As a National Tier 4 Centre we are required to negotiate contracts with local PCTs for each case before we can accept a referral. It has been our experience that many services are reluctant to provide additional funds for specialist adoption assessments. It is also our experience that, even before the general tightening of budgets within CAMHS services, many adopted children were being denied access to appropriate local services for reasons not directly related to costs. This may be because they have not received a specialist multidisciplinary assessment informed by the guidelines. If no appropriate assessment has been undertaken this can lead to problems remaining unidentified (see data in section 1 above), or dismissed with a formulation along the lines of ‘they have an attachment disorder because they are adopted and all adopted children have that… but we don’t treat attachment disorder in our service’ (see the case studies reported in Woolgar & Scott, in press; Appendix 3); or because the child might have a complex array of sub-threshold problems of which none are sufficient in their own right to trigger a CAMHS Tier 3 referral and intervention, but which combine to cause significant and pervasive impairments (see Figure 1 above). For example, a recent case to come to our clinic reported that they had been seen four times by local CAMHS services, at the Tier 3 level, before coming to our Tier 4 service. Their experience of these specialist, but not adoption-specific, assessments for the child was as follows: 1. 2. 3. 4.

ADHD, no autism Autism, no ADHD ADHD again, but no autism Behavioural problems & inadequate parenting, but neither ADHD nor autism

Our own assessment (the fifth) indicated an accumulation of sub-threshold problems that did not easily fit into any specific disorder, but which had a cumulative effect of a significant and pervasive impairment in the child’s social and particularly educational well being. The parents were parenting a complex and misunderstood child very well, without any formal support from CAMHS because he had been denied services as he did not meet threshold for services on the

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National Adoption and Fostering Service, South London and Maudsley (SLAM)—Written evidence basis of any single disorder. The repeated and inconclusive assessments had, of course, already had a significant financial impact upon the NHS before the costs of a specialist referral. Moreover, the assessments the family had had confused the picture with discrepant messages about the child’s diagnoses. Our management plan was to ensure an appropriate package of educational support was developed to enable a child who was of good intellectual ability to achieve at the appropriate level, rather than be facing exclusion. It also recommended an evidence-based, individually tailored parenting programme to continue to fine tune the parents’ already very sensitive skills to the child’s specific difficulties and to share this approach with school. The parents had already developed their own effective and largely appropriate way of coping with the child’s behaviour on their own, outside of formal support. We frequently have to turn families down who contact us to seek out specialist adoption assessments because their PCTs will not fund it. Their local services may, for example, offer them generic psychotherapy for a generic attachment disorder, an approach for which there is no evidence base. Such local decisions are often made without a specific assessment of needs but on the a priori basis that as the child is adopted the problem must be attachment. Some areas are more wiling to consider a specialist referral and some parents are more able, and have more personal resources, to challenge PCT funding decisions. Consequently there is little equality of access to specialist assessments, and by the time we see some adoptive families they are angry, exhausted and dispirited by the barriers they have encountered. Too often we see families who could have been more easily helped earlier in their child’s life but only now have they reached a crisis point in which a placement breakdown is a distinct possibility that the situation has been considered sufficient to trigger a PCT funded referral (see page 14 of Woolgar & Scott, in Appendix 3). While the costs of a specialist assessment of adopted children’s needs may be expensive compared with other CAMHS costs, the efficiency of a definitive assessment can avoid repeated, inconclusive assessments and a delay in initiating effective treatments and appropriate school support packages. It is also likely to be much cheaper than most independent expert reports that are commissioned for the care proceedings that precede a child entering the care system. In our experience, expert reports are of variable quality and their focus is not usually on the specific needs of the child as they move into permanency but rather about their entry into the care system. Thus, relying on a previously commissioned expert report to formulate the child’s current problems and future adoption needs is likely to be unhelpful. A specialist adoption assessment will be able to guide the child’s needs for mental health services, to identify their strengths, and their educational requirements. An early assessment undertaken pre-adoption could also help to identify the appropriate adoptive families best able to meet the child’s specific needs through permanency. Consequently these assessment costs need to be compared with the costs of adoptions that are not made or which break down. Different services would probably charge different amounts for such an assessment, and the precise costs will often vary according to the complexity of the assessment and the follow up sessions required. Whether these costs arise for the referrer directly or are hidden costs within a broader service depends on the mode of service delivery in different NHS CAMHS services. It is therefore hard to quantify a typical NHS cost.

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National Adoption and Fostering Service, South London and Maudsley (SLAM)—Written evidence The costs of treatment will depend upon the form and intensity of the care package recommended. If the advice to prioritise evidence based approaches is followed, then this opens up the range of potential providers for a wide range of possible treatment options, including local CAMHS services, as well as non-NHS providers. An effective care plan makes the choice of appropriate treatment providers easier to select from either local or specialist services, in the public, third or private sectors. However, we would recommend that all providers be actively assessing and monitoring the outcomes of any treatment. This is ought to be normal practice for all treatment approaches nowadays (see the Children & Young People’s IAPT initiative for examples) but is especially important for cases with high degrees of complexity as often found in adoptive families. Future & recommendations The evidence base applies to all children and we should use this to guide our assessments, treatments and the evaluation of the effectiveness of services. It is risky, unscientific and dangerous to make global statements such as ‘consequences don’t work for adopted children’ as if they were a homogenous, undifferentiated lump instead of individuals. It also makes no scientific sense. Specialist services should replicate the best practice guidelines presented above, and this would mean a genuine multidisciplinary team (child psychiatrists, clinical psychologists with neuropsychological expertise, mental health social workers etc) in which there was an emphasis on neurodevelopmental and neuropsychological problems as well as behavioural disorders and mood problems, alongside a strong, evidence-based understanding of attachment and an aversion to a lazy reliance on unscientific, generic and non-specific ‘attachment disorder’ formulations. Overall, such services should be prepared to work within the evidence base and to be open to comprehensive bio-psycho-social formulations. The individual nature of risk and resilience processes means that adopted children and their families must be seen as individuals with varying degrees of need. Some will need a great deal of support, some none at all, and for all, the amount and degree of involvement from services may vary over the course of the child’s life. Adoption is a journey that may need varying amounts of support over the lifespan. Families should have access to support and the potential for reassessment over the lifespan as circumstances change. An effective mental health and well-being screen could be used to help target the most needy children for more intensive and expensive assessments and interventions. If used pre-adoption such an approach could also readily give information to family finding agencies to help them consider the families best suited to meet a child’s needs, and to help families understand the possible range of challenges and opportunities that adopting a specific child could bring. No one approach can serve all children and their families effectively, nor can one framework adequately explain the range and diversity of adopted children and their family’s needs – the approaches must be tailored to individual children based on a thorough and scientifically informed assessment. It ought to be the case that assessments truly guided by the evidencebase are largely equivalent across the country.

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National Adoption and Fostering Service, South London and Maudsley (SLAM)—Written evidence Finally, we are proud to be working with an association of third sector adoption agencies to develop such an evidence-based comprehensive assessment model, including a pre-adoption mental health screen, to facilitate the family finding and support packages for some of the hardest to place children. This approach is consistent with the evidence base and is targeted towards the children who are likely to present with the highest levels of need. This is an exciting development for transforming the adoption process and we expect that their Lords will have heard about this innovative project already. Dr Matt Woolgar Consultant Clinical Psychologist Prof Stephen Scott Consultant Child & Adolescent Psychiatrist & Professor of Child Health & Behaviour Dr Carmen Pinto Consultant Child & Adolescent Psychiatrist Appendices 1. 2. 3. 4.

Service booklet Service outline Woolgar, Bengo & Scott (in press) Woolgar & Scott (in press)

References American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry (AACAP). (2005). Practice parameter for the assessment and treatment of children and adolescents with reactive attachment disorder of infancy and early childhood. Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, 44, 1206-1219. Bakermans-Kranenburg, M. J. & van IJzendoorn, M. H. (2007). Research Review: genetic vulnerability or differential susceptibility in child development: the case of attachment. Journal of Child Psychology & Psychiatry, 48, 1160-1173. Barth, R. P., Crea, T. M., John, K., Thoburn, J., & Quinton, D. (2005). Beyond attachment theory and therapy: Towards sensitive and evidence-based interventions with foster and adoptive families in distress. Child & Family Social Work, 10, 257-268. Belsky, J. & Pluess, M. (2009). Beyond diathesis stress: differential susceptibility to environmental influences. Psychological Bulletin, 135, 885-908. Cassidy, J. & Shaver, P. (2008). Handbook of attachment: Theory, research, and clinical applications. New York: Guilford. Chaffin, M., Hanson, R., Saunders, B. E., Nichols, T., Barnett, D., Zeanah, C., et al. (2006). Report of the APSAC Task Force on Attachment Therapy, Reactive Attachment Disorder, and Attachment Problems. Child Maltreatment, 11, 76-89.

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National Adoption and Fostering Service, South London and Maudsley (SLAM)—Written evidence Ford, T., Vostanis, P., Meltzer, H., & Goodman, R. (2007). Psychiatric disorder among British children looked after by local authorities: Comparison with children living in private households. British Journal of Psychiatry, 190, 319-325. Haugaard, J. J. (2004). Recognizing and Treating Uncommon Behavioral and Emotional Disorders in Children and Adolescents Who Have Been Severely Maltreated: Introduction. Child Maltreatment, 9, 123-130. McCrory, E., De Brito, S., & Viding, E. (2010). Research Review: The neurobiology and genetics of maltreatment and adversity. Journal of Child Psychology & Psychiatry, 15, 1079-1095 Meltzer, H., Gatward, R., Corbin, T., Goodman, R., & Ford, T. (2003). The mental health of young people looked after by local authorities in England. London: The Stationary Office. Prior, V., & Glaser, D. (2006). Understanding Attachment and Attachment Disorders: Theory, Evidence and Practice. London: Jessica Kingsley. Rutter, M., Kreppner, J., & Sonuga-Barke, E. (2009). Emanuel Miller Lecture: Attachment insecurity, disinhibited attachment, and attachment disorders: where do research findings leave the concepts? Journal of Child Psychology & Psychiatry & Allied Disciplines, 50, 529-543. Scott, S., Briskman, J., Woolgar, M., Humayan, S., & O’Connor, T. (2011). Attachment in Adolescence: Overlap with Parenting and Unique Prediction of Behavioural Adjustment. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 52, 1052-1062. Sroufe, L. A., & Rutter, M. (1984). The domain of developmental psychopathology. Child Development, 55, 17-29. Uher, R. (2010). The genetics of mental illness: a guide for parents and adoption professionals. Adoption & Fostering, 34, 105-108 van IJzendoorn, M.H., Bakermans-Kranenburg, M.J., & Ebstein, R.P. (2011) Methylation Matters in Child Development: Toward Developmental Behavioral Epigenetics. Child Development Perspectives. (in press). Woolgar, M., & Scott, S. (in press). The negative consequences of over-diagnosing attachment disorders in adopted children: the importance of comprehensive formulations. Clinical Child Psychology & Psychiatry. Woolgar, M., Bengo, C., & Scott, S. (in press). Social learning theory-based parenting programs to treat attachment difficulties: a case-study of an older child placed late for adoption. Adoption Quarterly.

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National Adoption and Fostering Service, South London and Maudsley (SLAM)—Written evidence Table 1: Percentage of Psychiatric disorders in ONS data; diagnoses in referral letters; and clinic diagnoses (N=100) ONS figures Referral letters All A&F cases Fostering cases Adoption cases (N=1253) (N=100) (N=100) (N=51) (N=49) Male 57.1% 61.0% 58.8% 63.3% Older (11+ vs. 5-10)

59.0%

33.0%

23.5%

42.9%

BME

8.4%

34.0%

43.1%

24.5%

Any Disorder

46.4%

31.0%

64.0%

60.8%

67.3%

Anxiety - PTSD Depression

11.1% 1.9% 3.4%

5.0% 1.0% 1.0%

8.0% 2.0% 3.0%

5.9% 2.0% 3.9%

10.2% 2.0% 2.0%

Conduct Disorders - ODD - Conduct Disorder Hyperkinetic Disorders Autistic Spectrum Disorders Attachment disorder

38.9% 12.2% 26.7% 8.7%

4.0% 4.0% 0% 12.0%

53.0% 19.0% 35.0% 31.0%

45.1% 15.7% 31.4% 27.5%

61.2% 22.4% 38.8% 34.7%

2.6%

4.0%

6.0%

3.9%

8.2%

2.5%a

16.0%

4.0%

5.8%

2.0%

Neurodevelopmental disorder Learning disabilityb

12.8%

0%

12.0%

11.8%

12.2%

10.7%

3.0%

10.0%

13.7%

6.1%

a

N=523, in Meltzer et al Learning Disability as mental age 60% of chronological age in ONS, as stated in the referral letters and as IQ