My article for February's Adoption Today

1. Need we panic about the sudden fall in adoptions?
I’ve been closely involved with adoption since about 2008 and, since my
“retirement” in 2011, it’s been a very big part of both my working and personal life.
Social media, particularly E-mail and Twitter, mean that general and individual
anxieties about adoption are soon known to me.
There’s no denying that the last few months have been challenging. For three years
we saw a steady and significant increase in adoption numbers. Two thousand
children a year more children found permanent and loving homes through adoption
in 2013-14 than in 2010-11. After a slow start, and much to do with the leadership
provided by the voluntary sector, particularly, the Consortium of Voluntary
Adoption Agencies, Directors of Children’s Services and local authorities have
responded brilliantly to the Government’s reforms. As a consequence, last year, we
could be sure that the number of children missing out on adoption had fallen
significantly although, in my view, there was and is scope for adoption numbers in
England to reach beyond the 5,000 peak reached last year.
But the last few months has seen the troubling drop in both placement orders and
applications for placement orders about which all adopters are aware. That is why,
and as Adoption Today reported in its last issue, my Adoption Leadership Board
published myth busting guidance to correct what I – but more importantly the
President of the Family Division, Sir James Munby – believed to be a serious
misinterpretation of two court judgements (Re B and Re BS).
Just before Christmas, Sir James issued another judgement Re R which confirmed the
view taken in the Myth Buster. In that judgement (Re R) Sir James said:
“There appears to be an impression in some quarters that an adoption application now has to
surmount 'a much higher hurdle' or even that 'adoption is over’...[Such concerns] plainly
need to be addressed, for they are all founded on myths and misconceptions which need to be
run to ground and laid to rest… Where adoption is in the child's best interests, local
authorities must not shy away from seeking, nor courts from making, care orders with a plan
for adoption, placement orders and adoption orders"
Nothing could be more unequivocal. But I know that some adopters waiting for
children and, most particularly those with children but not yet with an adoption
order, remain extremely anxious. This is because in the wake of the cases last year
we have seen an increase in the number of challenges to adoption orders, and in one
case, which has caused shock waves, a child in Rotherham has been removed from
his adoptive home and is to be raised by his Aunt.

2. Understandably this has caused extreme anxiety. But its important to stress that
although there has been a sharp increase in challenges to the granting of the
adoption orders, this case is the only one where adopters have seen a child removed.
And in Rotherham – this cannot be stressed sufficiently – the circumstances were so
exceptional that the local authority recommended that the child be brought up by
the Aunt while the Judge referred to this being the hardest case he’d had to deal
with in 20 years on the bench.
Of course it cannot be guaranteed that this might not happen again (it has always
happened very occasionally) but adopters do not need to panic. The new judgement
published before Christmas, with its emphasis on adoption being the right thing
when it is in the child’s best interests, and its dismissal of any notion that adoption is
only right when absolutely nothing else will do, should offer great comfort.
I think we have turned a corner and I shall be extremely disappointed if in 2015 we
do not see a recovery in placement orders as well as fall in challenges to adoption
orders.