Last year almost 6,000 of the 92,000 children in care across Britain were adopted – a 57% rise on previous years. An encouraging sign, yes, but are we really doing enough to change the country’s adoption landscape?
The government puts the increase in adoption orders down to its adoption action plan, with reforms and changes in adoption legislation introduced in the
Children and Families Act 2014. Following the government rhetoric that the best outcome for children in care is to be placed with an adoptive family as quickly as possible, this legislation encourages local authorities to consider placing children with potential adoptive families before an adoption plan has been agreed. The former duty of social workers to match a child’s ethnicity with adopters has also been scrapped, increasing the opportunity for adoption.
But it’s not just the welfare of a child in care that benefits from adoption – a cost calculator developed by
Loughborough University found that on average it costs a local authority £25,782 to have a child adopted, compared with a figure of up to £400,000 for each child remaining in long—term care.
The benefits of adoption are very clear, but this system, established by former education secretary Michael Gove, can be detrimental to the emotional well-being of children. When adoption (and placing children in it quickly) becomes the key outcome, children’s emotional needs can be overlooked and not properly reflected on before they are placed with adopted families. Of course, nobody is suggesting that it’s not harmful for a child to have to wait for such life-changing decisions, but these austerity cuts and judicial swiftness have a significant impact on family law reform.
Gove’s Own Story
Gove himself is no stranger to the adoption process, having been adopted in 1967 at the age of four months. Though he maintains that his experience was positive and that adoption was easier during this time, historical evidence suggests that his claim is misleading. Just one year after Gove was born, in 1968, 25,000 children were adopted in the UK, of which 92% were illegitimate and around 50% of those babies. Being a single mother was still very much a shameful and taboo subject, so for the mothers, children and other relatives, the adoption process was far from ‘straightforward’. We can see from popular TV shows such as
ITV’s Long Lost Family, that this societal issues left, and indeed still do leave, children estranged from their biological families.
The Changing Faces of Modern Adoptive Families
Legislation allowing unmarried and same-sex couples to adopt was passed almost a decade ago, and although this change was met with opposition and legal challenges, in 2013 around 6% of children in the UK were adopted by same-sex couples – a 2% increase on 2012. Another chance to maximise adoption opportunities came with the scrapping of the duty to match children with an adoptive family of the same ethnicity as them, though this also opens up the danger of children losing their sense of cultural heritage.
There are a variety of solicitors who offer support in these circumstances –
such as this example. Once on this page, there is a strong resource of related content which helps to explain important real life scenarios, so familiarise yourself with common responses before you make the necessary steps yourself.
Recently, the Children and Families Act 2014 allows children who are wards of the state to be placed with foster parents who may then go on to adopt the child. Though such placements are in place to try and prevent children losing yet another close attachment, birth families, social workers and the judicial system are challenged regarding the influence they will have on the final decision making process.
Ultimately, these decisions must be made in the privacy of courts and in respect of individual circumstances, but adoption, and the impact of being an adoptive child in the UK, is something that should remain at the forefront of our public consciousness.
