UK Children’s minister says ‘Spanish Inquisition’ style adoption process is too slow and bureaucratic
The Guardian reported yesterday: Plans to speed up adoptions in the UK aim to encourage people put off by a current assessment process akin to the “Spanish Inquisition”, according to children’s minister Tim Loughton.
Announcing an overhaul of the system, which has been criticised for being too slow, unnecessarily bureaucratic and not fit for purpose, Loughton said: “We desperately need more adopters.”
A group of experts has been asked to draw up a new system to recruit and assess individuals as adoptive parents, as some research shows as many as one in three prospective adopters fail to adopt at the end of a process that can take years.
Describing the current process as “more like the Spanish Inquisition in some cases”, Loughton said reform was needed to make the system as speedy and rigorous as possible.
“Too many people have contacted me to say look, we wanted to adopt, the process went on for far, far too long and in the end we decided that we’d blow that for a game of soldiers and we gave up. That’s crazy when we need more adopters,” he said in a BBC interview.
“All the time we wait and delay, that’s more months and years in the care system for young children who could, some of them, enjoy a permanent placement with an adoptive loving family.”
Latest government statistics show children wait an average of two years and seven months before being adopted, while this process takes more than three years in a quarter of cases. Potentially suitable adoptive parents are often turned away because they may not be the right ethnic match, are overweight or may have smoked”.
“Dedicated social workers are spending too long filling out forms instead of making sound, commonsense judgments about someone’s suitability to adopt,” said Loughton,
The expert panel is made up of representatives from across the adoption sector, including the Consortium of Voluntary Adoption Agencies, British Association of Adoption and Fostering, Adoption UK, and the Association of Directors of Children’s Services. Working with Martin Narey, government adviser and former chief executive of the charity Barnado’s, it will provide recommendations in March for a system to be introduced later in the year.
It has been asked to consider arrangements for an improved recruitment process for adopters; ensure those who come forward are not lost in the system; streamline the training and assessment process; remove bureaucracy; provide timescales for training and assessing suitable adopters, and design a national assessment form based on a robust analysis of an individual’s capacity to care for a child in need of adoption.
The group is also expected to suggest whether new monitoring and evaluation mechanisms are required to measure the success of the reformed system.
Narey said assessment reports under the present system could run to 140 pages, while there were about 1,000 children currently cleared for adoption with no adopters available.
“Some remarkable potential adopters are so frustrated when it meanders on for years not months, that they go to extraordinary lengths to adopt children from China, Nicaragua and Guatemala. We force some really fine people, who would be marvellous adopters, to go and adopt outside the UK when they would like a child from this country,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.
He said he believed the new system would be more rigorous, despite being shorter, as the current system is too repetitive.
“It binds social workers to a huge series of questions, some of which are simply banal”, he said, citing examples of social workers being asked to check if trampolines were in gardens, and if so whether there were safety nets.
“Social workers need to have a little more discretion and be trusted to find the right parents for some very challenged children, and having seen some of those reports which go to more than 140 pages in my experience, I simply know we can do better.”
Jonathan Pearce, chief executive of Adoption UK, said one in three prospective adopters “were not welcomed into the system”, with ethnicity among several factors taken into account.
“Sometimes it could be due to the fact that there is preference for married couples, so single people might find it harder to get into the process, gay and lesbian people may find it hard. There are lots of different things. It is not always just about race and ethnicity,” he said.
He called for standardised rules across local authorities, saying the process differed widely throughout England and was a “postcode lottery”.
However, Hilton Dawson, chief executive of the British Association of Social Workers, cautioned that speed must not be the priority.
“It’s essential that the adoption process remains as rigorous as possible. I don’t think that the government should emphasis speed over the quality of assessment. Adoption is for life.
“This isn’t something that people should enter into lightly. They are making a lifelong commitment to these children and what we must try to avoid at great cost is adoption break down”, he said.
Loughton’s announcement forms part of a wider programme of reform to the adoption and care system. Further proposals are expected to be set out in the new year.