I was a little hesitant, as I am these days, after considerable media exposure where I have found – as many do- that it’s not what you think it’s going to be. But I was both surprised and delighted; Myleene and her team were absolutely adorable.

I told her I was impressed that she had included adoption as a core part of her series: she’d also included gay parenting. This was a breath of fresh air compared to my experience so far. On most websites (including that big mums one!) and in magazines, adoption usually hardly rates a mention. It is still, it seems, akin to an illness that afflicts some very unlucky people. In a world where IVF and other forms of conceiving are talked about, this feels plainly wrong.

I was struck and reassured by Myleene’s warmth. It’s the mother in her I totally admire. She is genuinely into her role as a parent and mum: during the breaks in filming  she peppered me with questions about my childcare arrangements when I am working or travelling and how I dealt with those inevitable tantrums.

We talked about dilemmas involved in finding someone to look after your kids. Let’s face it you can find women with great skills but will they love your kids the way you would want them to ? We exchanged experiences on how unforgiving kids can be if you slip up and don’t accompany them to school on one day, even if you have been consistent in doing so before. I told her that when it happened to me I found Gaia at the school door, all cocky and careless, saying: “Go away mamma!”.  But really she was just confused in her own little way.

It was one of my more pleasant media sessions, and, as I left, Myleene briefly interrupted her phone call to shout: “Stay strong as they are all out to get us! Forget about all this other stuff, being a mum is the hardest job in the world!”

Thanks Myleene for such a lovely experience.

Click here to see the video of us together.

We had to go to Mexico to escape UK’s twisted system: How one couple who wanted to adopt got round council bureaucracy

Twice, my husband and I have tried to adopt children through our local authority. Twice, the over-bureaucratic, ideologically-twisted local authority has stood in our way.

Eventually, we had to travel halfway around the world, to Mexico, where  thanks to a far more efficient, orderly, sane system we now have a beautiful three-year-old daughter, Gaia, and one-year-old son, Luca.

The adoption system in Britain is a mess. The average child will wait two years and seven months to be adopted and during that time they will be bounced around the system while their birth mother – often addicted to drugs or alcohol – continues to neglect them.At the same time, the desperate adoptive parents are forced to jump through every hoop the local authority asks them to.

One of the most pernicious ideas in current thinking is that children should be placed with parents who exactly match their racial make-up.
I am white and Italian – although I have lived in Britain for 16 years – and my husband is white and British.

Our local authority, Ealing in West London, rejected our application immediately without even seeing us in the flesh. Apparently they deemed we were too white and middle class. Although we are medically able to have children, we chose to adopt. I have an adopted younger brother and I have seen at first hand the wonderful benefits of adoption.

We were a perfectly ordinary, decent, suburban couple hoping to provide a child with a loving home. We were both in full-time employment: my husband Rick is an ex-banker who works for an energy company and I used to be global communications director for Greenpeace.

We didn’t even smoke – often a problem for prospective adoptive parents.But we were treated like criminals. We were presumed guilty until proven innocent. The local authorities will talk to your parents and your relatives, get bank references and work references. It’s extraordinary – why would we be prepared to go through all this if we didn’t want to be good parents? It was extremely frustrating and invasive.We already owned our own home but we had to renovate it in order to satisfy the local council even before the process of being approved for adoption had begun.

After they had rejected us, Ealing even admitted they had a cap on the number of white parents who could adopt black children and in a farcical twist, after denying us the chance to adopt a non-white child from the same postcode, they suggested we adopt abroad. Mexico was a bit of a roll of the dice, chosen partly because I could speak Spanish. The Mexican end of the process was wonderfully efficient. Our caseworker met us within a week, and talked us through the process.

The authorities were a  hundred times more caring  than in Britain. Here, we never once met our caseworker at the Department for Education. Whenever we sent them an email, we got an automated email response, saying we couldn’t contact them; they’d have to contact us.

The only problem in adopting Gaia came from the British end. It was a shambles every step of the way. We were approved by our local authority and the Department for Education before going to Mexico. But once we got to Mexico, the British Department for Education lost our papers, and we had to wait three and a half months for them to post the documents to us.

Finally, when we came back through Heathrow, our two-and-a-half-month-old daughter was detained for six hours by immigration authorities, and we were accused of being child traffickers. But Gaia settled in happily and we began to think about adopting again.

When we returned to Ealing to tell them that we wanted to adopt another child, we thought our chances were better as a mixed-race family. No chance. The local authority told us we could only adopt another Mexican baby, from Ealing. What were the chances of finding a baby with that exact background in that exact postcode!

So we returned to Mexico and adopted Luca. This time, the process took only three months (it took six months for Gaia, because of British inefficiency). To adopt a baby in Britain takes nearly three years.

In February, the Government tried to reverse this farcical state of affairs, laying down new guidelines covering ‘transracial’ adoptions, saying that race should not be an issue. But inter-racial adoptions haven’t increased as a result, because local councils and social workers blithely ignore the guidelines and refuse to make the interests of vulnerable little children a priority.

This was reported in The Times yesterday by Social Affairs Correspondent Rosemary Bennett who used my experiences as a case study saying:

“Ofsted’s new inspection regime may in future allow couples like Francesca and Rick Polini to adopt children from care.

“Turned down by Ealing council, West London, where they live, because so few white children in care were seeking adoptive families and they were considered unsuitable to adopt an ethnic minority child, they went on to adopt two children from Mexico. Mrs Polini, 41, wrote Mexican Takeaway about their experiences.

“‘The Government has made a start … it remains to be seen if local authorities will follow it,’” she said.

Thank you again to The Times for being so proactive in promoting the desperate need for a fairer adoption system in the UK which I totally support, and thank you for giving my book a great plug!