In Worcester a few days ago a doorbell rang. The occupants of the house opened it to find a newborn baby, wrapped in a hessian bag. The baby, biblically named Joseph, is doing well say the nurses. The mother is nowhere to be seen and her state can only be guessed at. Those who know about this type of thing say it’s possible she was concealing the pregnancy but this is speculation. There is a lot of speculation about babies right now, not all of it joyous.

Two infants, to be born days apart in the uncustomary heat of an English summer. While Kate and William seem delightfully grounded, it can be safely said this baby will have all its needs met and more. Cared for around the clock, doted on, protected, loved and given the best that money and social status can buy, he or she will have every opportunity. This is not carping, it is simply fact. And what of ‘Joseph?’ Though only a few days old, his opportunities in life are already closing. If his mother is found, authorities will have to determine if she can, wants to or is able to look after her baby. If she cannot, then Joseph will go into care. At that moment his life has already diminished. Joseph will join over 60,000 children in the UK in care, many who have and will spend their whole lives there. Local authorities and courts will produce a mass of paperwork and have endless discussions purporting to be about Joseph’s welfare.

The care system as it stands in the UK is unable to care for the kids it is supposed to protect. Born without any knowledge of the world and no cares, just like William and Kate’s baby, Joseph’s life will take a very different trajectory. The inept bureaucracy of the system will ensure that he is shunted between foster families, standing little chance of bonding with anyone. If he does find a foster family who love him, the authorities will probably move him. He may begin to exhibit difficult behaviour as a toddler as he wonders if anyone loves him or cares about. He is likely to be a slower learner (even though he was probably not born that way), potentially disruptive at school and may engage in anti social activities.

His chances of youth crime, drugs and being a runaway are high, far too high. His chances of being adopted by a loving family are low. Not because there are no adoptive parents but because the system makes it very hard for people to adopt. And so while Joseph languishes in care, developing emotional and physical problems, his potential family will attempt to navigate the councils and authorities and probably find it too difficult. If they do manage to adopt they will be given zero support. One day when Kate Middleton is doing her charity work, she might visit him, in prison or if he’s lucky, in care. She’ll tell everyone that she has a little boy or girl too and all children should be loved and looked after. They should. But they aren’t.

So according to Cameron and the invisible and highly reticent Edward Timpson (Minister for Children apparently though you would not think so) the reason why many potential parents don’t adopt is because adoption gets bad press. Not for a moment have they considered that the bad press is warranted. It is not a case of people being fed lies; mostly it is that those who might know anything about adoption, know that there is no support for families once you have adopted. The subset of the population who might consider adopting are generally a well-informed lot: they know that once you take on the responsibility of a child who has been in the care system you get a sack load of trauma and neglect but not tools to help you deal with it. Kids in care suffer twice (at least), first from biological parents who can’t look after them or don’t want them. They’re already messed up but the care system then shunts them around and makes sure they’re well and truly feeling the pain of neglect.
Love is not enough for these kids. For someone adopted as a baby it may be ok but the reality is that most kids will be toddlers at least, before they are adopted. They will have felt abuse, emotional and physical pain and much more besides. They will need specialist care to either prevent them developing a form of mental illness or to treat it . But they won’t get it. Almost to the day that parents and children come together to form a family, they will be left alone. Local authorities and councils, happy to pass the parcel, will cross them off their list.

This example  is typical of how well-meaning people end up exhausted after fighting for years to get post-adoption support for their kids. Most never secure funding for the therapy that’s needed and it is not uncommon for them to return the child to care because they are unable to cope.

“Our son, who we’ve had since he was two, at age nine became incredibly aggressive and clearly has behavioural problems. “Now he’s a nearly 16-year-old who’s over 20 stone, and I’ve been pinned against the wall and my head smashed in. I regularly would get hit,and his mouth is like a sewer. I love him to bits, but I wouldn’t say I’m very proud of him. We’ve been close many times to picking up the phone and saying ‘we can’t do this’.”

While social workers may reassure parents during the adoption process that they have the right to an assessment of a child’s needs, they may not explicitly communicate that there is no duty on a local authority to provide the services to meet any needs that are identified. And because no statutory agency has any obligation to stump up, all too often, they don’t.

And so we come back again to one of the central platforms for Adopt a Better Way: the lack of a central regulating body. Without it we have no exact data as to how many children are returned to care as a result of lack of support. how many children develop mental illness during their first years in care and what is needed to minimise this awful chain of events. initiatives such as the ill-thought out adoption passport do not attempt to address key issues including how to monitor the performance of councils or how to move towards a structure that supports children and parents so they can come together and stay together. But with such a reductive government in power, one who talks a great deal about families but whose policies are almost resolutely anti-family, it is hard to see how this will happen.

Adoption with Humanity welcomes the new action plan. However, we continue to believe that sadly this will not make the changes necessary to improve the adoption system and assert the best interests of children. The reason remains the same – there still isn’t the appropriate regulatory authority to ensure that the government will be able to achieve the Minister’s stated goal “to accelerate the whole adoption process so that more children benefit from adoption and more rapidly”.

Far too much slack is given to local authorities and voluntary adoption agencies to achieve standards that they had already been expected (and failed) to meet for seven years. There is a role to help manage local family courts for the Family Justice Board at national level and the Local Family Justice Operational Boards – but the “elephant in the room” is that the courts and the adoption agencies are working to completely different and opposed laws and no effort has been made to align them. In addition, there is no integrated structure to ensure that sanctions can be taken to minimise and moderate the effects of failure.

Evidence is continuing to come to light about the failures of the current system – most recently the scandal of the unreliability of professional expert witnesses in family courts, and the excessive reliance that judges place on their reports, which has been described as “staggeringly wrong”.
Please read the article below, “How competent are expert witnesses?”

We maintain that the need for an adoption regulator, with regulatory investigatory and enforcement powers to meet statutory objectives set by the government, is only increasing.

The rationale for an integrated national adoption regulator in England and Wales is based on four primary considerations:
▪   The advantage of having a single regulator which is clearly accountable for its performance against statutory objectives, including:
-          the development of regulations
-          the investigation of the application of regulations
-          the enforcement of regulations
-          sanctions to be applied for the failure to abide by regulation.
▪   To ensure that regulation is consistent with the results of research and best practice world wide.
▪   To take advantage of economies of scale and scope and to add value by being able to allocate scarce regulatory resources efficiently and effectively.
▪   To take advantage of the benefits of being able to resolve the various interest groups and differing philosophies in one integrated authority.

These considerations explain why Adoption with Humanity continues to call for the Government to reassess the situation and set up a National Adoption Authority to act as an integrated national adoption regulator. The Government’s Action Plan for Adoption is doomed to failure and too much time will be wasted on allowing this to happen – and in the meanwhile it is the children who will pay the price.

I don’t think we’re any way towards meeting the problem with the reforms it needs. In conversations with both Martin Narey (newly appointed Adoption Czar) and Tim Loughton, the Minister for Children I was impressed with the way both men understood the problem. And I think their intentions are there. However I am not convinced that they are going to generate any substantial mileage in terms of really making any difference – the kind of difference that will change the appalling statistic that out of 4000 children up for adoption in 2010, less than 300 were adopted.

Why is this the case? Again I am loathe to apportion blame on social workers and local authorities as they are merely instruments of the system. It must be said they have used that to make not wholly safe judgements that have tended to be in the interest of keeping families together, rather than finding care and safety for the child. It is the DfE and the government who need to be more accountable though, for their parts in this immoral and often, inhumane circus.

We live in cash strapped times. Councils have always known they can save money, rather a lot of money, by keeping children in care instead of helping them towards adoption. This is going to exacerbate the situation. Sure you can save yourself a bit of money in the short term. And when those neglected kids fail to complete school and end up in prison then what? Because the statistics show us what happens and David Cameron knows it too.

A government that won’t take responsibility for something so fundamental to the well being of children and society is not behaving like a government Government. What we want to see is the government using its weight to enforce any measures with  Local Authorities, Social Workers and Family Courts.

Otherwise Local Authorities will do what they have done before and ignore them and hide behind them. We still won’t have the clarity of direction we need.

That’s why we need a National Adoption Authority which will be able to impose guidelines and ensure there are penalties for not following them. We need much more of course, like a more streamlined process in the family courts that does not aggravate the delays already present in the system. But most of all we need David Cameron to take the lead.

Dear Prime Minister,

Ref: Adoption with Humanity’s call for a “National Adoption Authority”

As you are aware, the adoption system in this country is in crisis and in dire need of reform. We were very pleased to hear you speak out on the subject in your speech at the Conservative Party Conference this year, and welcome your support for a reform of the system.

We have recently met with Mr Tim Loughton MP and are grateful for his plans for reform, however we strongly believe that there is an imperative need for the government to go one step further and create a “regulator” – a body which would ensure the proposed reforms are met; one that would be able to deal with everything from the delays and conflicts in the courts, to the Department of Education, as well as the local authorities.

We believe that whilst the government’s proposals are a good start, without taking on the challenges of the lack of authority and unity of purpose of the various parts of the adoption system, the changes will be nothing more than a token effort resembling that of the previous government’s call for reform ten years ago.

This “Regulator” or National Adoption Authority (NAA) as we would suggest, would bring together the social work and justice systems, and create a rational control structure to ensure co-operation between these two parts of the state. This will guarantee that current and future policies are made to happen and their success measured. We believe that only by setting up a National Adoption Authority will the government be able to claim its authority over adoption practices.

The rationale behind calling for an “Authority” is simple. It is, we believe, the only way that the divergent interests and policies from different departments can be brought into harmony and one set of laws, regulations and guidelines be imposed. Rather than being invested in an individual it would bring together, via a controlling mixed representative body, all the best thinking in adoption law and practice.

The NAA will not be a new “quango”, instead it will replace the team within the DoE with a structure that would have authority over local authorities, voluntary adoption agencies and the courts to enforce government policies. To confirm this is successful a much stronger version of the “inspection” function of OFSTED will need to be created as part of the NAA.

We would like to clarify that it is a National Adoption Authority (and not Agency) that we are proposing. Setting up a National Adoption Agency would involve considerable time and expense, and be in danger of replicating the same attitudes and behaviours that are causing problems in the current system.

We have set up a petition on the government site, a copy of which is enclosed, and are calling for support in our campaign.

Please see the enclosed document “Our Proposed Solution to the Adoption Crisis” for a fuller explanation and more details can be found on our website www.adoptionwithhumanity.co.uk.

We thank you for your time in considering our suggestion and hope for your support.

I feel great because of the recent national media interest in my adoption campaign as the momentum builds up for National Adoption Week which starts tomorrow when I will be delivering our Adoption with Humanity petition to 10 Downing Street with my daughter Gaia, fellow founders Alex Bemrose and Stevan Whitehead, and Alex’s young son Jose. I hope this petition helps to make a difference and provide love and security for children who have been left to languish in care. Do look out for us this week on Sky News, ITV and Channel 4, as well as in the press.

This article appeared in today’s Sunday Times and also included the story of how Rick and I adopted two babies from Mexico, as well as a picture of us spanning six columns at the top of the page. It’s case studies like this which reinforces to the public and politicians the need for change, and we believe that setting up a National Adoption Authority would be the best solution.

Here is the Sunday Times article, with Gaia looking cute in her Halloween dress!

David Cameron’s adviser on adoption is to crack down on councils that ban white people from giving homes to black children, or bar smokers and the obese from adopting

Martin Narey, former chief executive of Barnardo’s, the children’s charity, warned that local authorities could face a legal ban on preventing couples from adopting children of another race if they do not voluntarily change their practice.
He blames the barriers put up by many councils for the sharp fall in adoptions and the delays of more than three years endured by large numbers of children before they are given a stable home. The insistence by many social workers that black children should only be adopted by black parents is, said Narey, “preposterous”.
Narey, appointed adoption tsar by the prime minister earlier this year, said in an interview with The Sunday Times he was “appalled” by councils that refused to consider smokers as adoptive parents.
He said removing unnecessary barriers could cut the amount of time it takes to assess people for suitability as adopters from more than a year to four months, as already happens in some areas such as Harrow, northwest London.
He said enough suitable couples initially came forward to adopt, but there was a shortage because so many were put off after being “ground down” by a process that can involve a dozen visits from social workers and filling in health and safety forms that went into “ludicrous” detail.
Recent figures showed the number of adoptions had fallen 8% since 2007 and that just 60 babies a year were being placed permanently with families, compared with 4,000 in 1974.
Narey, speaking ahead of announcements by Cameron on adoption this week, warned that black children were three times less likely than white ones to be adopted from care homes, partly because of a shortage of black couples willing to adopt and because so many white ones were being turned down.
He said guidance from the Labour government in 2000 had not been followed, adding: “Michael Gove [the education secretary] has issued fresh guidance to say that seeking an ethnic match should not delay adoption.
“We need to see whether that guidance is listened to … By the end of the year, I think I will have a pretty good picture. If it hasn’t, then my advice to ministers … will be that they will have to go beyond guidance … possibly to legislation.”
He added: “In some US states it is illegal to take account of ethnicity in adoption. It can’t even be mentioned and trans-racial adoptions are hugely successful there.
“Race does matter, but there aren’t enough black adopters. I believe that to suggest a white couple can’t raise a black child and be supported to help with the racism that child might encounter is just preposterous.”
He said he had been “told by the British Association of Social Workers that the reason they don’t support trans-racial adoptions is that they break down in large numbers. It is simply untrue, there is no evidence”.
Martin Narey wants councils to take quicker action on children living in squalor (Matt Lloyd) Narey, who is also a former chief executive of the National Offender Management Service, was brought up in Middlesbrough as the eighth of nine children with “25 or 26” nephews and nieces, including five who had been adopted.
“It was irrelevant that they were adopted,” said Narey, who recently wrote a report on the adoption system as part of a campaign by The Times. “They were just my nephews and nieces.”
He said he believed it was vital to expand adoption, and for councils to become more willing to remove children from neglectful parents and put them in care homes before adoption.
“I am talking about children living in squalor, not being fed properly, not being loved, not being nurtured, being brought up without any aspirations, seeing violence, being the subject of violence,” said Narey.
Ministers taking a strong interest in adoption include Gove who was adopted as a baby after just four months in care.
Narey also backed a call by Tim Loughton, the children’s minister, who while speaking about adoption earlier this month at the Tory conference in Manchester said: “If you smoke, come forward.”
Some councils bar or heavily restrict smokers from adopting and fostering, even if they are otherwise well qualified.
Wiltshire council, for example, will not allow smokers to be given children under the age of five, or older boys and girls with respiratory problems.
Last month it emerged that Clare and Paul Baker had been told by Essex council that they were not fit to be foster parents after Paul admitted to smoking two cigars in 18 months.
Narey added: “That is not to say you shouldn’t be saying to a parent, ‘Look, you should be thinking about your smoking’ … but it is like saying we are not going to allow parents to conceive if they are smoking. It is a nonsense.”
He also said obesity should not be a bar to becoming adoptive parents. Two years ago a couple from Leeds were turned down for adoption because the husband, Damien Hall, was classified as morbidly obese.
Narey said it was “entirely typical” for some councils to take a year or more to approve carers. He singled out safety forms drawn up by the British Association for Adoption and Fostering and used by most local authorities.
“I want a rigorous system, I don’t want an adoptive child to go to carers who haven’t been properly vetted,” said Narey. “But we can do it much more quickly and we have to accept we can’t head off every possibility. Checking there are locks on the cutlery drawer is not a very valid part of a family’s ability to adopt children.
“The social worker has to complete a health and safety check that runs to five or six pages, checking such banalities as, for example, if there is a trampoline in the garden, does it have a safety net?”

Picture courtesy of Paul Vicente, Sunday Times

ADOPTION REFORMS PETITION TO BE PRESENTED AT 10 DOWNING STREET

Media invited to attend petition presentation: 13.00 on 31 October, 2011

A petition urging the government to form a National Adoption Authority and put the needs of children at the forefront of adoption reforms in the UK is to be presented at 10 Downing Street.

More than 1,200 supporters have signed a petition launched by Adoption with Humanity and firmly believe their proposals will overcome the present failing bureaucratic system which in the last year has seen only 60 babies under the age of one be adopted. It will be delivered to Downing Street on 31 October, the first day of National Adoption Week.

Francesca Polini, who adopted two children from Mexico after being turned down by her local authority in Ealing, London, and whose three-year-old daughter Gaia will present the petition, said: “It is important we take our message straight to the heart of government and we are doing this during National Adoption Week in the hope that our message is heard and listened to.

“We want to see changes implemented as soon as possible which will make a difference to the lives of countless young people who are left to languish in care homes.”

Adoption with Humanity was founded by Francesca, along with Stevan Whitehead and Alex Bemrose, who also both adopted children from overseas after being turned down in the UK for their skin colour and class.

It is proposed that the NAA have control over local authorities and courts and is governed by those involved in the adoption process, including social workers, psychologists, doctors, adoptive parents, birth mothers and adoptees.

One of the NAA key proposals is that a personal budget should be allocated to the child (similar to a statement of special educational needs) and the creation of a separate national budget for the assessment and preparation of potential adopters. Funding for this would come from the reallocation of budgets from the Department of Education and Ofsted.

Francesca says: “These proposals would result in significant improvements, resulting in less time being spent in care and a reduction of wasted time and resources as a result of proper co-ordination between agencies and the courts. Most importantly, more children would be placed in loving and secure homes earlier in their lives.”

Support for the campaign has been given by its patron Baroness King of Bow, Oona King, and courtier dress designer Bruce Oldfield, a former Barnardo’s boy.

Baroness King says: “Like Francesca I am an adoptive parent of two lovely children. And like her, I have experienced the utter frustration, despair and anger at the way the current system operates. This is not apolitical issue: successive governments have failed to solve the problem. So what’s the problem? Simply that a failing system discourages adoptive parents from adopting, and penalises children born into dysfunctional families.  These are children whose birth parents have usually been abused or neglected.

“Often, the best way out for these most vulnerable children is adoption. But adoption just isn’t accepted by the system. That’s why only a few dozen babies were adopted last year. The courts and local authorities need to be held to account, and the government of the day must get a grip.  Our government has a moral duty to get the system working, introduce national procedures, and rid the system of unnecessary obstacles. And there isn’t a moment to waste. I look forward to helping Francesca in her quest to change things for the better.”

Bruce Oldfield says: “Adoption today in the UK is itself dysfunctional. I find it particularly absurd that that colour and culture are preventing children being adopted by families because social workers and local authorities think it won’t work. I myself was raised by a single white woman, an extraordinary lady who looked after six of us in all. None of us were white. Her love, encouragement and the stable home she gave all of us was far more important than the colour we were born with.

“She is the reason I am who I am today and also the reason I am a couturier. As a dressmaker herself she was my role model. Without her there would be no Bruce Oldfield.  When Francesca told me what she was doing with Adoption With Humanity, I was immediately behind her.

“We need to get back to basics and to what adoption is all about and that is children who need parents and would be parents who have the love to give those children.”

Please contact our Press Officer Ellee Seymour on 07939 811961 if you wish to attend.

Having the power to change laws so that more children can be placed in loving homes is surely the most wonderful achievement. It’s one I am hoping our government will act on very soon and I eagerly await an announcement from David Cameron during National Adoption Week which starts on 31 October.

One of the greatest media advocates for adoption reform has been The Times, and particularly its Social Affairs correspondent Rosemary Bennett. The paper’s headline yesterday could have been spoken by me, “‘Set up a national agency’ to run adoption services”. These are words I have actively been promiting for our Adoption with Humanity campaign as we believe a National Adoption Agency is desperately needed to provide an efficient adoption service in the UK.

However, this time, the words were said by Dr Chris Hanvey, head of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, who is appalled by the “disgraceful” small number of children adopted each year in the UK.

He accuses adoption services of succumbing to prejudice, and ignoring the fact that the younger a child is adopted, the more successful it is likely to be.

Writing in The Times Thunderer column, he says: ” It is time to set up a national adoption agency, answerable annually to Parliament for its performance and committed, through a regional network to develop standardised measures aimed at boosting the number of number of children adopted each year.

“A national service would have a number of advantages. It would allow a greater flow of information on adopters, and children waiting to be matched, preventing local authorities for hanging on to ‘their’ adopters. If organised on a  regional basis it could abolish local authority adoption panels, which are subject to the vagaries of individual members.”

Thank you for speaking out Dr Hanvey. I hope those who can bring about adoption reforms will take note of your wise words which we believe in too.

It was horrible. It made you feel small. And useless. That’s nothing compared to how it feels to not be adopted. As I write adoption in the UK is in a sadly dysfunctional state. The system is broken and it means that there are thousands of children awaiting adoption- 4000 approximately at present. In the past year, there were less than 300 adoptions.

It’s not for lack of potential parents either. Each year there are hundreds of couples who apply and go through one of the most searching processes just to be allowed to adopt. And often they give up.

Why? Because local authorities and councils are applying rules of their own making, something is wrong. The authority vacuum and the lack of any leadership on the part of the government means that it takes at least 2 years and 7 months for a child to be adopted. But first they have to be removed from the family that can’t or won’t look after them. And that isn’t happening because the system thinks that keeping a child in a family that can’t or won’t love them is better than finding them someone who will.

By the time a child is adopted they may be around four years old.

By the time a child reaches five, it is put into the too hard basket and is less likely to be adopted.

And if you’re a black or mixed race child, forget it. It probably won’t happen.

These children will have suffered first at the hands of a family that neglected them and secondly at the hands of social workers and local authorities who simply have no motivation to place children with new families. Instead they try to keep them in the place that has made their childhood a memorable one for the wrong reasons.

You can make a difference. Please, please respond to this by clicking here and signing our petition and urging your friends and colleagues to do the same.

For their sake.

“Like Francesca, I am an adoptive parent of two lovely children. And like her I have experienced the utter frustration, despair and anger at the way the current system operates. This is not a political issue: successive governments have failed to solve the problem. So what’s the problem? Simply that a failing system discourages adoptive parents from adopting, and penalises children born into dysfunctional families.

“These are children whose birth parents have usually been abused or neglected.  Often, the best way out for these most vulnerable children is adoption. But adoption just isn’t accepted by the system. That’s why only a few dozen babies were adopted last year. The courts and local authorities need to be held to account, and the government of the day must get a grip.  Our government has a moral duty to get the system working, introduce national procedures, and rid the system of unnecessary obstacles. And there isn’t a moment to waste. I look forward to helping Francesca in her quest to change things for the better.”

Bruce Oldfied says:  “Adoption today in the UK is itself dysfunctional. I find it particularly absurd that that colour and culture are preventing children being adopted by families because social workers and local authorities think it won’t work. I myself was adopted by a single white woman, an extraordinary lady who adopted six of us in all. None of us were white. Her love, encouragement and the stable home she gave all of us was far more important than the colour we were born with.

“She is the reason I am who I am today and also the reason I am a couturier. As a dressmaker herself she was my role model. Without her there would be no Bruce Oldfield.  When Francesca told me what she was doing with Adoption With Humanity, I was immediately behind her. We need to get back to basics and  to what adoption is all about and that is children who need parents and would be parents who have the love to give those children.”