A curious thing has happened to adoptions in the UK: while the pool of approved adopters has expanded, the number of adoptions is in decline. Covid-19 is partly to blame, but this trend predates it. The effects have been devastating: children are now waiting much longer — an average of 660 days — to be adopted.
There are a number of factors at play here, including the pressure on family courts and local authorities, and disrupted working patterns during the pandemic. The cost of living crisis has added new complexities: as ageing foster parents retire, young couples facing financial uncertainty are less willing to take children in. Social workers specialising in adoption are particularly hard to recruit, the training is complex and the churn rate is high.
“Many in the workforce in children’s services have less than two years’ post-qualified experience. Many will never have seen an adoption,” Carol Homden, CEO of Coram, Britain’s oldest children’s charity, tells me.
There are also funding issues. Local authorities, which are already under enormous financial strain, are increasingly reluctant to pay voluntary agencies to recruit, train, assess and support adopters. In the past year, two — St Francis’ Children’s Society and Families for Children — became insolvent and folded, further reducing capacity in the system. Delays matter for multiple reasons, not least because, as Homden warns, the longer children are waiting in care, the less likely they are to be adopted.
Adoptions have undergone an extraordinary evolution over the past century. The system was only formalised after women joined the workforce and parliament in the 1920s. By 1946, the number of legal adoptions had reached 21,000, but it is likely that others were arranged informally by family doctors. This was not always successful, and some young mothers were forced to give up their children. Unbeknown to their biological parents, thousands of youngsters were sent to Australia in the 1950s and 60s.
The peak year for adoptions in England and Wales was 1968, at 24,800. But after this point, the availability of both contraception and abortion services sparked a dramatic drop in the number of unwanted pregnancies. The corresponding rapid decline in adoptions was also spurred by the increasing provision of social security benefits, childcare and housing to unmarried mothers, who could now afford to raise their own children.
However, some of this progress is now at risk. Fewer adoptions mean more children ending up in care, which results in worse life outcomes. Both infants and prospective adopters — who have been approved via a meticulous and costly vetting process — are waiting desperately for the local authorities to get their act together.
According to Homden, “things are very likely to get worse before they get better”. This is a system that is quick to veer off the rails, and very slow to get back on track.
