Adoption Leadership Board: The Changing Face of Adoption & Special Guardianship

The Adoption Leadership Board have commissioned a project to:

'understand and predict the future needs of children who are adopted or in special guardianship arrangements and their families, in order to plan a future system that effectively meets their support needs.' 

Today I was invited, along with lots of others, to a workshop to consider and discuss the initial findings of the report. I'm not going to try to give you a blow by blow account of the day but perhaps the key points from my perspective. Of course others in the room may have come away with different points to discuss. In fact my main thoughts are still in formation so I'm not going to bother you with them until I can make my own sense of them.

Those present included Special Guardians and kinship carers as well as a range professionals and adopters from different locations. It was humbling to meet with non adopters that face all of the challenges that we adopters do with less support or status. We came together to consider permanency and the future needs.

John Simmonds OBE gave a fantastic, and sobering, whistle stop tour through the history of adoption from The Adoption of Children Act in 1926 . We need to know where we've come from to inform where we're going and he did this fantastically highlighting lessons learned and not learned from the last 100 years especially.  We then had Prof. Beth Neil give a brief history and overview of contact with birth family. This was sobering as she noted that direct contact is occurring less now than when she first studied it 20 years ago in spite of the acknowledged potential benefits for many children.

That lead us to discuss specific areas of support and future policy. The idea that many families want an open door to support built on trust and relationship rather than having to revive closed cases with no corporate knowledge of families and routes to support that run a gauntlet of call to the front desk that may lead you into an unwanted or unnecessary child protection cul de sac. We debated how this would be described. A 'watchful waiting' or 'keeping in mind' by post adoption teams, language matters and I can see flaws in these two descriptions. The conversations then moved to other key issues that had been highlighted in the consultations.

Contact, what support and preparation will be be needed to facilitate contact between significant and meaningful family members for adopters and SGs? It remains a tricky issue and it was acknowledged that the needs and wishes of children and adults shift through the life course. Without doubt there remains lots of questions in relation to this not least the need to convince front line practitioners.

Lastly, the support networks around adults and children was considered, how to facilitate them and support their growth.

It was a good day and an opportunity to hear some different voices. Of course access to influence the report is limited and though some have had access to the different consultation events run by Hugh Thornbery CBE, who's heading the project,  many didn't so if you've thoughts you can email here

What will the outcome of the report be? It's easy to fall into a well worn cynicism in relation to reports and good ideas. In reality anyone who knows anything of this world knows there's a significant need and limited resources. That's where my mind was left at the end but I'm sure that I'll work that up into something. I'm naturally an optimist so generally I'm encouraged.

Adoption Support Dataset

On a really basic level what we measure we value, for example I know exactly how much cake there is in the house and I have no idea the quantity of lettuce we currently have. It reveals a lot about my priorities.

With that in my mind I was really happy to attend a working group today considering the data that the Adoption Leadership Board would like Local Authorities and Voluntary Adoption Agencies to gather for them. They already gather data in relation to the numbers of children waiting and the length of time that they take to travel through the system to adoption amongst lots of other stuff. We also have the data that the Adoption Support Fund has revealed about the availability of services. 

One of the key pillars of the Government’s policy on adoption is to improve the post adoption support that adopted children and adoptive families receive and gathering data in relation to who is accessing the service, how long for, how long that takes and the nature of the support they receive seems like an obvious thing to do. I'm not even going to mention the assessment of Adoption of Support Needs and all that we don't know about that. 

Of course the specific data that is collected can reveal more than just facts and figures it can lead to understanding of the challenges that children and families face and help those commissioning services to improve and develop them. I’d hope that it would also give indication to themes around who accesses service and in what circumstances. Not insignificantly it a clear statement to LAs that this is important and we are watching.

I’m confident that as we transition into Regional Adoption Agencies recording this data will become an accepted and welcome tool for improvement and if necessary to bring to account. Like all of this stuff, there are hoops and hurdles that need to be navigated and some proposals that may or may not make it to the final draft.

It's been a peculiar time nationally with changes and a shifting and uncertain political landscape and like many I've wondered how this will impact on on the political good will that adoption generally has. Today has encouraged me that there remains a willingness to focus on this and I hope that the benefits our children receive will spill into the lives of other children who live with kin or guardians. 

On a lighter note it was good to see #whathughsuptonow and he’s looking like a lean mean cycling machine.