Adoption
(asked on 20th November 2018) - View Source
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps his Department is taking to increase the number of children being adopted.
Decisions on adoption in England are made by local authorities based on children’s individual needs.
In 2016 the government published ‘Adoption – A vision for change’ which set out how we intend to radically redesign the whole adoption system in England – the structures, systems and workforce – to ensure we have the foundations in place to build lasting change.
We have enabled more children to be placed in stable homes earlier by requiring local authorities to consider a fostering for adoption placement wherever possible. We funded a significant growth in the use of innovative adopter-led matching through National Exchange Days and Adoption Activity Days. We have also introduced a new, quicker two-stage process for approving adopters.
The result has been that the average time taken from entering care to a child being placed with their adopted family has decreased since 2012-13 by 7 months to 14 months in 2017-18. The children waiting in care with a placement order but not yet placed with adopters has dropped from 5,300 reported at 31 March 2013 to 2,760 at the end of 2017-18.[1]
We are driving further improvements in local adoption recruitment, matching and support through the introduction of Regional Adoption Agencies.