Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps he is taking to reduce the time it takes to go through the adoption process.

The government set out a strategy to radically reform the adoption system in the document ‘Adoption: a vision for change’, published in March 2016.

Since 2012-13, the government’s adoption reform programme has improved the average time taken from entering care to a child being placed with their adopted family. This has decreased by 7 months to 14 months in 2017-18.