Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps she is taking with local authorities to reduce the time taken to adopt children in the care system.

The government is providing £19.5 million between 2022/2025 to regional adoption agencies to develop high-quality adoption services so that children waiting to be adopted can be placed with a loving family as quickly as possible. This includes £5 million dedicated to developing national matching activities that will help speed up the process of matching adopters with children. In addition, £1.5 million is being used for national campaigns to recruit the adopters needed who are willing to take the children who wait the longest to be adopted. The department has seen a decrease since 2020 in waiting times for those children who wait the longest. Those who wait 18 months since placement order have dropped from 390 in 2020 to 250 in 2023.

The full range of work is set out in the government’s national adoption strategy, ‘Achieving Excellence Everywhere’, which was published in 2021. The strategy can be found online at: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/adoption-strategy-achieving-excellence-everywhere.