Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps his Department is taking to help ensure that every local authority has a published (a) strategy on how it identifies at the earliest stage children who are likely to wait longer for adoption and (b) process for seeking to match those children with a family in a timely manner.

Our national adoption strategy ‘Achieving Excellence Everywhere’, published in July 2021, makes clear our ambition to support regional adoption agency leaders to ensure that support for adopted children and families is provided throughout childhood and in the transition into adulthood, whenever it is required. We recognise the importance of such support plans being in place even before the child moves into their adoptive family.

The adoption strategy focuses on the clear need to find families for children, not children for families, and for recruitment campaigns to focus particularly on seeking adopters for those children who often wait the longest. The strategy also sets out a range of ways to improve matching. As well as promoting existing methods and tools to secure matches for children without delay, we want to see new processes and procedures put in place to speed up the sharing of adopters across regions.