Education and Adoption Bill (Second sitting)

James Berry Excerpts

Tuesday 30th June 2015 Public Bill Committees

[Steve McCabe]

Q 19 I do not know whether you heard the earlier evidence, but we were told that voluntary adoption agencies consistently achieve better inspection ratings than local authorities. Do you have any concerns that voluntary adoption agencies could be marginalised by these proposals?

Hugh Thornbery: I do have a concern. It is definitely the case, if one generalises, that the voluntary adoption sector demonstrates a higher level of quality across the sector than local authorities are able to achieve. That does not take away from the fact that some local authorities do exceptionally well. We have heard, as part of the justification for the clauses in the Bill, that some agencies are too small. The first point I would like to make is that there is no necessary direct correlation between quality and size, and it would be tragic if we lost some of the real expertise that exists within some of the smaller voluntary adoption agencies, which focus particularly on trying to find the right family for some of the hardest-to-place children.

Because my organisation is UK-wide, I have been involved in developments in Wales that have led to a national adoption service and the development of five regional agencies, rather than 22 individual local authorities doing adoption. It has been our experience there that the voluntary agencies were left on the margins of that change process and found it very hard to have a say, despite the fact that they were delivering high quality and were placing about 20% of the children placed each year. So that risk does exist. The proposals set out in the Bill do nothing to reassure me, necessarily, that we will not lose some highly efficient and effective voluntary agencies as a casualty of this.

Andy Leary-May: Yes, I would urge caution as well. There are a lot of things that are working well in adoption, and if the powers in the Bill are used, we should be very careful not to lose some of those things. They include the work that goes on in voluntary adoption agencies and the skills and specialisms that exist within them.

[James Berry (Kingston and Surbiton) (Con)]

Q 20 How can we avoid voluntary adoption agencies being marginalised? You have both said that that is a risk.

Hugh Thornbery: I think one of the things that mitigates that risk is the investment that the previous Government and this Government are making in the capacity building of the voluntary sector. This comes at a very difficult time for the voluntary sector, with the steep decline in the number of children, which creates incoming cash-flow difficulties for voluntary agencies. So there are other challenges for the voluntary sector at the moment, as well as impending regionalisation.

The other way of dealing with this goes back to some of the questions and answers I heard in earlier evidence around the criteria used in determining what direction should take place if the need arises for the Secretary of State to direct. Prior to that, it would be very helpful if the Department were able to find a more bottom-up, locally driven approach. That is not, I think, something for legislation, but perhaps for guidance, to strengthen the role of the voluntary sector in the discussions and developments that take place at a local level. That happens exceedingly well already in some regions. I was in Yorkshire and Humberside the other day for a meeting at which all the voluntary adoption agencies had been pulled together by the consortia. It happens far less well in other areas. The risk is not across the board but particularly in some areas of the country, where there is perhaps no culture of engaging the voluntary sector.

[James Berry]

Q 21 So your concerns are capable of being dealt with within the framework proposed here?

Hugh Thornbery: There is nothing in the legislation that would deal with my concerns. It is a matter of what else there is. There is encouragement, clearly, in the paper that the Government have produced, “Regionalising adoption”. There are examples of where the voluntary sector has achieved some success—Coram is a good example—but it is too weak at the moment, and I think my colleagues in voluntary adoption agencies are feeling really quite anxious about the next year or two, compounded by their current difficulties with the fall in the number of children.

Andy Leary-May: I do not really have an answer as to how that risk could be mitigated—I think it ought to be. I certainly think that what this is trying to fix should be made clear. I agree that there should not be too much detail on how it is achieved, but what we are trying to achieve and what problems we are trying to fix should be made clear.

[Mrs Lewell-Buck]

Q 22 Good afternoon. As you are aware, adoption is only proposed for a child after all other avenues have been explored. Do you think that some of the money that the Government spend on these reforms might be better spent in social work teams, so that they could assess quicker and rule out or rule in family members before they get to the plan for adoption?

Hugh Thornbery: I do not have a particularly strong view. We are clearly in a time when pressure on public expenditure is very severe. The adoption system has two parts to it. It has the part where the assessment of children and the assessment of different options available within the children’s teams take place. Then there are the specialist adoption workers, family finding, supporting with matching and post-placement support.

I think it is entirely right that there has been investment in the areas where it is required within the specialist adoption sector. We still feel that not enough is being done to support adoptive families, but we have seen very good developments such as the adoption support fund and the pupil premium. It is right that money is being spent there because many of those families have been in crisis.

I think there is the opportunity within the proposals, particularly as set out in the Government’s paper, to consider how one might move from adoption agencies coming together to agencies that are not able to deal with a broader range of the aspects of permanence. I think we have some failings in the system at the moment in terms of being able quickly and accurately to assess what options are available and moving as quickly as possible to the right decision, whether that is adoption or some other pathway to permanence.

Andy Leary-May: Yes, I do think that the Bill misses an opportunity to focus on the other routes to permanence and to address that. To answer the question specifically, I think we should spend money on both. Given how incredibly important it is to invest in the future of these vulnerable children and given the benefits to society financially and otherwise, I would say spend money on both.

--- Later in debate ---

[Steve McCabe]

Q 102 I was referring to the joint arrangements covering adoption.

Edward Timpson: From memory, that was clause 3, but it may have changed during the Bill’s passage through the House of Lords.

As we heard in the evidence earlier this afternoon, the whole purpose of this clause is to have a backstop power in circumstances that we envisage will be extremely rare, if used at all, to enable regional adoption agencies to be fulfilled right across England. We want that to happen voluntarily, to be locally developed and to be done—I think this is where we can have a higher level of agreement on your point, Mr McCabe—in a transparent way. It must be clear who is involved and what will be expected of those who are in conversation with other local authorities, voluntary adoption agencies and the Department for Education, so that we get what our “Regionalising adoption” paper sets out clearly: excellence in every regional adoption agency.

The details of how we do that will, I am sure, be discussed in Committee, but I can certainly give an assurance that we want to see a transparent process. Much of that is already happening, as we have heard. I fully expect that to continue with the support we are offering through the £4.5 million over the next year and the practical support that the Department can offer, as well as the adoption leadership board and the regional adoption boards. That will ensure that excellence, where we know it exists, is brought to the attention of local authorities that do not know already about it and are looking to build up a consortia.

[James Berry]

Q 103 For constituents I have spoken to about adoption, the key concern and key failing they identify in the system is the time it takes to achieve permanency. Are you confident that the Government’s proposals in the Bill will speed up the process?

Edward Timpson: I am confident that if regional adoption agencies develop in the way that we expect and are already starting to see, that will help—particularly with the matching process and trying to bring down the time it is taking for far too many children whose plan is for adoption to be matched with their forever family. We know that there are 3,000 children in care at the moment whose plan is for adoption. Over half of those have been waiting for 18 months for that match, despite the fact that there has been a 27% increase in adopter recruitment in the past few years.

We have, in the past three to four years of the coalition Government, seen a reduction of about four months in the time it takes for a child to be adopted. That is good progress, but we think we can go further. The creation of regional adoption agencies will help in that endeavour, as will the area of recruitment and improved support for children who have been adopted—in particular, the specialised services that are not always available in every local area. If those services are commissioned and drawn from a wider area across the region, more families and children will be able to access them when they need them.

[James Berry]

Q 104 Secondly, the first set of witnesses we heard from on the adoption part of the Bill were broadly supportive of the Government’s proposals. The second set—to the extent that they were actually opining on the Bill; in other words, adoption rather than the wider piece—did raise some concerns, one of which was that small voluntary adoption agencies might be crowded out. Can the Government give any reassurance on that?

Edward Timpson: There are several ways in which I can reassure those voluntary adoption agencies. I had the opportunity a few weeks ago to speak to the Consortium of Voluntary Adoption Agencies about this at their conference.

First, I put on the record—I will continue to do so throughout the Bill’s passage—my view and that of the Government: voluntary adoption agencies play a key and central role in delivering high-quality adoption services in England and, I am sure, right across the United Kingdom. They will be an essential part of the solution to excellent regional adoption agencies. Secondly, in the paper, “Regionalising adoption”, we have—I think on page 12—clearly set out why we say that that is the case. We will be working with local authorities, as they develop their regional adoption agencies, to ensure that they understand the benefits that they can draw from voluntary adoption agencies if they are not already doing so.

Voluntary adoption agencies that may want to have a different arrangement—obviously, we cannot force them to join the consortium—will still have a vital role to play in providing some of those specialised services for children for whom it has proved more difficult to find the right family. They could also have a role in the training of adopters, so that they feel confident with the challenge, which, I know from my own family, adoption can bring.

[Peter Kyle]

Q 105 I have a follow-up question to Mr Gibb. First, I would like to associate myself with some of the comments that you made about the protests that have emerged around potential converter schools. I returned to secondary school in my mid-20s because I went through a failing school the first time, so I feel this very personally. In my constituency, I have seen cases of people using individual schools as political footballs, which I think is appalling.

We are now moving from an era of rapid conversions of failing schools into one where parents will find out that their school has been declared coasting, and that might be a shock to them. A rapid process may emerge, which will invite this kind of protest, however rapid it is. We could lose any existing community engagement, which could have been harnessed. I am throwing you an olive branch. We all want zero tolerance on young people leaving school and emerging into an area where they will not get the second chance that someone like me did. Is there a way of finding a consultation process that harnesses parent power, rather than, by default, seeing it as an obstacle?

Mr Gibb: There are two questions. One is whether children should be involved in a child’s education and whether the community should be involved in its local school—yes to both. Secondly, should organised political groupings locally be able to thwart the conversion of a failing school into an academy? The answer is no.

I should add that in the Bill if a school is voluntarily converting—a good school that the governors have decided to convert—there is still a requirement for them to consult the stakeholders of the local community. It is only for those schools that have been categorised by Ofsted as failing. When Ofsted puts a school into special measures, it is the truth; it is a school that has not delivered properly for those young people. We cannot have ideologically driven groups deliberately trying to delay and frustrate the aim of raising standards.