Adoption

(asked on 25th January 2022) - View Source

Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what initial assessment his Department has made of the impact of the national #YouCanAdopt campaign on the number of (a) adoption enquiries and (b) adoption approvals.


Answered by
Will Quince Portrait
Will Quince
This question was answered on 28th January 2022

Our national adoption strategy, published last year, sets out our bold vision to deliver excellent adoption services across England. It sets our commitment to:

  • boost adopter recruitment so that adoptive children are found permanent loving families quickly;
  • improve how children are matched with families through removing unnecessary barriers and bureaucracy placed in the way of those seeking to adopt;
  • continue to support adoptive families through the Adoption Support Fund; and
  • employ a new full-time national Regional Adoption Agency (RAA) strategic leader and support staff to drive collaboration between adoption agencies across the country and lead engagement with other services such as health and education to help children and adopters get the support they need.

To support delivery of the strategy, we have provided additional funding of £48.1 million in the 2021-22 financial year.

We continue to discuss adoption numbers with the Adoption and Special Guardianship Leadership Board and with the RAA Leaders’ group. These discussions have suggested that reasons for the decrease include the impact of COVID-19 restrictions in 2020-21, including on the courts and on wider decision-making processes within local authorities and RAAs.

Since the national #YouCanAdopt campaign began, we have seen a continued increase in the number of approvals of adopters. We now have more adopters (2,140) than children waiting (2,020).

Over 1,000 enquiries were received by the 6 adoption agencies sampled for evaluation purposes. Scaled up, the National Adopter Recruitment Steering Group estimated 10,000+ enquiries across all agencies in England during the campaign period.

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