Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps she is taking to tackle adoption breakdown.

The department has provided funding of £9 million in this financial year to Adoption England to improve adoption services in Regional Adoption Agencies (RAAs).

This includes £3 million of funding to develop more Centres of Excellence as multidisciplinary teams across the country to provide specialist and therapeutic support to families and the development of national standards for adoption support. It also includes a new framework for an early support core offer, ‘Becoming a Family’, for the first twelve to eighteen months of placement and an Adoption Support Plan to guide assessments of a family’s support needs. All are designed to improve support and reduce the risk of an adoption breakdown.

Adoption England are also planning work to develop a national protocol on how children’s services, front door services and adoption support teams work together to better support families at risk of adoption disruption.

Adoption England and RAAs work closely with adopters on all of their projects to improve adoption support services. This includes considering the latest evidence of why adoption disruptions have occurred in their agencies and across the country.

Since its inception in 2015, the department has provided over £400 million through the adoption and special guardianship support fund (ASGSF) to provide therapeutic interventions for around 52,700 children who have left care under an adoption, special guardianship or child arrangements order. The interventions are designed to help children and their families to deal with their trauma and attachment difficulties and have been independently assessed to have helped prevent adoption breakdowns. ASGSF funding for the next financial year is currently subject to business planning discussions and an announcement will be made shortly.