Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps she is taking to support adoptive families from being subject to legal action when attempting to return a child to care.

The department knows that some adoptive families do not get the support they need when in crisis. Rather than being supported, they experience blame and criticism of their parenting approach.

Adoption England are working with their local authority partner safeguarding teams to improve the support families receive when they are in crisis. The aim of this work is to develop a national protocol which can be used for all adoption support service teams and local authority front door safeguarding services. This will help ensure that parents are supported when they need it most.

We are also investing £50 million into the adoption and special guardianship support fund this year to provide therapeutic services to support children with complex needs to help prevent families reaching crisis, and £8.8 million into Adoption England so that families can access high quality support provision at all stages of their adoption journey.