Question to the Department for Education:

To ask Her Majesty's Government what impact the Adoption Support Fund has had on rates of adoption disruption since its inception in 2015.

The information requested on all adoptions which breakdown after the adoption order is granted is not held centrally. The attached research report, ‘Beyond the adoption order’, was published in 2014 and gave a one-off insight into adoption disruption. It can be found at: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/beyond-the-adoption-order-challenges-intervention-disruption.

Some information is collected on children who return to care and who are reported as having previously been adopted. This is published in table C1 (attached) in the statistical release ‘Children looked after in England including adoption: 2017 to 2018’. It can be found at: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/children-looked-after-in-england-including-adoption-2017-to-2018. These figures were collected for the first time in 2014 and should be treated with caution as the information is based on self-declaration, and for a large number of children the previous permanence arrangement is not known.

The independent, 2-year evaluation of the Adoption Support Fund (ASF), published in August 2017 (attached), found that ‘a large majority of survey respondents believed that the support provided through the ASF had helped them’.