Narey defends adoption report

Writing exclusively for CYP Now, Narey said that far from ignoring the voices of frontline practitioners, his report reflected what "brave social workers" had told him. He also said his report accepted that some parents can turn their lives around, but said practitioners can be faced with a system that is "gripped by an unreasonable optimism about the capacity of neglectful parents to reform".

Read Narey’s full response below:

Adoption: why I wanted to meet the challenge

As some of the press reported last week, and with just a hint of mischief, I had retired in January in order to spend more time with my family. This was not, for once, a euphemism for repairing a marriage after an affair. The truth was much less exciting and was simply that, after five-and-a-half years of weekly commuting from North Yorkshire to London, I wanted to spend much more time at home.

But the offer from The Times to write something about adoption and then the near simultaneous offer from children’s minister Tim Loughton to become a ministerial adviser was too much to resist and, although it will only be for a few days a month, I’ll soon be populating platform three at York station again.

There is nothing that approaches the potential of adoption in terms of transforming the lives of neglected children, and in my work for The Times I sought to identify the reasons for adoptions falling in number while the time taken to finalise them has lengthened alarmingly.

The report, published on 5 July, was influenced by my interviews and discussions from practitioners around the statutory and voluntary sector. But the conclusions and recommendations are all mine and I did not seek endorsement from ministers, or from any of my contributors. The Times made no attempt to influence what I had to say, nor did they edit a single word of the 22,000 I sent them.

I did not remotely expect everyone to agree with what I had to say (although I have been buoyed by very many letters including those from social workers and adoptive parents). But I was somewhat mystified to read in CYP Now that according to BASW I have, apparently, insulted social workers and that I have ignored the fact that some parents can turn their lives around and should not be immediately written off.

Rowing against the tide

In fact, my report is quick to acknowledge that parents can and sometimes do improve their parenting. Indeed, I say that parents should get not only a second but often a third chance. Just not a fourth, fifth or sixth. And so much of what I have written reflects what brave social workers in child protection and adoption have told me: staff who sometimes feel they are rowing against the tide, struggling in a system which sometimes minimises neglect and which is gripped by an unreasonable optimism about the capacity of neglectful parents to reform.

My report begins with a discussion about taking children into care. There is understandable anxiety right now about the increased number of care applications, but my view is that numbers are unlikely to fall anytime soon and, if anything, they might need to increase further. Sometimes local authorities and the courts hesitate over care because of misconceived notions of attachment theory, confusion over whether The Human Rights Act means that the primacy of the child is in part balanced by parental rights (it isn’t) or, most damagingly, the entirely incorrect notion that care has to be avoided at almost all costs because care further damages children. The evidence is now very, very clear. It doesn’t. Care improves things.

Everything flows from the point at which a child enters care. Sometimes that intervention needs to come sooner. To paraphrase the words of one frontline social worker who wrote to me, we need to spend less time witnessing neglect and more time intervening to halt it.

Adoption will not be the answer for all children entering care but it needs to be quickly considered as one option for all of them. And then decisions need to be made much more quickly. Practitioners seem simply worn down by delay, sometimes barely noticing it anymore, certainly no longer hoping things can move faster. The average time taken for an adoption to be completed after a child enters care is – incredibly – two years and seven months. A baby born tomorrow, taken into care immediately and where the mother does not oppose adoption, is most unlikely to become adopted before their first birthday.

A slow-moving process

Adoption moves slowly almost everywhere. But in some local authorities there are hardly any adoptions at all. Towns and cities, just a few miles from one another have radically different proportions of children leaving care for adoption and for no explicable reason.

For some children in care hesitancy and delay means it is almost too late. They have grown too old, and are too challenging to make adoption likely although better adoption support may yet allow us to reduce their number. A genuine change in the current inflexibility around so-called ethnic matching will achieve adoption for children languishing in care simply because they are black. The new ministerial guidance is, I believe, being interpreted in such a way as to mean that white children are likely to continue to leave care for adoption at three times the rate of black children.

Adoption transforms lives and, I believe, adoptions are disrupted far less frequently than alleged. For children aged over five, perhaps only four out of five succeed. But for children under one perhaps 97 in every 100 succeed. The message there is very clear.

Adoption is not for every child taken into care. For some children other forms of permanence will be more suitable. But adoption is the best option for many more than a meagre 3,000 a year from a care population of 20 times that number.

Right now, with Education Secretary Michael Gove and Tim Loughton’s determination we have a spectacular opportunity to increase that number and to ensure that all adoptions take place more quickly. I shall regard my appointment a success only if those two things begin to happen.