Most often we see adoption targets being cited as evidence of the pro-adoption corruption of the system, but in this instance they appear to be susceptible to the opposite criticism. What remains unclear is the extent to which targets ever have or ever will sway social work care planning decisions on the ground be that in one direction or the other.

It will be interesting to see how effective these targets are and how long they last.

Bubble Wrapped Children: How social networking is transforming the face of 21st century adoption

By Helen Oakwater, MX Publishing 2012

Helen Oakwater is the parent of three adopted children. She thus has immediate and practical experience of the difficult issues adoptive children can face overcoming the trauma of their early years and establishing healthy attachments to their adoptive parents. She is also well versed in the theory as (amongst other roles) a former member of the government’s Adoption and Permanence Task Force.

The ‘bubble wrapped’ children of the title refers to the traumatised adopted child who has tried to protect himself by a metaphorical wrapping of protective layers. The  adoptive parent must help to peel away these layers to allow the child to form healthy attachments to a new family.

The stated purpose of this book is to discuss and analyse the impact of unregulated and unexpected contact from birth families via social networking sites such as Facebook. Again, the author has direct and painful experience of this, her own children having received such communications just days before Christmas in 2009.

I discussed some of the issues around adoption and Facebook in an earlier guest post. I do not doubt that this is a serious issue which requires urgent engagement from all those who work in this field. However, I wonder whether attempting to present the book as one with a single issue focus is in fact doing it a disservice.

This is more than just an analysis of the particular impact of social networking sites. It has to be, because the implications of such ad hoc contact cannot be fully understood without some appreciation of how adoptive children might be different to those raised with uninterrupted and healthy attachments to their primary carers.

The book inevitably has to cover a very wide range of topics in order to allow the reader to fully understand the full potential for harm from such unexpected contact   to children already traumatised by earlier life experiences. The author sets out to  explain the likely nature and extent of trauma suffered by the adopted child and the ways in which the child can be helped to make sense of his or her world. She also puts herself in the shoes of the birth parents and considers how they might be thinking and feeling and how this can influence their actions.

The book is thus an excellent resource for those coming new to the system and who require an introduction to the psychological theories around attachment and trauma. The author is able to present a number of quite complicated concepts in direct and vivid language, making good use of metaphor and diagrams to aid understanding; I found illuminating the example of child development as a river. Some rivers flow smoothly to the sea, others are turbulent with additional murky tributaries. Which river would you rather navigate?

Thus, the book goes much wider than just the single issue of the ‘Facebook question’.  For me, its true core and most urgent call to action is found at page 111 where the author states:

‘Even though parents don’t have the professional expertise and knowledge of attachment and trauma trained therapists, they are, in the most part, expected to raise traumatised children without support or therapeutic in put from professionals’.

Indeed.  With an adoption disruption rate of about 25% we can’t afford to ignore this stark and sad reality.  I would recommend this book to anyone who needs an introduction to or refreshment of their understanding of the current psychological theories around trauma and attachment, be they lawyer, social worker or a potential adopters.

Tonight’s episode struck a real chord – those cases where clients make a remarkable turnaround are so fantastic, and so awful. Because you are hoping against hope it won’t go wrong. But sadly, most often, it does. It is no surprise that the social workers who bear the responsibility for making the judgment call to terminate those mother and baby foster placements drop like flies. Its a terribly stressful job, especially if you put your heart into it like the social worker in today’s case. Some social workers become hardened, no doubt to protect themselves, but the best are warm and sympathetic – and of course all the more vulnerable because of that.

It was a surreal experience watching the #protectingourchildren hashtag on twitter tonight. It cascaded down my screen almost to fast to read – faster that #bbcqt. It seemed to be a mixture of “that social worker / foster carer is amazing”, “social workers do such a hard job”, “heartbreaking”, messages of hope that the mother would succeed, and angry comments about how irredeemably awful the parents were: “they should be sterilised” and “disgusting”, “how could she choose drink over her baby”. These latter display a lack of understanding of just what a big achievement it was for the mother depicted to break free from her unhealthy relationship, remain dry and parent apparently very well for the first five weeks of the baby’s life – albeit that it could not be sustained. 

I’m really pleased that this series seems to be generating a certain amount of goodwill to social workers, and it certainly is a reminder that what we lawyers scrutinise and criticise in witness statements and in cross examination, was a real lived experience for the social worker – with all the shouting, crying, noise, smell, emotion, hope, frustration, stress, danger, responsibility and fear that goes with it. Lawyers criticise and defend their client – they bear responsibility for doing a job well or poorly, but the burden of decision making rest elsewhere. Social workers must bear responsibility for making decisions in the field and then often have to defend themselves in court. I wish I could say that the kind of social work demonstrated is a reflection of what I see day in and day out in care cases I deal with. In truth it’s not. The picture of social work we see is far more inconsistent than that. But this series is a reminder that the court based professions must constantly remind themselves of what it’s really like to be out there, working against the tide. And on top of that, what the show has yet to tackle is the chronically high caseload and lack of resources that most social workers struggle with.

At court recently we were all struck by the young social worker who, having weathered quite an attack in cross examination from myself and another counsel, chirpily joked “thanks for going easy on me”. It was his first experience in the witness box and he made a point of being polite and friendly throughout the rest of the trial. Often social workers are ill prepared for cross examination, and misperceive the experience as personal attack – this is partly a product of inadequate training about how the court system operates and what a lawyer’s role is, and partly because social workers as a profession are used to being under attack. David Norgrove was partially right when he identified a dysfunctional relationship between the social work and legal professions, but this young social worker was a breath of fresh air. I hope he doesn’t bring the barriers up and become like so many of his stony faced colleagues. He will be a poorer social worker for it.

For anyone who has not seen this series there is a useful guide on Community Care, as well as on the BBC website.

Social media – our master or our servant?

I dimly remember being a teenager. It was not a great time. It would have been much worse if I had been adopted and on top of my hormonal struggles to come to terms with my place in the world, I then had to cope with the sudden discovery via Facebook that numerous members of my biological family wanted to get in touch and share their perspective about why I was adopted.

Binoculars courtesy of tunnelarmr on flickr

The human part of me feels compassion for the families who have had to face this; in some cases the fall out from such sudden reintroduction to the birth family has been massive and children have decided to move out of their adopted homes. But the less compassionate, lawyer part of me says ‘good’. Because perhaps now we can kick start more debate about post adoption direct contact. We can’t have a blanket assumption that such contact is either good or bad as each case involves a multiplicity of complicated facts and a variety of different people. Direct contact involves a dynamic relationship between people that changes over time. However, if there is now a serious risk of haphazard and unstructured post adoption contact being facilitated through the medium of social networking sites, we need to decide how we deal with that situation and our decisions should be based on good evidence.

The last 50 years have seen enormous shifts in societal attitudes towards accepting different concepts of ‘family’. Adoption is no longer a mechanism to cover up a shameful indiscretion and to encourage adopted children to vanish without trace into their ‘new’ family. There is recognition of the likely strength of our curiosity about our origins and the pull of the blood tie.

According to the Adoption Information Line, 70% of children adopted are between 1 -4 years. Only a very few are under 1 or over 10. The numbers of children adopted each year have decreased significantly from about 21,000 in 1975 to 5,797 in 1995; a reflection of the increased availability of abortion and the societal shift that no longer stigmatises illegitimacy. Adopted children are very unlikely to be brand new babies, given up by desperate teenage girls, but rather older children who have already suffered or were likely to suffer significant harm from their birth parents. We are thus considering a group of children who had a less than ideal start to life, may suffer difficulties with attachment and may retain memories of the harm done to them. It is likely that these children will find it difficult to cope with sudden and unsupported reintroduction to their birth family.

Research suggests that ‘communicative openness’ in adoptive families – how they think and talk about adoption – is positively linked to ‘structural openness’ – contact with birth family members – but that children’s emotional and behavioural development was not related to either the type of contact they were having with their birth families or the communicative openness of their adoptive parents (see Post-Adoption contact and Openness in Adoptive Parents’ Minds: Consequences for Children’s Development Elsbeth Neil Br JSoc Work (2009) 39).

More research is needed; as Elsbeth Neil recognises ‘finding empirical answers to questions about outcomes of contact after adoption is frustrated by significant methodological challenges …what is meant by contact after adoption? The type, frequency, duration and management of contact all need to be considered, as does the type of birth relative involved.’

Elsbeth Neil urged social workers to remain open minded about the issue of direct post adoption contact, resisting blanket predictions of either help or harm. However, it seems that the prevailing attitude is to assume it shouldn’t happen. Different reasons are given for this and they are compelling; birth parents may try to undermine the placement, the children may have unpleasant memories of the birth family and become upset by contact. Many social workers worry that potential adoptive parents will be ‘put off’ adopting if they also have to manage direct contact with birth parents.

But in practice it is rare to find social work analysis that goes beyond those familiar shibboleths, to consider the particular circumstances of children and birth family currently under scrutiny. Those of us who represent birth parents in care proceedings will be sadly familiar with the ‘party line’ around post adoption contact. It seems that the best we can get is a vague expression of a ‘hope’ that an adoptive family can be found who would be ‘open’ to direct contact but in the majority of cases the industry standard is letter box contact once or twice a year. This is so even in cases involving parents who would not actively attempt to undermine the placement and who had not subjected their children to serious abuse, such as parents with a learning disability whose children were removed on the basis of risk of significant future harm.

see no evil - courtesy of C. Pajunen on flickr

Perhaps we are still left with a residue of those earlier desires to entirely absorb the adopted child into the new family and to protect a sense of entitlement for adoptive parents. After all, it is asking a lot of someone to undertake the arduous task of raising a child (who often is neither grateful for nor welcoming of the parents’ input) without clear recognition of the status of ‘parent’.

Thus, the current purpose of the law appears to be to assume that adoptive families should be left in peace without any direct dealings with the birth family throughout the child’s minority. The child’s need for information can be met by Life Story books, some photographs and possibly a letter once or twice a year. An adopted child and birth families can now enter their details upon the Adoption Contact Register to apply for contact with one another. However the clearly stated purpose of the register is to permit contact only between adults if both want it.

Section 4 of the Adoption and Children Act 2002 provides that adoptive parents, children and birth families all have the right to request an assessment of their needs for post adoption contact. A recent study investigated the levels and nature of such support (see Supporting post adoption contact in complex cases – briefing paper June 2010). It found that direct contact happens only in a minority of cases and support for such contact is likely to be organised on a case by case basis rather than via dedicated staff or formal systems. The prevailing attitude of social workers towards direct contact is to focus on controlling risk rather than pro active consideration of how to overcome problems that would affect contact.

The main type of support offered to both adoptive and birth parents was co-ordination and administration of contact, rather than providing emotional or therapeutic support such as work on relationship building. Unsurprisingly, for direct contact to work well it helped to have an element of emotional support together with facilitators who were organised and forward thinking, anticipating challenges and changes rather than simply responding to them. The ‘average’ family used contact support services 12 times over the course of a year and the cost was £999. Unsurprisingly, the cheapest model of support was administered contact averaging £395 per year whilst supervised and facilitated contact averaged at £1,371 per year, but these costs were probably an underestimate.

It would be interesting to develop the study and to have greater consideration of the existing structure of post adoption contact support together with a more rigorous cost/benefit analysis of the different types available. Considering the detailed nature of the assessment and matching process in adoptions, the disruption rate is surprisingly high at about 25%. It is certainly worth investigating whether or not greater structural and communicative openness in adoptions is a protective factor against breakdown.

That investigation becomes even more urgent when considering the inexorable rise of the new social media and the impact this has had on the way information now flows and is disseminated. It seems unlikely that the current rather static and limited framework to post adoption contact, with emphasis on adult control and choice, can survive the challenge posed by Facebook or other similar social networking sites.

Facebook was born in 2004 in Harvard. By the end of that year it had barely reached a million active users in the US and it took until 2007 to acquire a similar number in the UK. Like an extremely effective virus it then spread world wide; to date Facebook has 800 million active users, half of whom log on every day. 350 million of these users access Facebook by a mobile device. Each user has an average of 130 friends (Source: Facebook statistics). This incredible growth far outpaces the ability of the law to react to change. Users of social media have been able to act en masse to undermine legal rulings. Depending on your perspective this is either gloriously empowering or a serious threat to the rule of law.

Not only is it now easier than ever before to track people down due to the extent of our interconnecting networks, once you have made a Facebook friend you can access richly detailed on line information, which is immediately and constantly accessible. You can engage with people in discussing and disseminating this information and for those with vulnerable personalities it can be a dangerous playground.

Those 1-4 year olds adopted in 2004 before anyone outside of Harvard had heard of Facebook will now be aged between 9-12 years and likely to be already embracing social media or just about to. It seems inevitable that the numbers of adopted children involved in on line communication with birth parents can only increase and we need to start thinking about how we deal with this now.

It does not seem remotely realistic to respond to the Facebook issue by moving even further away from a culture of openness about adoption and our origins. Worryingly, anecdotal evidence suggests this may be the response from some Local Authorities.

Human constructs such as social media should be our servants, not our masters. They should exist to make our lives easier and better and to provide us all with opportunities to attain as much self actualisation as is within our capabilities. But this will only work if we understand the nature of what it is we have created, both its possibilities and its limitations. The law is a slow and lumbering beast, out of necessity. It takes time to legislate and to see how legislation works in practice. The new social media by comparison has grown from nothing to world domination in a remarkably short space of time and most people have only a hazy understanding of how it operates.

What we need to do urgently is to review and examine our approach to the whole issue. We need more research about the benefits or otherwise of direct post adoption contact. Where such contact is considered potentially beneficial, we then need to think more about what organisation and support is both affordable and feasible.

I appreciate that many parents may not be able to cope with direct contact, or at least not in the immediate aftermath of the proceedings and may, consciously or not, undermine the adoptive placement. But it is a rare set of care proceedings that involves only a mother or father in isolation from wider family and there needs to be fuller consideration of the role played by other relatives.

Adoptive families must not be undermined or disrespected. Adoptive parents take on a very difficult task and have jumped many hurdles to do so. But we have to do as much as we can to protect children from sudden and potentially harmful exposure to a birth family who may be understandably desperate to make contact and provide their version of history, regardless of the pain this can cause. Those adoptive parents who have welcomed post adoptive contact and found it worked well reported a benefit to the relationship with their child; ‘confirming them in their status as the psychological parent and creating an atmosphere of openness and trust within the family’ (see Supporting post adoption contact in complex cases).

As Carl Rogers put it ‘the facts are always friendly. Every bit of evidence one can acquire, in any area, leads one much closer to what is true. And being closer to the truth can never be harmful or dangerous or unsatisfying thing’.

Young children should not have to cope with a deluge of facts about every horrible detail of the circumstances of their adoption. But they need to understand their general situation and why they couldn’t grow up with their families of origin. We need to find the best way for them. We need to master this situation, not just dance to Facebook’s tune.

“Adoption should never be pursued simply because it saves money. But there is no doubt that were adoption managed more energetically in Kent there would be a financial pay off as the increase in the numbers of children being taken into care would be ameliorated, if only in part, by those leaving care for adoption.

KPMG were invited to conduct an independent audit of the financial savings achieved through the increased number of adoptions and guardianships in Harrow (and the consequent reduction in the number of children in care) and have confirmed that in 2010/11 alone, that Authority saved £440,000. So it is clear that were Kent to increase adoptions, not only would it be transforming the lives of some of the most vulnerable and disadvantaged children in Kent, it would, simultaneously achieve potentially very significant financial savings.

In the immediate term, urgent discussions should be held with external organisations with a view to bringing in a team of managers who, while remaining in the employment of the external organisation, would manage the Adoption team in Kent.

I am satisfied that there would be interest from voluntary sector and private sector organisations in this management only compromise. It may be that with the stimulus of external management, the current directly managed arrangements can succeed.But the more radical option of outsourcing needs to be carefully considered. The potential gains in securing and maintaining a higher number of adoptions, and the potential financial savings which would accompany that are too great to be ignored.”

Alright. That’s pretty stark isn’t it? Sort of plays into the hands of the adoption targets, incentive to baby snatchers lobby? The kind of distasteful alignment between money and babies that gets even reasonable sorts like me in a bit of an acronymically sweary tizzy.

But a good lawyer never relies on the case summary. You gotta read the source material. The whole report is here:

http://democracy.kent.gov.uk/documents/s28170/Item%20B1%20adoption%20cpp%20Dec2011%20V2.pdf

Those quotes above are accurate. And they still make me twitch and shift in my chair. I think adoption is a delicate political issue (Narey of all people ought to know this), and the handling of the forced adoption, budgetary control and efficiency in one public report is a tricky affair. I think Narey could have chosen his words more carefully, but based on past performance this is no surprise.

But it is important to put the quotes above into context. The context is this: Kent wanted to know why the numbers of adoptions were dropping in their area and commissioned the Czar to troubleshoot. As you do. And remember the report is not about WHETHER babies should be adopted, its about how efficient an adoption service is for children whose approved plan is for adoption. For children who need to be adopted they need it to happen quickly and efficiently and if it isn’t I would not criticise any LA for trying to reverse that trend. And whilst I’m no management consultant it seems to me Narey makes some sensible observations and suggestions about what appear to be some material inefficiencies that are really impacting on the effectiveness of their adoption service. It’s important that our adoption services are efficient and effective, making good and durable placements and doing it quickly. And it’s important that a LA should be publicly accountable for failures in that regard and that it should publish material concerning its efforts to right problems.

But I can’t leave a report like this without making the following points:

I think that there is a danger that the report will inadvertently promote the simplistic embrace of the idea that adoption is the prize to be aimed for with all children who cannot be at home (as with adoption targets and indeed current government policy of promoting adoption per se). I think there is a false comparison in the suggestion of a potential financial pay off from a more “energetic” approach to adoption. Firstly, it appears that the suggestion is that the LA should be more energetic about adoption in part by more vigorously issuing applications (see reference above to increase in numbers of children being taken into care).

Secondly, the report talks about “financial savings” without taking into the reckoning broader potential costs to the LA that arise from the promotion of adoption over (say) SGO, rehabilitation or long term foster care. Although the cost in connection with the care of an individual child may be reduced over the long term by adoption as opposed to foster care or other options, what this leaves out of the equation is the cost of repeat performances by the parents with child 2, child 3, child 4… As DJ Crichton said in relation to the FDAC, there is an:

 ”intergenerational cycle” of self-destructive behaviour. He referred to one psychiatric report where the mother said “every time they remove a child, the only way that I can deal with the pain of the loss is to get pregnant again”.

“I’ve had women scream at me across the court: ‘If you take this one away from me I’ll go on having children until you let me keep one,’”

Adoption may break the cycle for that child but it doesn’t break the cycle for the parent. You can’t ignore bigger picture that if you want to save either children or money.

So, whilst I’m grateful for the tip off, I think this post will be disappointing to anyone hoping for 10 entertaining reasons why Martin Narey is a ****. It’s a valuable, if imperfect report.

I suspect this post is also imperfect, since I have been stop-starting it for about ten days, have lost part of it (thank you wordpress), and have now tried to rewrite it whilst missing part of my brain (thank you flu).

I could write more about this topic (previous writing here). But there is some fantastic commentary on this already and I would be merely creating a poor imitation, and a rush job it would be too. So I’m going to give you some links and adopt everything everyone else has said (unless that someone has Minister or Tsar in their job title).

Amanda Bancroft has written a well considered and knowledgeable blog post this week about the current drive to have more babies adopted: Adoption Stories From The Tories: Part I (presumably to be followed with a Part II).

There is also some really good writing on The Justice Gap website by Liz Fisher Frank: Setting Up Kids To Fail. The Justice Gap also has a useful piece on the FDAC (Family Drug & Alcohol Court) Pilot which reminds us that whilst removal and adoption may be the best outcome for some individual children it doesn’t really solve the root problem or the broader societal problem: Uncertain Future For Pioneering Court quotes District Judge Crichton’s haunting description of the cyclical nature of birth and removal (we have all heard our clients utter these words):

He describes his own frustration ‘removing the fourth or fifth child and sometimes the seventh or eighth child from the same mother for exactly the same reasons’. ‘Nothing changes and nothing has been done to help them achieve change,’ he says.

Crichton reckons that a mother who has her child taken away in such traumatic circumstances ‘consciously or subconsciously goes off and seeks comfort’ often leading to another baby. ‘I’ve had women scream at me across the court: “If you take this one away from me I’ll go on having children until you let me keep one”,’ he adds.The judge refers to a recent psychiatric report in which it was said that the mother told the psychiatrist that ‘every time they remove a child the only way that I can deal with the pain of the loss is to get pregnant again’. ‘What a way to begin a life,’ adds Crichton.

There was an interesting interview on Womens’ Hour yesterday with an adoptive parent, which gave some insight into just how difficult it can be to nurture what are often very damaged children.

I despair at the oversimplification of the whole issue of adoption by politicians and those who ought to know better. Rumours abound about a six month longstop on care proceedings – that should keep the appeal courts busy for a while. We can expect to find out a bit more about that tomorrow when the FJR is published (can’t wait).

Oh, and you can also view a flashy PR video of Martin Narey trumpeting the merits of adoption on Family Lore here. I’d rather see the funds spent on projects like FDAC, on front line social work training or on reducing delay in the court process by increasing sitting days.

Oh for the love of god I can’t keep it up: And then the wolf gobbled them up. The end.

But seriously, I notice today that the Narey report remains on the agenda, and that the Government, through Mr Loughton, is due to respond shortly and it has prompted me to complete the task begun in July.

So…

Narey Report: A Blueprint for the Nation’s Lost Children – Part II

In part I of this blog post I dealt primarily with the *cough* provenance of the report, and with rigour of the referencing and the source material that Martin Narey relied upon in his report.

I had intended in July to carry out a full and rather detailed analysis of the report. I’m not going to do that now. I’m going to look at things in a rather more broad brush way. The Community Care article referred to above reports Tim Loughton as telling us we have all the ingredients for a “perfect adoption system”. Now that is not Martin Narey’s phrase, but it is a good illustration of the upside down approach to adoption. What can ever be perfect about severing a child’s relationship with her parents and transplanting her with a new family with whom she has no connection? For the record, I’m not anti-adoption and neither do I favour children languishing* in care for years on end, or endorse them remaining in abusive homes – but there is a concerning tendency in some circles to view adoption as a “good thing”, as a success story. And concomitantly, a tendency to see low adoption figures as a failure – when the most recent batch of adoption statistics were published a month or so ago there was a lot of press coverage about the fact that only 60 babies were adopted in year to end Mar 2011 (No mention was made of the 3000 other over 1s who were also adopted or of those who were the subject of placement orders, or who were matched but not yet adopted).

From the perspective of those who wish to have children but who cannot, for whatever reason, become biological parents: of course adoption is a wonderful opportunity for them; although the romanticised picture of adopters taking home a newborn bundle is no longer realistic since the eradication of the social stigma associated with bearing children out of wedlock has radically affected the numbers of so-called “voluntary” adoption and the numbers of babies available for placement. That some blameless couples (or individuals) would otherwise be unable to become parents themselves is not a reason to promote more and faster adoption. Biological parents are themselves often the victim of cruel circumstance that has impaired their ability to parent, albeit in very different ways. If they can be helped to parent well they should be so helped. IF.

Adoptions can be successful, they can be the best (or at least the least worst) option for individual children. But the only “perfect” solution is to – somehow – enable a child to be safely and adequately parented by her own parents, or perhaps by her own extended family. Why do we find that aspect so easy to leave out of discussion about adoption? Because we know that sadly, today’s “lost children” are tomorrow’s are tomorrow’s inadequate parents. And today’s inadequate parents are yesterday’s lost children. And that is a story of failure that is quite hard to think about. Because it feels so inevitable, so immutable, so desperate.

Adoptions by their very nature are necessary because something has gone very wrong (excluding perhaps a small group of voluntary adoptions which fall into a rather different category). Sometimes that is the “fault” of the parent, for example because they perpetrate abuse on their children. Sometimes it is because, through no fault of their own they are unable to parent, or they are inadequate. Much of what people like Mr Narey tell us about adoption is all happy ending and no story. For most adopted children their life is not in any sense a fairy story.

Nobody would argue with the proposition that where children cannot return to their families adoption ought to be pursued as swiftly as possible. And we have to find ways to avoid delay. But the whole thrust of both the report and much of what one can read in the press rests upon the base assumption that more adoption is a good thing. Actually more adoption means that we have failed on more occasions to successfully support parents and families to stay together. It means that we have abandoned the task of improving the parenting capacity of parents, apparently oblivious to the inevitability that they will fall pregnant again and the cycle will be repeated.

There is a lot of talk about family intervention projects but nominal support for them by the Government. Those are where we should be targeting resources. District Judge Crichton of the Inner London FPC this week won an award for his outstanding contribution to family law in the shape of the successful and innovative Family Drug and Alcohol Court which supports parents to make the changes necessary to enable the courts to avoid draconian solutions like adoption (he got a rapturous applause from the audience and rightly so). That kind of project is where we should be targeting resources.

That is particularly so when the Government itself recognises the inadequacy of evidence about the breakdown rates of adoptions (even if Martin Narey does not). More adoption does not necessarily equate to more happy endings – even in what could properly be called a successful adoption an adult will be profoundly effected by the fact of their adoption and their experience and knowledge of the circumstances surrounding it. We have to be more creative about breaking these cycles and about investing efforts in making families functional, and we should be very anxious about approaches which encourage us to rush to judgment on the capacity of parents to do a good enough job. It was under Martin Narey’s stewardship remember that Barnardos proposed a timescale for the completion of an entire set of proceedings (12 weeks) that is shorter than the generally recommended time for residential assessment of learning disabled parents (16 weeks) that is required in order to properly establish their ability to parent and – crucially – their capacity to learn and change. Of course there are some who would say that the court’s role should be minimal in any event (the views of Family Justice Review Panel Member John Coughlan deserve a whole blog post in themselves, suffice to say he appears to be saying the exact same things that he said when I gave evidence to the panel last July).

We can never achieve perfect parenting. I can’t achieve it. My clients can’t achieve it. Those members of the judiciary, social work and other professions who have children don’t achieve it. Adoptive parents don’t achieve it. We all bumble along doing our best. Sometimes we fail to put the children first, make a textbook mistake. And some parents really do fail and fail irredeemably. But except at the extremes it is essentially a matter of degree, a spectrum. You can’t identify a hopeless parent by checking behind their ear for a label – you have to look carefully at the complexities, the details, the background. Adoption is and should be a draconian state intervention of last resort, not a quick fix or an aspiration. By all means speed up care proceedings where possible, improve adoption practice, do more robust research on adoption breakdown so that we can give children the best possible chances….But do not make adoption an end in itself. The only target we should have is to reduce the numbers of adoptions which become necessary at all.

* NB it is compulsory pursuant to s1 of the Emotive Language Act 1999 to describe all periods of accommodation by way of foster care as periods spent “languishing”. It is an offence punishable by a sentence of up to six months imprisonment (in a cell with Christopher Booker) not to employ the use of this term.

Slightly belated news that the Justice Select Committee has published it’s report on the Operation of the Family Courts. Scroll down to paragraph 239 and you will find a quote from Lucy Reed, author of Family Courts without a Lawyer – A Handbook for Litigants in Person, and a footnote citing Pink Tape! I have to confess this is a little bit rewarding and not a little bit anxiety inducing. Who the hell else is reading the rubbish I write? Can’t decide if my career is circling the plughole or – well the opposite of that. Anyway, regardless of my mini-ego trip the report is worth a read. I’ve had a chance for a quick scan only – and it seems pretty sensible to me. They do not mince their words in respect of the poor evidence base on the potential impact of the legal aid cuts and the likely upsurge of litigants in person in private law cases. I will expect the MoJ to be placing a bulk order for the Handbook very soon (not). A summary of the report is available here for those without the stamina to read the whole thing.

Also, whilst you are all waiting on the edge of your seats for part 2 of my inordinately lengthy adoption post (yes, @johnbolch, I know you mean me ) it seems that the blueprint for change is in fact NOT a blueprint for change at all. Confused? Camilla Pemberton at Community Care has interviewed Tim Loughton Children’s Minister, who (in spite of the fawning admiration of him by Martin Narey in his Times’ commissione adoption report) has rejected some of recommendations contained in it, importantly the suggestion we need not bother with assessing the self evidently cr*p extended families of obviously inadequate parents (I paraphrase a leetle). Bet he wishes he’d seen the report before the appointment.  Martin Narey responds here (I think unconvincingly but I’ll tackle this in blog post no 2).

Oh, and since it appears that most Government policy is almost entirely based on the opinions of rubbish newspapers, I am confident that they will revise their proposals to cut legal aid in private family disputes involving allegations of sexual abuse. Let’s face it – if the Daily Mail get it (sort of – just pretend they said “alleged paedophiles”)), the Government should be able to grasp the concept (h/t @acute_tomato).

Well, I have to go and catch some Zeees in preparation for the day job – so that’s your lot for today.

I will do my best to write this post so as to be meaningful to those who object to subscribing or who do not have access to the report itself.

In fact, it didn’t take long to read: whilst it runs to 48 pages it is discursive in style and contains no footnotes or references (that was the 1st of many raised eyebrows for this reader). It has taken me some time to put this post together, partly because of other commitments, and partly because of the gravity of the subject matter, and the need to do it properly. And partly because I like to sleep on a post when something has got me really riled up. This post required several nights sleep before I felt safe to start typing, let alone hit “publish”.

I would like to have spent more time on the post than I have been able to, but in the interests of publishing whilst there is still some news currency I have resolved to post what I’ve got – there will no doubt be some flaws and gaps which others will correct or fill in comments or elsewhere. In fact, for the same reasons I have resolved to post this in two mammoth posts – this is the first. Part two will follow – when I have finished writing it.

Background

Let’s begin at the beginning.

The Times newspaper has previously run campaigns about family justice, notably the campaign a couple of years ago for open family courts, spearheaded by Camilla Cavendish. It’s current campaign calls for radical reform to the adoption system. David Bebber, introducing the report wrote on 5 July:

“Three months ago, amid mounting evidence that thousands of children are left languishing in temporary foster care or residential homes, The Times launched a campaign for radical reforms to the adoption system. We called for more and speedier adoptions, and for older children in particular not to be overlooked. And…we realised that to make a real difference, a more detailed analysis of the system, with specific recommendations on how it should be reformed, was required.”

Enter Martin Narey, stage left. Martin Narey has a long and distinguished career, first in the prison service, subsequently probation (NOMS) and latterly Barnardos. In the latter role he expressed forthright and often controversial views about the fast tracking of routes to adoption. Having left Barnardos in January 2011 he was available for work. Perfect candidate for the production of a controversial and therefore eminently newsworthy report, the outcomes of which are neatly foreshadowed in the quote above.

Consider:

tendentious |ten?den sh ?s|

adjective expressing or intending to promote a particular cause or point of view, esp. a controversial one : a tendentious reading of history.

DERIVATIVES 

tendentiously adverb

tendentiousness noun

ORIGIN 

early 20th cent.: suggested by German tendenziös.

David Bebber goes on:

“So we asked an expert to help. Martin Narey…was ideally placed to draw up a report, exclusively for us, that would appraise the system fairly and thoroughly”.

Ideally placed indeed. Fairly and thoroughly? I’m going to analyse that proposition below.

Before I go to the content of the report it’s important to note the announcement of Martin Narey as the Government’s Adoption Tzar on 7 July (two days after publication of this private commission). How’s that bad taste? Another concerning example of Public Policy apparently driven or influenced by the media you say? Pshaw! Ridiculous!

Detailed analysis

As noted above, there are no footnotes, endnotes or indeed any references. The sources cited are in the main not referred to with their full title. This is a further barrier to transparency. It took me a number of hours to track down the references to books, reports and other written material that Narey refers to and relies upon. I have compiled them below, with links where available. This could be viewed as a surprising lack of rigour.

I have not undertaken the exercise of identifying sources which are not referred to by Narey but which evidence alternative or contradictory positions to those which he adopts (excuse pun) in his report. That exercise could be undertaken, but it is not within the scope of this post. I would welcome the posting of links to other reference material, research etc in comments.

Material that IS referred to in the report:

• Family Justice Review Interim Report (p4)

• “A highly regarded study by the University Of York, Mike Stein” (p5 & p10) – ??

• Quote from Royal College Of Paediatrics And Child Health teaching (p5) – unable to identify from RCPCH website.

• Bowlby and Rutter – attachment theory – no specific source identifiable, but many sources available for general history, development and principles of attachment theory.

• Martin Narey’s Institute of Public Policy Research paper 2010 (p6-7)

 I can only find a reference to a paper published in 2008 (here).

• The Daily Telegraph summary of 2010 article (p7): ??

• Liberty quote (p7):

“Separation of family members will normally constitute an interference with the right to respect for family life, although such interference may be justified, for example where a child is taken into care for his or her own protection”

This quote is taken from a brief summary for the public on the Liberty website (here), and is clearly neither intended to be a full exposition of the law in this area nor taken out of context. In any event it is a trite proposition – clearly the removal of a child may be a lawful interference with Article 8 rights – and depending on the facts it may not. Narey sets up a false dichotomy – there is no contradiction between the paramountcy principle and due regard to Article 8 and indeed Article 6 rights – the proper consideration of welfare issues in accordance with s1 Children Act 1989 is likely to render an interference necessary and proportionate on Human Rights grounds, but it need not be an either or situation. Welfare itself is difficult to identify and even more difficult to agree on – it has many aspects and an action may simultaneously enhance welfare in one aspect whilst harming it in another. Narey seems to see the world in black and white: safe and unsafe homes; good parents and bad parents.

• “Demos study” (p10) In Loco Parentis, Celia Hannon Claudia Wood Louise Bazalgette, Demos, 2010, but also see another more recent study by Demos, not mentioned by Narey: The Home Front, Jen Lexmond, Louise Bazalgette, Julia Margo, 2011, which recommends better support for parents in order to achieve better outcomes for children.

• All In A Day’s Work, Becky Hope (p10):

Published by Hodder & Stoughton and described in marketing material as “one woman’s gripping story”. Without wishing to doubt the authenticity or sincerity of this social worker cum author’s account, this seems to me to be a suprising source for a report which is intended to shape public policy. There is a place for qualitative evidence, but this is not just anecdotal evidence, it is a commercial product. This is no substitute for meeting with and speaking to Local Authority social workers, lawyers and others, for visiting the places where their work goes on and for gaining a real understanding of what they do. Narey says her book “captures the sad reality that too often we wait too long before removing a child from parental neglect, sometimes because of an unjustified optimism about the capacity of parents to improve.” It’s not a reality that I am often presented with when explaining a Local Authority’s care plan to my clients. My sad reality is quite different – optimism about parental capacity for change is not something that today’s overworked, jaded social workers are generally overflowing with.

• Case Management And Outcomes For Neglected Children Returned To Their Parents: A Five Year Follow Up Study, Elaine Farmer (2010) (p12)

• “A University of York study published last year” (p13):

Maltreated Children In The Looked After System: A Comparison Of Outcomes For Those Who Go Home And Those Who Do Not (Jim Wade, Nina Biehal, Nicola Farrelly and Ian Sinclair) Social Policy Research Unit, University of York, August 2010.

• “An article published in the Journal of Social Policy in 2009” (p13):

What is the Impact of Public Care on Children’s Welfare? A Review of Research Findings from England and Wales and their Policy Implications, Donald Forrester, Keith Goodman, Christine Cocker, Charlotte Binnie and Graham Jensch; Journal of Social Policy (2009), 38: 439-456. The quotation is a direct quote from the abstract.

• This “deeply unbalanced reference…on the website of one local authority” (p16):

“A parent who is considering placing their baby for adoption must be offered counseling and must be given time after the baby is born to reflect on tehri decision. Many are sad about not being able to raise or have a relationship with their child. Some have said that they eventually adjusted to the loss of a child, but that the pain and grief lasted a very long time. Others have said that life was never the same after placing the child.”

This appears to relate to Kirklees and concerns the decision by a new mother of a newborn baby to place him for adoption. It appears to me that far from being “deeply unbalanced” this statement is likely to be factually accurate, and aimed at the same issue that is behind the statutory prohibition on adoptions immediately after birth – namely that such decisions can have lifelong serious consequences for mothers and should be taken after proper reflection.

• Planned Parenthood (p16-17) is a US website, and as such deals with the US legal and cultural framework.

• “One local authority says this on it’s website” (p17):

“It is an important part of an adoptive parent’s role …to help a child or young person deal with their feelings about being part of two families and it is essential that efforts are made to keep a child’s birth family “alive” for that child”

This appears to be Dundee: and is rather taken out of context. In any event there is plenty of research that suggests that adoption is more likely to be successful (particularly in relation to older children) where knowledge of the birth family is open to the child “for identity purposes” (See for example the Kirklees website that Mr Narey refers to).

• Adoption statistics referred to at p19 can be found via the BAAF and Department of Education website here:

• “The Guardian recently estimated adoption breakdowns at 20%” (p24)

The only reference I can find is to this article, written by a member of the public in 2008:

• 2006 Rushton and Dance research (p25).

Shows an average adoption breakdown rate of 20% for “late” adoptive placements.

• PACT adoptions (p26):

Superficially, the written material referred to above gives an impression of “detailed analysis”, but in my view the use of even those sources is questionable. In any event it is apparent that in large part the conclusions reached are based largely upon Martin Narey’s strongly held opinions, opinions which pre-dated the commission and which are base upon limited anecdotal evidence in the course of his previous roles, rather than any systematic qualitative evidence gathering or fact finding exercise in the report writing period (a period which extended over as little as two or three months depending on which bit of the report and introductory article you rely on). There is no evidence of Martin Narey having visited courts or Local Authority social workers (the information he takes from social workers appears limited to social workers employed by Barnardos and one or two Local Authority social workers who have chosen to write to him, perhaps aware that his views chimed with their own). There is no reference to any legal source, other than passing mention of the Children Act and Articles 6 and 8 ECHR, and not even a mention of the complicated (and dysfunctional) framework of regulatory material in relation to care and adoption.

THAT my friends, was a tedious and laborious task. Having carried it out, I find I am surprised at both the choice and use of source material and the tendency to compress nuanced research conclusions and complex issues into soundbites, apparently in uncomplicated support of Mr Narey’s arguments. Whether I am right in this opinion will now at least be capable of discussion. I have not read all of the research on these topics. I have not had either the time or the stamina to do so after constructing Mr Narey’s Bibliography for him. It should at least aid transparency of discussion. Perhaps others can take up the baton whilst I take a rest?

Part Two of this blog post will follow in a day or two.

I’m all for permanence for children who cannot return home, but did nobody learn from the adoption targets episode and predict that this is precisely the kind of thing that will confirm the impression in people’s minds, peddled by many activists, that there is a system bias in favour of removal, adoption, “baby snatching”? This sort of soundbite initiative will have an untold impact on the ability of parents to engage constructively with professionals regarding concerns about their care of the children – parents could be forgiven for seeing everything as a step towards the end game of adoption. And there are those who will do their utmost to encourage that view. In order to promote adoption, it seems to me this initiative may play a part in the more chronic erosion of public confidence in the family justice system, and the care system in particular.

We don’t need Tzars to beat “soft-touch” social workers into shape, to “persuade” them of the rightness of adoption. Based on my experience, I’d say there is no shortage of social workers ready to recommend adoption at the drop of a nappy. We do need to make changes in the system though to speed up adoption where it is appropriate, such as by taking a sensible look at the regulatory framework for placement proceedings and adoption panels. And we may need to enlarge and broaden the pool of potential adopters in order to speed up the matching and placing process. But why does that require a jazzy title exactly? (Perhaps, taking a leaf from certain other campaigners, the Tzar will don a ridiculous costume in order to curry attention for his cause?)

Community Care also reports that “It was today confirmed that The Times has commissioned Narey to produce a special report on adoption and that he will be known as the ministerial adviser on adoption.” Initially I thought that must have been a typo, and that it meant to say that The Times has confirmed that the Dept of Education has commissioned him. But apparently not so – if I read the Community Care articles correctly The Times is to be heavily involved in the active promotion of adoption, presumably to tackle a shortfall in prospective adoptive parents. Not sure how this squares with the now ancient history of The Times campaign for open family courts, which was, as I recall it, rather critical of removals of children which took place in secret.

I’m presently rather bemused about this whole story, and awaiting the official announcement in the hope that it will produce some clarity. This short post is my gut reaction to the limited information available – I welcome views on whether other people had a similar or different initial response.