Adoption and Looked After Children

clause 1 - I am very concerned about the rights of the child as enshrined in the UNCRC and in particular the right to be raised by his or her parents. The natural follow through to Clause one is that the local authority can and will place the child in a fostering placement which will move to an adoptive placement without scrutiny by any outside agency ( the court). The right of the child to be heard on decisions that are to be made about him/her will be infringed (Article 12 UNCRC). There appears no effective mechanism to safeguard the child's rights. Equally the right of the parent to a fair hearing- Article 6 ECHR and the right to family life Article 8 ECHR ( in particular where section 20 agreements are signed under duress or without proper advice and understanding of the consequences of signing agreement are made clear to the parent. There appears no mechanism to challenge and if there is one it will be dependent on the grant of public funding which is being cut for all types of legal remedies against the state . This clause should be deleted from the Bill as it does not secure better outcomes for the child, the parents and importantly the family which is the core of our society. If we have no family there is no society and we impoverish our world.
Clause 2 - this is a clear infringement of the rights enshrined in both ECHR & UNCRC of the child and parents (family) and in contravention to the Universal Declaration on Human Rights as it relates to upbringing of a child and freedom of expression including choice of religion. Better outcomes for children cannot be achieved if we ignore these matters which are fundamental to the individual child's development. Why would you wish to deprive a child of its path of development by ignoring the very circumstances into which he or she was born. There is the need to understand that we do not need just to feed the physical vehicles of a child but must feed the soul and a failure to acknowledge that we must do so and then a failure to do so will inevitably lead to poorer outcomes for children resulting in a broken and fractured society and ultimately a broken and fractured world. This clause does not promote better outcomes for children but is expedient only for the process forgetting the very people it is meant to serve. This clause cannot be altered to improve it, it has no value for the children and family and should be deleted in its entirety.

SHAMA PART 5
LACK OF STATISTICAL DATA ON RELIGION HAS AN IMPACT ON MOBILIZING FAITH COMMUNITIES TO ENGAGE WITH ADOPTION:
Rather than doing away with the need to consider religion, more could be done to engage faith communities in adoption. More rigorous outreach initiatives to call for adopters from faith communities that represent children needing adoption is a valuable strategy. But how can the needs of these children be met when there isn’t even data collected by the DfE. Rough guesswork from ethnicity data is insufficient. Surely LAs should be keeping records on faith of children. Why is this not collated and published by the DfE as part of the annual statistical return?
I believe that people of all faith groups (whether Hindu, Sikh, Jewish or Christian, etc) would be interested in identifying how many children of their faith are represented in the care system. I know that this is the view of the UK Hindu Council.
Better recording of the faith of Looked After Children may prove to be an awareness catalyst for communities who may not know how many children of their faith are in the care system, thus encouraging recruitment in high demand areas.
Ideas to consider?: Local Authorities could report the faith of LAC to the DfE. DfE annual statistics could then categorize LAC by faith (as well as ethnicity). Local Authorities’ data on faith of LAC could be accessible to appropriate parties – this could help to speed up adoptions as it enables signposting people interested in adoption to appropriate LAs.

SHAMA PART 4:
A Muslim adopter could nurture a ‘healthy’ understanding of Islam and counter false allegations made against Islam. Left unchecked, this would only serve to make a child feel ashamed of his/her Muslim background, and subsequently lead to low self-esteem; Muslim adopters would be in a position to help a child challenge notions they may face in the playground and elsewhere; that all Muslims advocate terrorism, or views on oppression of women and Muslims being intolerant to other faiths. Muslim adopters can use Quranic texts to properly inform the child with a basis to challenge stereotypes they may face. Also, when an adoptee goes off to explore Islam, we want him/her to avoid coming under the influence of Muslims with radical views; being brought up in a normal Muslim household would be a deterrent to falling in with the wrong crowd.
A Muslim child adopted to a family of a different faith potentially threatens the child’s Muslim identity because the adopter represents the dominant role model - the one whose approval the child will seek - the child is likely to subconsciously internalise the life style, beliefs and practises of the adopter. For a child who is potentially already set to have identity issues and confusion because they are adopted, I worry that this scenario can only serve to compound the confusion for a child – how can a child take seriously attempts to learn about its faith when he or she can see that the parent doesn’t have the same conviction.
What’s revealing is that though the adoptees’ adoptive parents were committed, loving parents, all the adoptees I spoke to felt that, where possible, Muslim children should be placed with Muslim families. It’s imperative that we take notice of these messages. Of course it’s too late for them but it’s not too late for children facing adoption now. The children are voiceless in all of this – we have to be their voice and declare that that FAITH MATTERS!

SHAMA PART 2:

While I believe that a child should not be deprived of a loving family if a faith match is not available, I feel that restricting the search to only a local level for monetary reasons is a case of prioritizing money over the needs of the child. This is a scandal as the child has no voice, no insight as a youngster to the long term implications throughout his/her or life of decisions made on his or her behalf based on cost!
Trouble is, such were the pressures on social workers to disregard inter-agency adopters, thereby impeding searches for a faith match, at a time when ‘due consideration to religious persuasion’ had been a legislative requirement. If this clause is repealed, some social workers are concerned that they will be under much greater pressure to place ‘in house’ without looking further afield for a ‘best match’ due – not only to budgetary constraints – but due to the additional pressure of scorecards publicising timescales on adoptions. It is unfair anyway to compare adoption speeds of LAs whose demographic is over represented by BME children, who are harder to place anyway, with LAs whose demographic is predominantly white. There’s a danger that pressure to perform on league tables will promote inappropriate and rushed placements for BME children. Speed over quality of match!
Yet there’s an inequity; BME children can be placed with white adopters but when enquiries are made about a child who is considered ‘half Muslim’, Muslims are turned away because they are not considered able to sufficiently support the child’s ‘white’ heritage, despite white culture being the dominant culture in society. Surely it would be easier for Asian, Muslim adopters to support the white heritage of a half Muslim child than it is for a white family to support the BME heritage of a BME child in a dominantly white society?
Another concern social workers have reported to me is the pressure to appease adopters who have been approved and are waiting for a child but who do not match the child’s faith, while knowing that adopters who could match the child’s faith may be available with other agencies. The best interests of the child again go out the window. Professionals have experienced that children from Sikh backgrounds have been matched ‘in house’ with Hindu families and that children of Pakistani Muslim background have been adopted ‘in house’ to Indian Sikh or Hindu families on the basis that they have been matched with an "Asian" family, and, African Muslim children have been placed with non-Muslim black Caribbean families.
Let’s do away with this inter agency fee and have a ‘central money pot’ so that money is not the centre of decision making when family finding for children.

SHAMA PART 1:

Through the work I’ve been involved in over the last 5 years, promoting adoption of Muslim children and raising the profile of adoption in Muslim communities, I have been contacted by social workers from different parts of England. A recurring theme emerged from these totally unconnected individuals. Time and time again, in confidence, they told me that they were trying to find a family for a healthy Sikh baby or a healthy Muslim baby for whom they felt it would be relatively easy to find a faith match, seeing as most adopters seek healthy babies.
In the absence of their own Local Authorities’ adoption agency having an ‘in house’ approved Sikh family for the sikh child - or a Muslim family for the Muslim child - the social workers proposed to seek a family from another agency who would be a faith match. They were dismayed that their managers would not allow this due to financial reasons. They were prevented from referring children to the adoption register or to magazines that profile children (eg BeMyParent), thereby hindering approved adopters from other agencies knowing about these children. These social workers felt that they had no choice but to match the child to ‘in house’ approved adopters who were of a totally different religion; eg the Sikh baby to a Hindu family and a Muslim baby to a sikh couple. This sort of thing happens time and time again.
On the other end of the spectrum, I hear from approved adopters who are frustrated with waiting and are constantly being told there are no babies of their faith background. From the evidence I’m gathering, their clearly are but they fall through the net and are under the radar of these approved adopters. SWs who contact me do so as they feel they have nowhere to voice their concerns and feel so strongly about the injustice that they risk losing their jobs by speaking about it. They are saddened that the child has missed an opportunity to grow up in a family that could have supported their faith identity, denying the child the social connectivity that will have growing significance as the child grows up. These social workers say that their managers blame the government for tight budgets. Knowing that there could have been an appropriate family out there but being denied the opportunity to use them is playing on the conscience of these social workers.
This practice of not using inter-agency adopters is an attempt to avoid paying the interagency fee or what SWs term ‘buying a form F’. This practice is well known. The government blamed delay in placing BME children on social workers being too fixated on finding the perfect ethnic match. But the delay in placing BME children (and children in general) can also be attributed to local authorities’ unwillingness to pay the inter agency fee to acquire inter-agency adopters – Dr Julie Selwyn’s study on the inter agency fee criticizes some local authorities for leaving children to languish in foster care, rather than utilize government allocated resources to publicise children through the adoption register or BMP for whom they could not find an appropriate in house match. She also criticized LAs for ignoring matches that the register recommended.
Clearly, these are not merely my own views or the views of a few; some Voluntary Adoption Agencies complain of a lack of referrals by local authorities and how this impacts on their ability to stay afloat. This practice was acknowledged by the government’s own former Children’s Minister, Tim Loughton, in his letter addressed to all local authorities and in the DfE’s Statutory Guidance on Adoption: under the section ‘Adoption agencies, Consortia & the Adoption Register p89 paragraph 17 & 19:
Paragraph 17: “In trying to identify a suitable prospective adopter for a child, the agency should bear in mind that the most suitable family may be one that has been approved by another agency. It should make use of all its available resources such as other adoption agencies – both VAAs and local authorities (- any consortium of agencies of which it is a member), and the Adoption Register, to help ensure there is no delay in children’s placement with adoptive families.
Paragraph 19: “Where a local authority is aware that a particular prospective adopter approved by another adoption agency can best meet the needs of a child, they should negotiate with the agency about the possible placement of the child with that family. Unwillingness to pay an inter-agency fee should not be the reason for not placing the child”.

The inter agency fee is not just an impediment to the best placements for Muslim or Sikh children as it acts as a deterrent to finding a best match for any BME child.

My comment is regarding CLAUSE 2 of the C&F bill. I feel that the religion and racialbackground of the child should be considered for adoption. It gives them self identity which brings confidence in a person

Please reconsider the removal of Clause 2 as there is evidence  that children from trans-racial adoptions, have had many problems have had many problems in the past.

 The assumption that the removal of this Clause will make a difference to the number of children left in care long term is also misleading. Other issues such as age are more important factors that contribute to children being left in care long term without a placement. Currently this clause does not prevent parents from different races and religions adopting children who are not of their race or religion, it just means when children are being placed with foster carers or adoptive parents factors such as race and religious beliefs are taken into consideration.

The long term affects need to be considered when children are fostered or adopted as they may also become isolated from their racial/religious communities who might be best able to support them as children and later as adults. 

I feel extremely strongly about clause 2 removed as a child's ethnic needs should be considered. At present I have a child who is with me over an year. Before he came to me he was placed with foster carers who did not meet his religious and ethnicity needs. At all his meetings with his social worker he only says that "I wish you had placed me with my present family from the beginning". He seems very upset when talking about his previouse foster carers. Due to this incident I strongly say that the child's ethnicity should be considered.

Clause 1
Fostering for adoption.
This is not in anyones interest, the childs, the birth parents or the adopting parents.
Not in the childs best interests because the family court system is not based on fact finding, social services records are based more on opinions than facts, expert reports are based on records held by social services which are all too often false, misleading and inaccurate.
Therefore the first priority should be forming a working model that is based on proven fact.
This in turn can allow a family court to make decisions not to wrongfully remove a parent or parents against the stability and longer term emotional health of the child.
Without trouble shooting the above and placing a child with foster carers who wish to adopt, the first damage will be to the birth parents and child, the longer term damage to the foster carers/adopted family and children. The final and most damage to both the birth parents and children.
Clause 2 is giving another patch to an already broken system. The sign of a desperate need to remove children from 'state care' given that the same has been proven to be a serious abuse to children.
I am sure that most of the other comments are strongly against given that the last rights of natural child rearing (identity) are even being considered for removal.
Not in the best interests of children.
Clauses 7 and 8. These would only serve the interests of the social workers who want to do everything and all to make the relationship work between adopting couples and the child. But it would not serve the real interests of children. Based on extensive research and history it may work on animals replacing a surrogate with the real mother, but history and reseach proves it does not work with humans as longer term emotional damage is vast when identity has been denied.
And where in the system does it have 'in the interests of the damaged adult' by then there is no such concern.