Agenda item

Report of the Director of Children’s and Education Services.

The Board considered a report of the Director of Children’s and Education Services that provided an overview of the adoption activity and performance in 2024/25.

Officers explained that each local authority was required by regulation to publish an annual adoption report. The Annual Adoption Report (Appendix 1) provides an overview of adoption activity and performance for the year 2024-2025.

Coventry Children’s Services delivered adoption services in partnership with the Regional Adoption Agency – Adoption Central England (ACE), which has been operational since 1st February 2018. This was in accordance with national policy that all local authority adoption services were required to be part of a Regional Adoption Agency by 2020.

ACE provided a number of services as a local authority shared services arrangement hosted by Warwickshire County Council. Details of the services provided by ACE were included in the Annual report

In partnership with ACE the local authority planned to improve and develop its adoption practise in the following key areas:

·  Continue to develop collaborative working across Children’s Services for effective pre-birth, pre-proceedings and care proceedings to ensure timely permanence is achieved for all children.

·  Continue to ensure fostering for adopt / early permanence is considered for every child where appropriate and a rationale for decision is recorded.

·  Continue to collaborate with ACE on an operational and strategic level (via the ACE Executive board) regarding sufficiency challenges in ACE to minimise delay for children being matched with adoptive families.

·  All social workers who are working with children who have a plan / potential plan of adoption will undertake permanency planning training offered by ACE to continue to promote good practice in this area.

·  All social workers will undertake training on life story work, life story books offered by ACE to continue to promote good practice in this area.

·  Coventry to have an established framework for assessing and supporting post adoption relationship maintenance between Adoptive families and Birth families.

In considering the report, the Board questioned officers, received responses, and discussed matters as summarised below:

·  The service activity figures followed promising downward trends that were lower than both national and local levels. Despite this, the council would continue to focus on improving the service.

·  How the council was focusing more on ensuring children received some form of direct contact with birth parents. This was the norm outside of the UK and in line with national attempts to increase this kind of contact where possible.

·  How social media had made contact between birth parents and children outside of council instruction, this further encouraged the council to promote appropriate and supervised contact.

·  That although the overall reduction in people willing to adopt may be in part due to a focus on increased contact between parents and children, a more significant factor was the cost-of-living crisis dis-encouraging potential adopters from taking on this additional financial burden.

·  That when children are fostered, they are more likely to see their birth parents weekly but when adopted, this was more often a few times a year.

·  Fostered children are still officially seen as in the council’s care whereas adopted children are fully in their adoptive parents’ care with minimal direct supervision.

·  Children are usually adopted to parents outside their local authority to promote stability, although this is situation dependant and not mandatory.

·  That although parents can decline to meet their birth children once adopted to different parents, this is rare.

·  Research had shown that increased contact between children and their birth parents led to more positive long-term outcomes and improved their sense of identity.

·  The age of the child impacts how contact with their birth parents is managed, furthermore, adopted children are given life story books to help them understand and explain their identity.

·  Social workers stay assigned to the children throughout their life and are available even as adults to provide support.

·  That all children are given life story work and social workers are trained to include it in their support.

Members requested that the following information be circulated to them:

·  Explaining the decrease in ADM decisions that a child should be placed for adoption as reported by ACE between 2022 and 2025.

·  Concerning the ethnicity of adopted children and how it impacts the time to place them.

·  The numbers of children adopted from abroad.

·  Detailing the Richard Rose and Joy Reece models with examples of them in practice.

·  Be brought to the next annual report detailing life story work and how it impacts adopted children later in life.

The Education and Children’s Services Scrutiny Board (2) Resolved to note the contents of the briefing note and report and had no further recommendations for the Cabinet Member.