Only 60 babies adopted in the UK last year
For childless couples desperate to adopt a baby statistics released by the Department for Education will have made their hearts sink: only 60 infants under the age of one were adopted in England last year.
This shockingly low level has been declining in recent years — it has fallen from 150 in 2007.
While parents want to adopt from as young an age as possible, most adopted children are aged between one and four years old. Of all looked-after children adopted more than 70% fell into this age group.
For children aged five and older, 820 were adopted in the year to March 2011, down from 880 in 2010.
Overall while there was a 2% increase in the number of children in care, there was a 5% decrease in the number adopted. There were 3,050 looked-after children adopted in the year to March 2011, down from theprevious year's figure of 3,200. This was an 8% decline since 2007.
[See also: Obese children to be put up for adoption]
In response to the statistics Anne Marie Carrie, the chief executive of children’s charity, Barnado’s, urged decision-making to be quicker.
“Everyone involved in the care system needs to be braver and should ‘act fast’ to place children with a new permanent family when it is clear that even with support the child’s birth family is not going to change and cannot cope,” she said.
“It is imperative that decision making is sped up at every stage of the adoption process; we know that by the time a child is four years old they already have a far lesser chance of being adopted than a baby.
Successful adoptions not only transform the life of the child for the better, but also that of their new family,” she added.
Carrie also said that prospective adoptive parents must be encouraged to come forward and be supported with adequate training both before and after adoption.
Barnardo’s works in partnership with local authorities and health trusts to find foster care and adoptive parents for looked-after children. It has more than a 100 years’ fostering experience and 60 years in adoption.
The average length of time a looked-after child has to wait to be adopted is two years and seven months.
More than half of the children who were taken into care in the year to March 2011 were the victims of abuse or neglect.
Carrie said that the thresholds for allowing parents to adopt a child were too high and that instead of being ‘cherished’ prospective adoptive parents were treated with suspicion.
