Council adoption services criticised for mistakes in matching children with families

Council-run adoption services have been criticised for a series of blunders and delays in matching looked-after children with families.

A Department for Education study into family finding and matching in adoption found that too often information prepared by social workers contained errors.

It found that a third of child permanence reports, which are prepared by social workers and are the main source of information used in finding families, did not accurately reflect children’s difficulties.

Adoption panels were forced to return 13 per cent of these reports because they did not have enough information about the child.

The report also found that matching through in-house council adoption services was less successful than when handled by adoption agencies. A third of in-house matches were considered poor and would have required serious compromise by the young person and the potential adopters, compared to 18 per cent of matching using an inter-agency approach.

County councils were among the worst performers in matching families with young people. The report said: “Significantly more poor-quality matches were arranged by county authorities, suggesting that their greater use of in-house placements may sometimes have involved compromising on fully meeting children’s needs.”

Social workers’ stubbornness in finding “a notional ideal family” was also causing delays. The report found that often they were unwilling to alter requirements of the adoption “even when no family could be found”.

Other delays were experienced by councils not starting to find a family until a formal placement order had been made by a court. However, this was often made at least two months after the adoption recommendation had been approved.

The report found just two councils that focused on avoiding this delay by starting work on finding families as soon as the recommendation was approved.