Hansard

Every child deserves the best possible start in life and to grow up feeling and being loved, wanted, safe and secure. All across Scotland, thousands of adoptive families provide the love and security that all children deserve. They make a huge difference to the lives of children whose early lives have often been blighted by abuse and neglect. I want to thank them all for making that difference for their children.

Achieving permanence for children through adoption necessarily involves a process of checks and balances and a system that applies a rigorous approach, involving a range of agencies and professionals. That system needs to be proportionate and effective, and must enable the finding of permanent homes for children.

In recent years, we have made much progress in improving the system and the process. The starting point is the Adoption and Children (Scotland) Act 2007. Its measures have resulted in changes that have been an unalloyed good, and I want to pay tribute to Labour’s Hugh Henry, then Minister for Education and Young People, and the Liberal Democrats’ Robert Brown, his deputy minister, for shepherding that legislation through this Parliament.

As Robert Brown said when closing the debate at stage 3 of the bill, the legislation represents not just a milestone but also a start, and that is what has been achieved. Services have been improved and now function within a more coherent framework. The development and use of permanence orders has helped to provide adoptive parents and adopted children with greater security. More and better support, not just in financial terms, but by way of advice, information and training, is now available. Further, crucially, the act has enabled opportunities for more people to adopt, including same-sex couples.

However, implementing the legislation and delivering the change that is required have not always been as straightforward as we might have hoped. None of us foresaw nor wished for the demise of the British Association for Adoption and Fostering in July 2015. In order to ensure that advice, training and support could continue to be provided to professionals and organisations, the Scottish Government stepped in with funding to enable the creation of the Adoption and Fostering Alliance Scotland, which enabled some of the former BAAF Scotland employees and members to continue their work. We now provide funding of £100,000 to AFA Scotland and support a range of other charities and organisations doing vital work in the area. The St Andrews Children’s Society, which was established more than 90 years ago, receives more than £160,000 a year to maintain and expand Scotland’s adoption register; it also seeks to recruit more adopters and foster carers. Birthlink also receives funds from the Scottish Government. It provides and maintains the adoption contact register for Scotland. Its work is especially important in enabling people who have been adopted to reconnect with their birth families through its register, which contains tens of thousands of people’s details. Adoption UK receives £75,500 to promote adoption policy and good practice and to operate the national adoption advice line.

Adoption UK has also taken on the facilitation of the first adoption week Scotland, which is taking place this week and which, rightly, is themed as a celebration of adoption in Scotland. Events are taking place across Scotland, including an information session for people who are interested in finding out more about adoption and a practitioners networking event to enable those working in the sector to meet and hear input about adoption and permanence initiatives. Further, a large celebratory event for adoptive families is being held at a soft-play centre in Edinburgh. I hope that members will use the opportunity of adoption week Scotland to promote those events and to highlight the role that is played in their communities by adoptive families. This week, we should do all that we can to celebrate adoption.

With the Children and Young People (Scotland) Act 2014, we have placed Scotland’s adoption register on a statutory footing. The register provides opportunities for children to be matched with families across Scotland if they cannot be matched locally. By requiring all local authorities to use the register, the legislation plays an important role in reducing delays in children being matched with adoptive families and finding permanent homes. Since the establishment of the register in 2011, it has facilitated 320 matches with adoptive families. I recently visited the 300th register match and was impressed with the supportive and caring environment in which the child was developing, thanks to his new family.

However, the progress that has been enabled by the register is not enough by itself. The current rate of matches is good, but it is not good enough. There are still far too many children waiting—growing up while waiting—for a family and a home, and there are not enough prospective adopters to provide those children with a home. If we are to see a step change in children finding permanent and nurturing homes, over the coming years adoption numbers need to grow—in the hundreds. We can get there only if we start by reaching out through our collective efforts to the dozens of potential adopters who are willing and able to help out the hardest-to-place children and young people.

We need to ensure that the system continues to evolve to increase opportunities. The register is playing a big part in that, exploring and developing innovative and child-centred ways of promoting adoption. One such example is adoption exchange days, which feature profiles of children who are waiting for adoption, including photographs, drawings and letters, which help approved adopters to gain an insight into those children. Beginning in 2012, exchange days have been held throughout Scotland and have resulted in 88 matches to date.

Another example is adoption activity days, at which prospective adopters meet a range of children who are waiting to be adopted and engage with them in a supported, safe and fun environment. So far, there have been three adoption activity days in Scotland. There has been positive feedback from those who have attended, including through an independent evaluation of the first activity day, which has been published and is available from the Parliament’s library. The first activity day was held in October 2015 in Prestwick, with seven matches being made as a result. The second, which was in Perth in May, resulted in two children being matched. The third was held in Bathgate on 5 November and so far there have been 14 notes of interest in pursuing adoption further.

The 300th matched family, which I visited, came about with the help of an activity day. The adoptive parents said that there was a strong possibility that if they had not attended the event, they would not have made such a connection and been matched with their son.

We have held three such successful events, and I can announce today that from April 2017 adoption activity days will become a permanent feature of Scotland’s adoption register. Moreover, I am increasing funding to the register to double the number of events from three to six per year.

Although we are working to embed an approach that puts children at its heart, we also need to use technology to maximise resources and ensure that prospective adoptive parents can play an active and pro-active role. I can therefore also announce that we are putting into effect measures that enable adopter-led matching through a secure online system called link maker as part of Scotland’s adoption register. It allows prospective adopters to look for matches directly while enabling social workers, practitioners and agencies to seek placements for children by considering the profiles of prospective adopters. Many registered adoption agencies throughout the United Kingdom are now using link maker effectively and securely, and adding it to our adoption register will provide consistent access across Scotland.

Of course, making the process more child and parent centred and more efficient will not by itself improve adoption rates. One of the biggest challenges is to reduce the drift and delay that still often permeate parts of the process. Our work to address that is centred on the permanence and care excellence—PACE—programme, which supports improvement projects in 10 local authority areas, with plans to add a further four by March 2017.

We have funded the centre of excellence for looked after children in Scotland since January 2014 to implement the PACE programme. Its care and permanence team works closely with individual local authorities and their partners to make improvements to their decision-making systems. By providing intensive, system-wide support, the CELCIS team and the local authorities with which it works put early intervention into action, streamlining decision-making processes and creating concurrent planning by all the agencies involved in an adoption process.

While local areas are identifying and taking forward the right actions that will lead to improvements for their locale, we are monitoring and evaluating the impact of those actions, with a view to sharing more widely what works. I have recently seen at first hand some of the outcomes that have been achieved by PACE projects in a number of local authorities in Scotland. The work is very encouraging and is an example of empowering practitioners to take the best course of action to deliver the best outcomes for the children in their local authority area.

The PACE projects across Scotland give us a route map for the future. We will continue to achieve more adoptions and more permanence for children if we can ensure that all parts of the system are involved and committed to improvement; that professionals and practitioners have the tools, skills and knowledge that they need to effect change; that we continue to adapt those tools to meet needs and interests; and, crucially, that we increasingly involve prospective adoptive parents and children in the process.

I want to conclude where I began, by thanking all who work and volunteer in the adoption system for the commitment that they bring to this vital work, and by thanking all adoptive parents—and those who are still to come—for giving some of Scotland’s most vulnerable children a home, a family, security, care and, crucially, love and hope. We are grateful to all who adopt children and all who are registered as prospective adopters. I recognise that we have more to do to encourage more people to come forward. Part of today’s debate is about celebrating the on-going work to provide safe and stable home environments for children who are in need of permanence, and part of it is to serve as a rallying call to those who may be considering adoption to look at the benefits that it can bring not just to the children who are adopted and who achieve permanence, but to prospective adopters who go on to become an adoptive family.

I confirm that we will accept Labour’s amendment although I have to add a couple of notes on that. We do not operate a priority system that is based on background or status. Children should be given support based on need. However, I believe that the spirit of the amendment is about ensuring that adopted children get whatever support they need and are not forgotten about at the point at which they leave the care system. In that spirit, we can accept Labour’s amendment. This has the potential to be a consensual debate and I am glad that we are able to accept the amendment.

There is more to be done to ensure that more children and young people benefit from a secure, permanent and nurturing family environment at the earliest opportunity. As we pause this week to celebrate adoption and the difference that it makes, let us resolve to get on and make sure that we continue to do just that.

I move,

That the Parliament welcomes the first-ever Adoption Week Scotland, which takes place from 21 to 27 November 2016, to celebrate and promote adoption; acknowledges the role played by measures in the Adoption and Children (Scotland) Act 2007 and by Scotland’s Adoption Register, which have resulted in progress in recent years to increase the number of adoptions; considers that there is more to do to speed up decision making and reduce drift and delay in the system, and supports the roll-out of the Permanence and Care Excellence (PACE) programme to all local authority areas to make improvements in this regard so that more children benefit from a secure, permanent and nurturing family environment at the earliest opportunity.