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Only one in eight of the couples and individuals who try to adopt children are approved by social workers, official figures revealed yesterday.
The shocking statistics mean that more than 22,000 would-be adoptive parents vanish from the system every year.
The figures were made public for the first time by the schools and children inspectorate Ofsted. They were released just three weeks after the government-sponsored National Adoption Week called for thousands more people to come forward to adopt.
The Ofsted count showed that in the year which ended in March, 25,380 couples and individuals made inquiries about adopting a child.
Of these, only 4,145 (16 per cent) went on to make applications to adopt a child. Even fewer – 3,048 – were actually approved as prospective parents by council or agency social workers.
The drop-out rate has been revealed at a time when ministers have promised to sweep away the barriers to adoption put up by social workers over the past three decades.
Parents have been regularly turned down because social workers insist on precise racial matches, and white parents are routinely rejected as adopters of black or Asian children. Potential parents are also turned down because they smoke, or are too old, or social workers say their health is not good enough.
The Ofsted breakdown, based on returns from councils and voluntary adoption agencies, gave the same figure as Whitehall for the number of children adopted from the care system last year – 3,450.
Refused: Many would-be parents have been turned down because social workers insist on precise racial matches (file photo)
About 65,000 children live in state care, either in children’s homes or with frequently changing foster families.
Children who grow up in care are likely to grow up with poor education and have a high chance of falling into drug abuse, crime or early pregnancy.
Despite regular warnings that adoption placements often break up, the Ofsted figures showed that there were only 115 ‘unplanned endings’ of adoption placements during the year. Continue reading
Image: Priests for Life
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