Not enough adoption placements are being found for children

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abuse, adopters, adoption, adoptive placements, Children, family, foster care, neglect, placement orders, support, Therapy

Not enough adoption placements are being found for children

The government’s overhaul of the adoption system is designed to speed up the approval process and make it easier for people to adopt. But the latest Department for Education statistics for England reveal that the number of children waiting to be adopted has increased by around 15% since last year.

In March 2011, there were 6,240 children with placement orders, a year later there were 7,160. A placement order is granted when a local authority plans for a child to be adopted. At the same time, the number of children placed with adopters has decreased by 1% since 2011 – and 6% since 2008. This suggests that while more placement orders are being made, not enough adoption placements are being found.

John Simmonds, policy director for the British Association for Adoption and Fostering (Baaf), says the number of children with placement orders is a concern: “I don’t think we have a sufficient number of adopters being recruited at the moment. For some children there’s a prospect that they won’t get placed at all.”

If progress is to be made, he believes it is crucial that adopters know they’ll get the necessary support once their child is with them, particularly in the case of harder-to-place children such as sibling groups, older children and those with disabilities. “There needs to be a recognition that, for any adopter, this is a challenging thing that people are taking on.”

The support provided to adopters by local authorities and voluntary adoption agencies varies. Julie and Mark had a six-year-old boy placed with them for adoption last year. Julie says that, despite their local authority’s promise of support, appropriate help and information ceased when it looked as though the adoption could go ahead and they began asking questions and requesting support. The placement broke down and their child returned to foster care.

Julie says: “I did not want to lose our boy. He was my son whom I had begun to bond with, loved and had envisaged being part of our lives for ever.” She believes their son could still be with them had they been supported adequately.

By contrast, Rose adopted her son through Adoptionplus, an agency that provides specialist therapeutic support for all of its adoptive families. She says: “We felt very well prepared for our little boy to be with us.” Rose says support is available whenever they need it. “Although we’ve got set therapy sessions, we know that if we don’t need to access them we don’t have to. The great thing is that we could not see them for months and months, or years, and then ring them up in six years’ time and say this is starting to be an issue, and then they can help us out with that. That’s just great to know.”

Currently, 72% of adopted children were neglected, abused or both by their birth families. Alan Burnell, director of adoption agency Family Futures, says many children they see are scared and need help to adjust. “Even though they’re in safe, new environments, they need help to rewire their brain so that they can accept the love and the care that they’re getting in adoptive families,” he says.

Local authorities are obliged to assess adopters’ support needs, if requested, but not to provide any specific services identified by those assessments. “The key to adoption success is in the post placement support and therapeutic input,” says Burnell. Family Futures has been placing children for adoption since 2009 and offers support from a team of therapists, paediatricians, teachers, psychologists and social workers. “All the families that come to us have access to that whole multidisciplinary team, who can provide whatever help they need over a long period of time,” he adds.

Joanne Alper, director of Adoptionplus, used to manage a local authority adoption team. “It used to break my heart to see the same children coming back into care again and again, following breakdown after breakdown of fostering and adoptive placements,” she says. “The local authority used to respond to these children from very much a crisis intervention perspective.”

Alper is part of the team that set up Adoptionplus to support children’s long-term needs. The agency started placing children for adoption in 2011, and employs a support team of specialists.

Diane Cecil manages a team at Essex county council whose job is to find families for children who are hard to place. “We have placed many children outside of Essex,” she says. “There have been some voluntary adoption agencies and local authorities that have provided good post-adoption services, and there have been some that haven’t provided anything at all.”

Cecil’s team recently placed a child with an Adoptionplus family after his first adoption broke down and it was clear he would need ongoing support. “I feel confident … this little boy and these adoptive parents are being provided with a very good support service,” she says. Although the cost of this type of placement is high (Adoptionplus charges local authorities £65,000 for placement and support), she adds that the alternative for the child would have been long-term foster care, costing the council around £27,000 per year. “For us, I felt that was a really good investment.”

• Some names have been changed

Government tackles abuse of children accused of witchcraft

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abuse, neglect, ritual abuse, Therapy, Torture, violence, witchcraft

Government tackles abuse of children accused of witchcraft

The government has announced plans to tackle the “wall of silence” around the abuse and neglect of children accused of witchcraft, following the brutal murder of Kristy Bamu, who was tortured to death in London in 2010 by his sister and her partner after they said he was a witch.

Key charities say many cases of “ritual abuse” are under the radar and that the belief in witchcraft is on the increase in the UK.

Under the new plans, the government aims to identify and prosecute more offenders by raising awareness of faith-based abuse and its links to trafficking, missing children and sexual exploitation or grooming. The goal is also to help the victims give evidence.

Tim Loughton, the children’s minister, said: “Child abuse is appalling and unacceptable wherever it occurs and in whatever form it takes. Abuse linked to faith or belief in spirits, witchcraft or possession is a horrific crime, condemned by people of all cultures, communities and faiths – but there has been a wall of silence around its scale and extent.

“It is not our job to challenge people’s beliefs but it is our job to protect children. There can never be a blind eye turned to violence or emotional abuse or even the smallest risk that religious beliefs will lead to young people being harmed.”

Kristy Bamu was 15 when he arrived in London from his home in Paris to visit his sister and her boyfriend for Christmas. Eric Bikubi, the man he referred to as his uncle, became fixated with the idea that he was practising kindoki or witchcraft. With increasing violence, Bikubi, 28 when he came to trial, tried to “exorcise demons” from the child.

During the torture, described during the trial this year as a “staggering act of depravity and cruelty”, the 15-year-old was deprived of water and sleep, and punched and kicked repeatedly. Floor tiles were smashed over his head and his teeth were hit out with a hammer.

The trial followed the case of child B – an eight-year-old Angolan girl who was beaten and cut, and had chilli rubbed into her eyes after being accused of being a witch in 2003 – and that of eight-year-old Victoria Climbié murdered by her guardians 12 years ago.

Despite low reported figures of ritualised abuse, police have warned that the crime is “hidden and under-reported”.

Under plans drawn up in the national action plan to tackle child abuse linked to faith or belief, police, social workers and others who come into contact with potentially abused children will get more training. It recommends that children should have better access to therapy and emotional support after abuse.

Drawn up with faith leaders, charities and the Metropolitan police, the plan urges local communities and churches to work more closely together to prevent abuse.

Loughton said: “There has been only very gradual progress in understanding the issues over the last few years – either because community leaders have been reluctant to challenge beliefs which risk leading to real abuse in their midst; or because authorities misunderstand the causes or are cowed by political correctness.

“This plan will help people recognise and know how to act on evidence, concerns and signs that a child’s health and safety is being threatened.”

The research is limited and there are few official statistics concerning the abuse of children accused of witchcraft. In the past 10 years there have been 81 recorded police investigations in London of faith-based child abuse, while research commissioned by the Department for Education and Skills in 2006 analysed 38 cases involving 47 children, from Africa, south Asia and Europe, all of whom had been abused in the name of possession or witchcraft.

Research for the education department on child abuse linked to faith, based on previous findings, is expected by the end of the year.

Mor Dioum, director of the Victoria Climbié Foundation UK, welcomed the move to recognise faith-based child abuse. “By bringing the issue into the open … we can better protect and support members of our communities when they seek to highlight their concerns. However, we need to work more effectively with families to achieve better outcomes for children and young people affected by this type of abuse,” he said.

Simon Bass, the chief executive of the Churches’ Child Protection Advisory Service, said a multi-layered approach was necessary to address the issue.

Pastor Jean Bosco Kanyemesha, representing the London Fire Church International, Peace International and Congolese Pastorship in the UK, said the government’s move “was an adequate response to resolve issues troubling our local communities”.

Debbie Ariyo, the director of Africans Unite Against Child Abuse, described the action plan as the first step taken by any government to seriously tackle ritualised child abuse, but said it was not going far enough. She called on the government to make it illegal to brand a child a witch.

“We would have liked to see the government go further but we believe this action plan will go a long way to encouraging voluntary agencies to take concrete steps to fight this type of abuse,” she said.

NHS is failing patients with neurological conditions, claims report

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brain damage, dementia, dystonia, emergency hospital admission, epilepsy, mental health issues, motor neurone disease, multiple sclerosis, neglect, neurological condition, Parkinson's disease

NHS is failing patients with neurological conditions, claims report

People with neurological conditions such as epilepsy, multiple sclerosis and Parkinson’s disease suffer “neglect” by the NHS, claims a report by an alliance of charities representing patients.

Poor care means that too many of the 8 million patients in England with a neurological problem are admitted to hospital as emergencies, experience delays in having their condition diagnosed, and receive too little information about what is wrong with them, according to the Neurological Alliance.

The alliance is a group of more than 70 charities that work with people who have suffered damage to their brain, spinal column or nerves either as a result of illness or injury. Its members also include charities representing those with motor neurone disease and rarer conditions such as dystonia.

An alliance report accuses the NHS of not taking patients with neurological conditions seriously enough, and warns that the coalition’s health reforms will do nothing to help them. “Policy levers for improving care in the new NHS landscape are not being mobilised to support improvements to neurological services.

“Five of the six key policy levers, including national outcome strategies and the commissioning outcome framework, are not currently being used to improve services for people with neurological conditions,” it claims.

This is despite neurological services taking up more than 5% of overall NHS spending, which makes them the service’s eighth largest category of spending, and the fact that one in six people are affected, it adds.

The report urged the plethora of new NHS bodies being created next April by the Health and Social Care Act to tackle “the legacy of neglect which has resulted in unacceptable variations in outcomes and higher than necessary costs”.

Inadequate and poorly co-ordinated care of such patients by GPs and other community health and social care services result in undue numbers of emergency hospital admissions, it says.

Research by the alliance uncovered what it called “a spending lottery” on neurological services by NHS primary care trusts (PCTs). While Central Lancashire PCT spends £11.37m per 100,000 of population on them, Haringey Teaching PCT in London spends just £4.31m for the same number of people.

Similarly, there is a sevenfold variation in the proportion of PCT spending on these conditions that goes on emergency care. In places such as Liverpool, Sunderland and Wandsworth in London, it is more than half. “Not only are emergency admissions distressing for patients and extremely costly for the NHS, but they are often an indication that conditions are not being well managed within primary care, community and social care services,” the alliance claims.

Arlene Wilkie, the organisation’s chief executive, said action was urgent because half a million people a year are diagnosed with a neurological condition and the number of patients with one is set to skyrocket in the next decade.

“If the NHS reforms do not address poor standards of care for people with neurological conditions, then they will fail. The government has said that managaing health reforms should be all about outcomes, but it has failed to identify the outcomes which matter to people with neurological conditions,” she said.

The charities want the Department of Health and new NHS Commissioning Board to devise indicators for quality of care and patients’ outcomes that will prompt the service to overhaul such services.

The Department of Health said that the commissioning board is already planning to drive improvements to services for those with mental health problems, dementia and neurological conditions by ensuring that some of the first strategic clinical networks set up next year cover them.

“We want NHS services to focus on what matters to people most. This will make sure that people with neurological conditions get integrated care and the support they need at the right time and in the right place,” said a spokeswoman.

“We are working closely with patient groups and health professionals to develop a new Long-Term Conditions Strategy. The NHS commissioning board is already planning to drive improvements to improve mental health services, dementia and neurological conditions,” she added.

More:

NHS warned of ‘neurology timebomb’