Yesterday’s Community Care article paints a bleak picture. A 45.5% rise in the number of children waiting to be adopted in England, and a 42.7% fall in the number of approved adopters. This is a crisis.
Many explanations are offered in the piece, and our own campaign and survey findings are cited. It is clear that several factors are at play:
1. The cost-of-living crisis and broader uncertainties that shapes people’s ability to commit to adoption.
2. Cuts to the Adoption and Special Guardianship Support Fund are undoubtedly a factor and they add to a growing sense that support for adoptive families is fragile.
3. When families already in the system are struggling to access help, that reality filters through.
4. Confidence and trust in the system is being impacted and without them, recruitment will inevitably suffer.
Indeed, it has been suggested to us, in recent weeks, that our campaign is harming adopter recruitment. This misses the point.
The stories being told by adoptive parents are not driving people away from adoption; they are revealing what happens when support systems fail. If speaking honestly about those realities discourages people, then that speaks to the scale of the problem, not to the act of telling the truth. Those of us who came to this campaign as adopters remain passionately pro-adoption, but we have a duty to shine a light on the weaknesses that put families at risk.
We suggest rather that Adoption England, under pressure from Government to respond to the adopter recruitment crisis, has turned to glossy marketing. The ‘You Can Adopt’ and RAA (Regional Adoption Agencies), recruitment campaigns, though no doubt well-intentioned, are seen by many among our community as presenting a sanitised vision of adoption. Ads featuring happy toddlers laughing and smiling, talk of ‘magic matching’, ‘resilient babies’, ‘sparkling eyes’, a gentle nod to challenge perhaps, but little sign of the reality that often follows. It is as though the story ends once a child arrives. Yet adoption is lifelong, and for many families it is complex, exhausting, and beautiful in ways that Facebook reels and carousels cannot capture.
Marketing is a poor vehicle for the truth of what it means to parent through trauma. And a central message of the You Can Adopt and RAA marketing “Support is available every step of the way” fails to mention that the ASGSF has been cut to the point where it is no longer fit for purpose for many. And the support that is on offer is far too often lacking.
We are not, as some might imagine, a group of disgruntled parents with an axe to grind. We are weary mums and dads, parents and carers doing our best in often near impossible circumstances. We see first hand and close up the harm that is done to our children when the specialist therapeutic support they need isn’t there. We have watched our children regress, unravel and hurt as support from the ASGSF at the level needed has disappeared.
We bear witness to our fellow adopters caring for their children while on their knees, trying to hold their families together. Resilience runs deep in adoptive homes, but too many are stretched beyond endurance.
Society’s understanding of adoption, trauma and neurodivergence remains years behind the science. That ignorance allows systems to fail, and those failures to be excused. Families like ours are often cast as “outliers”, as though we represent a small, unrepresentative minority. Yet the data say otherwise. Adoption UK’s latest Adoption Barometer found that more families than ever are under severe strain. Research such as Far, Far Beyond the Adoption Order by The POTATO Group and the DfE-commissioned Family Routes Study show that these challenges are widespread.
It is troubling that some professionals dismiss such evidence, muttering about sample sizes or bias. No research is perfect, but to ignore what families are telling us is perilous. Across the country, parents are speaking out because the costs of silence are too high. The stakes for our children are too high.
Telling the truth is not easy. Our first duty is to protect our children, which means maintaining privacy and discretion. Even so, our campaign has brought forward stories of immense courage and pain. They represent only the visible tip of a very large iceberg.
To accuse us of deterring adopter recruitment is to misunderstand both our motives and our ethics. Recruitment matters, of course it does, but not at the expense of honesty. Prospective adopters deserve to make informed decisions and to be properly prepared. If truth itself discourages recruitment, the problem is not with the truth. It is with the system the truth exposes.