Department for Education-funded initiative will focus on the Midlands A humanitarian charity is to launch the UK’s first dedicated programme to tackle the shortage of Muslim applicants to adopt children. The Penny Appeal, based in Wakefield, West Yorkshire, has won £200,000 funding from the Department for Education to support the 12-month project. Some 2,000 of the 70,000 children in care…
When Poppy Adams was asked by a therapist to pick from a pile of toys the character she felt best represented her birth mother, the 12-year-old chose a Disney princess. Asked the same about her social worker, she selected a snake. “She should not have taken me away from my mother,” said Poppy, who had always idolised her birth mother,…
John Simmonds raises two issues in his letter (25 January). First, he questions the “data and its analysis” cited in the article (Rising adoptions penalise poor families but don’t cut numbers in care, says report, 19 January) without outlining his concerns. I have published a spreadsheet showing sources of data, assumptions made, and the calculations (bilson.org.uk/calculations/) so that he, or anyone…
“We don’t say the A-word here anymore,” a social worker once told me when I dared to ask why there are hardly any adoptions in Australia. But, with our foster care system in crisis, it’s time to talk about an alternative option for the increasing number of children removed from their home due to abuse or neglect. Adoption is so…
Clause 15 of the children and social work bill is eliciting much comment and criticism from the social care sector. The clause, in the words of the children’s minister, Edward Timpson, seeks to: Allow great social workers to try out new approaches and be freed from limiting bureaucracy, all in the interests of achieving more for children. But, according to…