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…
My grandmother liked to gamble. We would go to Atlantic City sometimes and sit together at the blackjack tables while she smoked and patiently explained strategy to me. It was fun to be doing something she enjoyed, fun to go out to dinner and eat the pickled tomatoes that came to the table with the menus, but I didn’t care…
A major new resource, based on extensive research and contributions from social workers and families across the UK, could change the way contact between adopted children and their birth relatives is handled. The Contact after Adoption website, a partnership between the University of East Anglia (UEA) and Research in Practice, follows comments by senior judge Lord Justice McFarlane, who questioned…
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…
There are very serious questions raised by your article (Rising adoptions penalise poor families but don’t cut numbers in care, says report, 19 January). The implications suggest a link between increasing levels of poverty and increasing numbers of children being adopted without the consent of their parents. By coincidence, the issues were discussed last week at our Research Advisory Group, which…
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…
Ilona, 20, came to Britain from Hungary two years ago to make a better life for herself, and has worked as a hotel chambermaid. An attempt to get a late abortion brought her to the attention of children’s social services. She told social workers that she and her partner did not have the financial means to look after their daughter…