How to improve adoption services?
I do not know whether amid their red-boxes and brimming email, politicians and officials have time for a question they may find impertinent — but it is a question whose importance is growing. For those of us involved in charities that are Voluntary Adoption Agencies (VAAs ) — I am a trustee — it is becoming very pressing. Do government officials actually understand adoption, and how to improve the adoption system?
The adoption system matches disadvantaged and damaged children with adults who who can become adoptive parents. It seeks to create loving families where children feel they belong and are able to thrive. Adopted himself, former Secretary of State for Education Mr Gove put improving adoption services high on his agenda. Children’s Minister Mr Timpson, from a family with an adopted child, urges better support for families with adopted children. He sings the praises of Voluntary Adoption Agencies.
Steered by DfE officials and their agents (misleadingly called ‘coaches’), and assisted by ‘development’ grants to local councils and charities, new ‘Regional Adoption Agencies’ are intended to build on the work of VAAs and Local Authority Adoption Departments, and improve the adoption system. So why is the service getting worse? Why is the very existence of good local VAAs threatened? Why is the approach to change actually driving out innovation, and mitigating against real, sustained improvement and better value for all manner of stakeholders?
We who have been on the receiving end of numerous central government initiatives to improve local services know the script. A national initiative is launched with fanfare. Groups of organisations are invited to come together to bid for support—a little extra money for a couple of years, a ’coach’ to encourage appropriate and sustained change. The call is for ‘bold innovation’, ‘more effective’ service and ‘better value-for-money’ — but always at less overall cost. The rhetorical carrot is locally controlled action to create local solutions helped by a temporary injection of cash; the all-too-real stick is that if you do not do what government wants, it will take over.
How many depressing idiocies do there need to be before a halt is called to this particular programme of change? It is depressing when people who have never been involved with adoptive families, or run an operational service programme of any size, hold the whip hand. Depressing when the lessons of experience, and the insights of xharity enterprises are marginalised. Depressing when civil servants and their ministers appear unaware of the lessons about mergers, take-overs, and partnerships that are avaiable from market, state and third sectors. Deeply depressing when it is anyone except active practitioners, parents, older children and the younger talented managers of the future who are analysing the problems and proposing solutions.
When we people ‘on the ground’ resist knee-jerk analysis, highlight use of failing paradigms, and challenge the assumptions of central government mandates, those who think they know so much better than us groan at our response. When we urge our local authroity colleagues and partners to make haste more slowly, to reflect critically on the assumptions embedded in the DfE’s expectations, and negotiate not genuflect — they too are not enamoured of our response, pressured as they are by the deamnds of austerity and the threat of OfSTED inspection. But how much longer can central and local government officials shrug their shoulders at the limitations of their thinking?
They call for us to submit another plan by yesterday, read new prescriptions today, make re-calculations by tomorrow, and attend yet another hastily convened, daytime meeting next week. The flaws, however, are in their own approaches, and the trust they put in their flawed understanding of adoption and change. They ignore the details of the chain of actions by various parties that make up a ‘regional adoption service’. They pay insufficent attention to the realities of people, culture and politics at local level. And they foster short-term problem-solving with little prosepect of actually improving the value-for-money to the public purse of finance invested in adoption.
(TO BE CONTINUED)
