Adopter surplus

[HeyMrPostman99]

I thought prospective adopters might be interested in reading the article linked below - it was written last month and is saying that there's currently a surplus of adopters, partly because of a rise in applications and partly because of family court backlogs. It says a lot of agencies aren't taking new applications for single/easier to place children.

I'm a long-time lurker by the way! DH and I have two birth children and have been thinking about adoption for a long time. The time isn't quite right for us to apply just yet though, which is lucky given that we'd most probably only be looking to adopt one child.

www.homeforgood.org.uk/why-the-wait

This must be regional. Certainly not the case in my local authority where adopters are being placed with children fairly quickly after being approved

We were told this on our training day, but were told it's a temporary thing.
I think it's a real issue that children are staying with Birth Families longer than they perhaps should and there are lots of accidents waiting to happen...

There is always a surplus of adopters waiting for a "healthy white baby".

On link maker at the moment there are 100s of adopter profiles looking for age 0-2 and who say they can't consider pretty much any level of need. Astoundingly, dozens of profiles that say "no" to attachment issues!

But profiles for adopters who can consider siblings, older children, disabilities, autism, BAME - very few. And ones who say on their profile that they are open to it, invariably when you message them to see if they might be interested in your child's profile, the reply comes back as "thanks but we are holding out for the younger end of our approval range/ lower level of need".

Hi Marmite,

I'm not sure I agree with you there. I have been adopter since a week before we got hit with lockdowns started in 2020.

In my region, there was only a small number of adoptive families at the time, and now there is more like 50 or so waiting families.

I see very little on LM and I believe i am fairly open to many children 0-5.. not necessarily siblings as a single person, but things like autism i have been fairly open to, nothing about attachment issues and still struggled to find link.

The few that i have found get snapped up very quickly, or child SW'rs don't respond. I got told the very same thing as Karcheer a year ago and nothing has changed.

It's just something to be aware of for potential families looking to adopt. Hundreds of sites show 'children waiting' but it's the other way around. There are a lot of resources online which show the same thing, ans that the system is broken. Children waiting years before they are even given the opportunity to be adopted.

Personally wish i hadn't listened to all that hype about 'there are more children than adopters'.. that might have been true at some point, but as of 2021/2022, it's not the case.

It says that article was published in April 2021, not 2022! This is an old thread.

I understand that but it's still relevant.
Thanks.

We were told there was a surplus of adopters this time last year just before approval panel, we were linked with our children just over a month after panel and they've been with us 6 months now. We wanted siblings though, some of the people on our training have only recently been matched as they wanted a single child.

When we were looking at linkmaker there were loads of children (singles and siblings) but apparently when contacting the relevant sw they had already been matched and should have been taken off LM