GOVERNMENT TO PUMP £30M TO HELP ADOPTIVE CHILDREN FIND HOMES
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BY JAMES SIMONS
The government has pledged £30m to speed up finding adoptive parents for children in care in England. This year, local authorities all over the countries will be provided with enough money to cover costs incurred in finding parents outside their geographical borders.
At the moment, several children wait for up to 18 months before being safely placed with adoptive families. The funding is expected to mentioned in Wednesday’s budget. The cost of finding, assessing, and matching a parent and child currently stands at £27,000 for a local authority.
Prime Minister David Cameron said: “I am determined to tear down the barriers to children in care being found loving adoptive parents. The average time it takes to place a child with a new family has been falling and I am delighted we are able to offer this funding to try to ensure it falls further.”
The £30m funding could pay for more than a third of the 3,000 children currently in care.
WAITING CHILDREN
The number of children waiting for a happy home to settle, run into their thousands. Finding willing parents to adopt children is one problem solved, but there us sometimes the added problem of children who need to have certain types of children under their care. Not all parents will be compatible with all children, even though a degree of adaptability and compromise is necessary for children who want a home, and for parents who wish to adopt children. Some children may have deep rooted psychological issues that require a special type of attention from loving and understanding adoption parents.
In other cases, it might be the parents who may need to adapt their environment to accommodate the fact that children potentially with a complex set of issues will now be a part of their household. These are important issues sometimes at the forefront of the problem of matching parents with children in need of adoptive parents. However, additional to these are sometimes the challenges of even identifying adoptive parents to fill in the gap between stability and children in dire need of foster care
Chancellor George Osborne told the BBC ” We cannot sit by when so many children are waiting so long to find a stable loving home, particularly when there are parents out there who want to adopt. It just isn’t good enough. So, I want to do all I can to make sure there are as few barriers between children in care and their new parents”.
