The term special guardianship, with its connotations of guardian angels, has a certain fairytale ring to it that adoption has never had. It sounds just that little bit sweeter and seems to have a win-win appeal for all of the parties involved.
With SGOs, birth parents maintain a basic legal right to their adopted child and have limited parental responsibility. All of the day-to-day responsibilities and decisions are transferred to the special guardian but the birth parents hold onto their ‘parent’ title.
So is it a surprise that in its first full year of availability, hundreds of prospective adopters have moved from one camp to the other? I don’t think so.
Special Guardianship Orders have had a huge impact on the number of children being adopted this year, with adoption levels dropping from 3,700 to 3,400.
At the same time, SGOs jumped up from 60, in the first quarter of 2006, to 740. It’s a huge uptake and too big, in my opinion, to simply be a coincidence.
But I don’t think it’s going to stop here. Traditionally, adoption cut all ties between a child and its birth parents. But over time this model has become more open and now many children receive birthday cards and letters from their families. Perhaps SGOs are simply the next natural step and will become more popular than adoption over time.