Fostering charity takes on adoption

A national fostering charity has moved into the adoption field
in an attempt to find permanent families for hard-to-place
children.

The Adolescent and Children’s Trust (Tact) said that registering
with the Commission for Social Care Inspection as a voluntary
adoption agency was a natural extension to its services.

Tact’s adoption and permanence manager Elizabeth Webb said the
move would allow it to offer a seamless service for children who
wanted to move from fostering to adoption.

She said Tact’s experience in finding foster carers for
hard-to-place groups such as older and disabled children, those
with siblings, and children from ethnic minorities would be
invaluable when it came to finding adoptive parents for them.

Felicity Collier, chief executive of Baaf Adoption and
Fostering, welcomed the launch of Tact’s service.

She also said that the number of looked-after children who had
been adopted increased by 37 per cent from 2000-4 and was likely to
have met the government’s target of a 40 per cent increase by March
2005.

But Office for National Statistics figures show that overall
adoptions fell by 21 per cent to 5,354 in the 10 years to 2003.
Collier said the fall was due to the decline in the number of
children adopted by step-parents when
their birth mother remarried.