Is adoption always bad? Why we should have faith in our care system

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he actress Sandra Bullock recently announced that she has just adopted her second child, starting an important discussion regarding the concepts of adoption and fostering.

Our care system often receives negative press, with critics attacking many aspects of the system. These can range from the slow speed of the adoption and fostering process, the length of the court processes to the inefficiencies of social workers.

Periodic headlines highlighting deaths of children while they were in social care scream out to us, such as the recent reports from Lancashire City Council. These stories give us reason to believe that our country’s care system is not helping children.

However, if we were to look at the facts more carefully, we would learn that the care system is actually a very positive thing for vulnerable children from troubled families.

In an unusually positive press report about the care system, the BBC recently published an article stating that children in foster care make better educational progress than vulnerable children who remain with troubled families.

The article referred to research published by Oxford and Bristol University investigating the link between children in care and their educational attainment.
Overall, they concluded that “there was little support for the claim that being in foster or kinship care per se is detrimental to the educational outcomes of children in care.”

Clearly, when children are removed from traumatising circumstances and placed in a stable and nurturing environment, children’s emotional and psychological development will be affected positively.

As Aoife O’Higgins, the lead author of the research, points out, “the care system on its own isn’t bad”. She states it is the reasons why children need to be in care that contribute their lower educational achievement, not the fact that they are in care itself.

We should remember this the next time we want to criticise our social care system. Social workers, teachers and adoptive and foster parents work hard to improve children’s welfare, and this report shows that their work does make a positive difference.

Our social care system is under great financial strain in our current economic climate, yet research with positive results like this proves that it is making a huge difference to children’s lives, and we should celebrate that whenever and wherever possible.