Children and Young People Committee
AD05

Inquiry into Adoption

As a family with a 10 year old birth son having applied and been approved (since September 2010) to adopt a second child, we are now approaching a hopefully happy conclusion to our adoption journey as we have been matched with a little boy (currently 21 months old ). However it has been a long lengthy process and at times we've felt disempowered by the system.

We felt that with the matching process, it was particularly difficult that when a link was identified, we were not allowed to see a photo of the child until we had committed to proceeding with the link. There are also difficulties with the linking process when the meeting with the medical adviser is held at a very late stage in the process and as was our experience with a previous link that didn't proceed to matching panel, important information was withheld from us until this meeting. Our experience would have been more straightforward if a) we had more input into the matching process b) we had as much information as possible (including photo) at a much earlier stage in the process.

As regards the earlier stages of the process, we applied through St David's Children Society because we were told by Cardiff County Council that if we applied to adopt through them, we would have to wait 12-18 months just to be allocated a Social Worker to be assessed. We would support the establishment of a National Adoption Agency to pool the resources of the existing agencies, reduce delays and hopefully enable all prospective adopters to be treated equally.

We hope that you will find this feedback useful.