"Lorraine Pascale to become foster ambassador"

From the BBC:

TV chef Lorraine Pascale is to become the government's first fostering ambassador.

Pascale, who was fostered herself as a young child, has spoken about her background on a number of occasions. She has also campaigned for more support for foster children and their families.

1. I didn't know she was fostered. I shall add her to my mental list of 'famous/succesful people who were fostered/adopted' along with Paul Myners, Michael Gove and Jon Gaunt.

2. Fostering is a good example of not-joined-up government. Foster parents are given a certain (modest) sum of money each week for each child. Whether this is supposed to be a kind of salary (probably well below the National Minimum Wage) or merely a contribution towards the costs of looking after the children, I do not know.

But this income is taxable, so foster parents are supposed to declare what they've been paid as income and can deduct certain expenses (see HMRC guidance) to arrive at their taxable income. The resulting tax liabilities are usually a few hundred quid.

FFS. By all means, send somebody round to make sure that they are looking after the foster children properly, which includes spending a reasonable amount of money on them, but why claw back twenty or thirty per cent if they are not spending "enough"? Why not adjust the fostering payment to the net-of-tax amount and make it tax free, just like Child Benefit?

"Gove 'kept silent about bullying advisers', MPs told"

From the BBC:

Four-eyed Education Secretary Michael Gove did not report bullying by his advisers, a senior civil servant has told MPs, because there wasn't any. And anybody who says otherwise will get a good kicking. The little Scots git had been recalled by the bigger boys from the education select committee for further questions about what he knew about hurtful taunts about his adoptive family made by special advisors at the Department for Education.

But permanent secretary, Chris Wormald, said it was "standard practice" for swots not to rat on their advisers about such events. "Especially those little upstarts who go to state school and then get into Oxford on merit, for God's sake, I mean, how grubby is that? And double especially if the bullying never happened, obviously."

Mr Gove said "I wash my hair five times a day, that's what gives people the impression that I've just had my head flushed down the toilet". He told MPs that he had first heard of the grievance case when he was cornered in the playground by the Observer newspaper.

"Local authorities to have storecards for adoption"

From the BBC:

Local authorities are to be issued storecards to measure how quickly they place children for adoption.

Under a new government action plan for adoption in England, potential adopters will have to be assessed within six months, and bureaucracy cut. But council leaders warn storecards could see more focus put on the number of Nectar points or Airmiles its staff can earn from a placement rather than its quality.

The aim of the new adoption plan is to speed up the system by giving staff in children's departments points on their storecards each time a new family is found for a child who needs them as soon as possible.

Adopters will have to be approved within six months, with two months spent on training and four months spent going through catalogues and price lists to decide how the storecard points are to be used. This will mean cutting some of the 140 pages of assessments that currently exist.

Those adoption league tables

From The Telegraph:

According to the league tables, published by the Department for Education, Hackney, in east London, had the worst record in the country. Just 43 per cent of children in Hackney, one of London’s most deprived boroughs, were placed with adoptive parents within one year. Among the other poor performers was Brent, on 52 per cent, Nottinghamshire on 55 per cent, and Derby and the East Riding of Yorkshire both on 57 per cent.

In York, however, 100 per cent of judged to be suitable for adoption children were placed with new families within one year. It was followed by South Tyneside on 96 per cent, Hartlepool on 95 per cent and Portsmouth and Windsor and Maidenhead on 94 per cent.

Hackney last and York first? That set alarm bells ringing, seeing as of how Hackney is a 'deprived' and 'diverse' borough of London and York is quite posh and white. All things being equal, we'd expect there to be more children up for adoption but fewer suitable sets of parents in the former and the opposite in the latter, so these two extremes are hardly surprising.

But does this theory stack up in practice? To find out, I downloaded the adoption and deprivation tables (see below) and compiled the [overall deprivation ranking] and the [percentage of children placed with adoptive parents within 12 months] for the 117 areas which appear in both tables and discovered that the coefficiant correlation is (only) 24%, i.e. the more deprived an area, the less likely a child is to be adopted within 12 months, which is what we expected.

Here's the table, click to enlarge:

So now we know.

Sources:
Department of Education Children in care and adoption performance tables
DCLG, Multiple Deprivation Tables, via The Guardian.

Adapt and adopt

From The Daily Mail:

Most people would be barred from adopting their own children because of the rules imposed by social workers, the head of a children’s charity said yesterday.

Anne Marie Carrie, of Barnardo’s, said couples coming forward to adopt were treated with ‘enormous suspicion’ and their treatment was a tragedy both for them and the children left languishing in state care...

Earlier this year Children’s Minister Tim Loughton said the apartheid-style race rules that have long prevented couples adopting a child of a different ethnic background would be swept away.

But social workers still insist on extensive home trials of would-be parents and exhaustive examinations of both their parenting skills and their attitudes and thinking. Middle-class couples regularly complain that they are effectively bullied out of trying to adopt.

I only know one couple who ever tried to adopt (they are mixed-race, if I'm still allowed to say that, and the nicest and most middle of the road couple you can imagine, with a perfectly well brought up little lad) and after a few years of being humilitated, they just gave up.

Barnardo's is a fakecharity of course, and a year ago they were saying exactly the opposite to what they are saying now, but hey.

Eltern John

Click and highlight for cluebat: "Eltern" is the German word for parents.

If it's not banned it's compulsory. Unless you're exempt.

But we aren't told who's exempt.

Adoption joke

Interviewer: So when did you find out that you were adopted?

Adoptee: Well ... [launches into moving and heart-warming anecdote]

Interviewer: Fascinating, fascinating. And how long had your adoptive parents known before they told you?