The next item is a statement by the Minister for Children, Older People and Social Care on Adoption Week. I call on the Minister to make his statement—Huw Irranca-Davies.  

Diolch, Llywydd. I'm very pleased to be able to celebrate National Adoption Week with you and to recognise and to pay tribute to all of those caring individuals who are willing to put themselves forward to become adoptive parents and also to those who provide support to them on their journey. 

Becoming a parent is a significant commitment and the start of an emotional journey that brings great rewards. But you will know as well as I that being a parent is not always simple and that challenges can and do arise. And, at these times of challenge, we may need support that enables us to continue to provide a loving, stable home environment—a home that enables our children to thrive. That support is available in many forms—be that friends or family, support groups, or from the range of universal and specialist services. 

It continues to be a tremendous inspiration to me personally that individuals continue to commit themselves to care for and support children right across Wales. And I particularly want to pay tribute today to those who have already adopted and to encourage anyone who's considering adoption to come forward. And I also want to recognise the role that professionals and organisations play in supporting adoption right across Wales and, finally, to highlight the action being taken to enable and empower improvement in this area.

More practical support is being delivered for adoptive children, for young people and families as part of a national framework that is driving consistency and improving outcomes. For professionals, a toolkit has been developed to support them to undertake life journey work in adoption. The toolkit has been developed in collaboration with children, young people and adopters, ensuring that the voice of children and young people is heard and, through their lived experiences, is helping to shape and to inform further improvement.

As part of driving this improvement agenda, we have also commissioned the National Adoption Service to, firstly, lead the development of an awareness-raising toolkit for primary health and child and adolescent mental health services and also to secure research to better evidence why prospective adopters choose not to proceed and progress their applications.

The National Adoption Service for Wales was established in November 2014. It's led by local government, in line with local authorities' legal responsibilities for adoption, and it was created in response to recommendations made by National Assembly for Wales committees on how adoption services should be improved. And improvement is happening. 

The latest annual report from NAS confirms that children are being placed with adoptive families quicker than before, that nearly one third of placements were sibling groups, with brothers and sisters together, that nearly all adoption placements are lasting and successful, and that more people want to adopt. So, these are positive outcomes that are sometimes lost. And that's why today and this week are important, because it allows us to offer deserved focus and recognition on the successes of adoption in Wales.

Continuing the improvement journey requires further co-operation and partnership to improve the outcomes for children, and to address, collectively, the adverse childhood experiences that impact on children, irrespective of their family background or structure. That is why adoption is an intrinsic component of my work programme for improving outcomes for children, advised by my ministerial advisory group. 

Building the emotional well-being and resilience of children is key to addressing the challenges they have faced, as is providing them with the skills to recognise and to address situations and events that may challenge them in the future.  This is where life journey work, which has improved significantly since the establishment of the National Adoption Service, can help provide a solid foundation from which to build and grow.

It's recognised that children who are placed for adoption will often have experienced some degree of trauma or loss in their young lives. Equally, building a securely attached relationship with a traumatised child can be challenging. This requires collaborative approaches between partners to deliver seamless services across health and social care, as the Cabinet Secretary and I have emphasised repeatedly in 'A Healthier Wales'. One such example is happening in south-east Wales where the south-east Wales regional collaborative of the National Adoption Service and the Aneurin Bevan health board have worked together to secure improved access to clinical psychology input from the child and family psychological health service. 

And we know that challenges and trauma are not always immediately apparent. They might not come to the surface until later in a child’s development. That is why it's imperative that adoption agencies continue to provide access to their services and support to families in the event that challenges start to arise. Prevention and early intervention are core principles across social care and health, as are co-operation and partnership. We expect partners to deliver seamless whole-system approaches that mitigate the escalation of need, and of crisis. 

So that we better understand how and when these experiences become apparent, and to help to evidence and inform improvement, I am pleased to announce that we have commissioned further work with Cardiff University that builds on the adoption cohort study. This is a unique study of almost 400 children adopted from care that provides a level of detail about early adversity, family relationship quality, child psychological health and so on. This next phase will directly engage with a cohort of families to explore their experiences of informal and formal sources of adoption support in Wales, including child psychological well-being and children's experiences at school, including additional learning needs. 

Our approach in Wales remains that we will identify and deliver a range of timely adoption support for families, based on evidence. The legislation provides families with a right to an assessment of their needs for adoption support and it provides local authorities with the powers to meet those needs. 

For those who are considering adoption, I can offer no greater encouragement than to direct you to the experiences and the family stories on the National Adoption Service website and the poignant words of those who know best. Colin and Carol say:

'There are children out there that need mums and dads and we were a couple who wanted to be a mum and dad.'

Eileen says:

'Taking on three children at the same time is daunting, but it brought me incredible joy.'

And Tony and Jacquie say:

'We have found it hard, but our two have given us the family we have always wanted. AND we’d do it again.'

And, finally, the words of those who have been adopted. Firstly, the force that is Jamie Baulch. He says:

'I never really wanted to talk about adoption before because the time wasn’t right. Now I’m happy to tell everyone how amazing my life has been. I’m older and wiser and look back on my life and realise how magical and fantastic it has been.'

And, secondly, but equally importantly, from Nick, who says very simply, but very effectively:

'Being adopted is insignificant to me. But my parents mean everything.'

So, tomorrow, I am looking forward to meeting two new prospective adopters to hear about their personal journey toward creating a new family. 

Today and this week is about recognising the success of adoption in Wales and I urge all Members to join me in celebrating and promoting adoption. Diolch, Llywydd.

Isn't it lovely to be able to follow you when you've expressed your gratitude and acknowledgement of the work that our services do to support both the adoptive parents and adoption and our children? Because I've had quite a lot of experience with some families—a family of three siblings, and, along the way, some of the challenges that presented. It was wonderful, really, when we were able to address those and things were dealt with early, and that's where early intervention and prevention is key. So, I would like to join you on behalf of the Welsh Conservative group in expressing our sincere gratitude to those working in adoption services and to those who adopt children and young people in Wales, knowing that they do so, as you rightly pointed out, to complete their own families. Everybody does such fantastic work to provide a better future for hundreds of children every year, and I'm sure that we all join in and recognise this across the Chamber.

On page 2, I note, about adoptive parents, how we do need to actually help now making it quicker and easier for sibling groups, because they do present more challenges than a single child. According to the National Adoption Service's annual report, 300 children were placed in adoptive homes across Wales in 2016-17 and I welcome the improvements made in recent years to our adoption services. The National Adoption Service's annual report has, however, identified some concerning statistics, because, as of June 2018, we do have more than 300 children still waiting to be adopted, and nearly one in five of these have been waiting for more than a year, and when we consider that a year in the life of a child is considerable—. 

Any wait for both the potential adoptive parents and, indeed, the children places extra pressures and unnecessary stress. So, I'm pretty keen that whatever we can do, even though it is fantastic, we look to actually make our systems even better. There is an urgent need to develop and deliver a more targeted approach to finding suitable families for priority children across Wales, and then to streamline that process to encourage more families to come forward and want to adopt.

In your statement, provided to an ITV Wales article published yesterday, you state that you

'want to encourage anyone who has thought about adopting to contact their local adoption agency'. 

I would just ask you and your department whether there is some work that you could perhaps do that actually highlights the need, highlights this issue, because I do know people who find, sometimes, it quite difficult to navigate the system. So, anything that you, as a department, can do to make that link-up and that joining-up, and make those families complete, all the better.

So, really, I would just endorse a lot of what you've said here today, Minister, but just if you could answer that question as to what you think you can do to actively reduce the numbers of children waiting so long to be adopted, and how you think you can then provide more support for families—. But it's about getting more profile for this so that we don't have a situation in Wales where we have children waiting to be adopted and we have adoptive parents, desperate to adopt those children. Thank you.

Thank you, Janet, and thanks for your encouragement as well of families who might want to come forward. We want more families to come forward, and families come in all shapes and sizes, as well. But we want more families to come forward, because we've had around 300 children, over the last year, go through into the adoption process; we know that we currently have around 350 who are going through the process and we hope they'll all be successful, but we do need more potential families to come forward. And we can play a role in that, certainly, as elected individuals, because we have quite a reach ourselves in the way that we promote what's going on in this week, particularly, with us standing here today. But we can do more as well in working with local authorities. I would want to encourage all local authorities, as well as agencies out there, to carry on and to amplify the work that they do to encourage potential adoptive families to come forward as well. 

It can't be just this one week; it needs be a constant thing. And that's where the National Adoption Service, I think, is increasingly playing a very strong role—it's promoting the work of adoption and the opportunities here. You rightly flag up, though: there is a great deal of good news and progress that is being made and I think putting the national framework in place is helping to drive that. The National Adoption Service itself is helping to drive it.

But, also, performance management is very important. We've put in place now what, I think, has been recognised as a more robust performance management framework for adoption services. It's been an important innovation because when you can measure it and when you can measure regional variation as well, it does tend to drive improvement forward because it allows that meaningful comparison between different areas of Wales—and there are differences, even though the trajectory is upwards, there are still areas lagging behind. It enables us then, as Ministers, as the National Adoption Service, as local partnerships, to put real challenge into the system and identify best practice and get it rolled out everywhere.

We think that that more robust performance management is a significant step forward to equalising access to services and also raising quality overall. There is some way to go. We've had that positive impact around the drop in the length of time between the child becoming looked after to being placed for adoption—that has gone down. There are fewer children waiting more than six months for a match. But, actually, we think we can do more, and some of the measures we're taking now in reviewing and overhauling parts of the system will match our ambition that no child should be waiting even a month to get onto the register. They should be on the register and then with the ability—the more flexible ability—of potential adoptive families to match up with those children and young people as well. So, all the time, we're trying to find those new ways that we can improve performance and get the performance consistent across Wales.

Can I welcome the statement from the Minister as regards celebrating National Adoption Week? And, obviously, I think we're all, on these benches, very happy to join in widespread celebration of adoption week. I'm very happy to second the tribute to all prospective adoptive parents and those who have been adopting children and young people over the years. It really is tremendous. I stand in awe, actually. I stand in awe, because there is a huge agenda here, obviously. I used to wonder, in my baby clinics in Fforestfach Medical Centre years ago—. I used to see little babies who were exactly the same as my own babies at the time, but they would have very different experiences to my children, and you could see the brutalising effect of a wide variety of adverse childhood experiences scarring young children, and it wasn't their fault. And it was absolutely terrible to behold. The same sort of situation, unfortunately, carries on happening these days, and sometimes that phrase, 'adverse childhood experiences', seems to hide the cruelty and the abuse that is still happening, and scars run deep and long. And obviously, prolonged stays in the care system as well can be sometimes equally brutalising. And so, adoption really is extremely important, and I salute, obviously, also, the work of the National Adoption Service as well.

Now, plainly, my question involves—. Plainly, adoption, therefore, is preferable, obviously, to remaining in the care system for a long period of time. So, can I ask the Minister how confident is he that the current focus on trying to ensure children can return to birth parents, while understandable, that sort of focus on trying to ensure that children can return to their birth parents is only being undertaken when most people involved in that situation would accept that this is a realistic possibility? Because, it's an important issue, and situations are extremely difficult. Decisions cannot be rushed, but obviously they have to be the right decisions as well. Thank you.

Dai, thank you very much, and on that very important point, I think this is why, curiously, the work in the adoption sector doesn't stand totally isolated from the wider issue of looked-after children and improving outcomes for all children. I think, in all of that wide piste of work, of paramount importance and statutorily underpinned, as well, by our belief in the rights of the child, is that the child comes first. He and I will sometimes, as all Assembly Members do, have some challenging conversations with birth parents who will say, 'Well, the best interests of the child are for them to be with me,' and yet the multi-agency professional advice is: 'Whilst we sympathise with the parents, actually the best place is somewhere else.' Sometimes, however, it is the other way, and with the right therapeutic support, with the right interventions wrapping around the family, solutions can be found where, safely, they can be retained in that family setting, with often quite intensive additional support, but it has to be in the best interests of the child. And that, curiously, is where the work beyond adoption but actually within the ministerial advisory group and the work streams that they have set in front of them, including one, which is—. In fact, their first work stream, probably, at the moment is safely reducing the numbers of children who come into looked-after care, but it's also the quality for those children who are then within care.

But adoption provides, we know, with the right support in place, a very, very good route into family life—with the right support in place, a very good return to family life, and something that can have a lasting and profound influence on that child and young person's development. In celebrating this week, as I mentioned in my opening remarks, it's heartening to see the success we are having, not only in increasing the numbers coming through, but also that those adoptions are largely successful—despite tribulations, very often, with children and young people with traumatic incidents in earlier life, who still need therapeutic interventions to help, and the family will need support as well. But it works, and people work through this.

Like him—he used the words that he stands 'in awe' of those people who go on this journey. Actually, many of them who go on this journey, they get so much out of it as well, but I equally stand in awe because of the challenge of doing this. No child being brought up is easy, but actually saying, 'We're going to take a child that we know is coming to us with complex issues that we're going to have to work through for years and years', and to do it, well, it is quite breathtaking. But, we want lots more people to come forward and do it as well.

Thank you for your statement, Minister. I would like to join the Minister in paying tribute to those who put themselves forward to adopt a child in need of a loving and stable home, and I welcome this statement. Although the Minister hasn't quantified the improvements he set out in his statement, I welcome the news that children are being placed with adopting families quicker, that a sizeable proportion of sibling groups are being placed together, and that more people want to adopt. It's equally good news that the majority of adoptions are lasting and successful. As the Minister says, adoption week offers an opportunity to focus on adoption and recognise Wales's successes.

However, it's also a chance for the Minister and his department to reflect on whether there are barriers to people applying to adopt or continuing with the adoption process. It's also an appropriate time for the Minister to consider whether the guidance he and his department provide to adoption agencies and services is the best it can be, to ensure that no child is waiting for adoptive parents longer than is absolutely necessary. Does the Minister therefore intend to review such guidance and will he report back to this place on the results of his review?

I'm a firm believer that it's the quality of parenting an adopter can offer a child that should be the deciding factor when placing a child with adoptive parents, ahead of all other considerations. The Barnardo's website suggests that there's an additional difficulty in finding adoptive homes for children of black and minority ethnicity, sibling groups, and children who have challenging behaviour.

I wonder if the Minister is aware of the initiative named Adopting Together, which is supported by the National Adoption Service and that was highlighted in an article on the BBC website earlier this week? I presume he is. It seems to be a good approach to placing children in need of adoption. But, whilst it states it's targeted at finding loving homes for children aged four and over, sibling groups, children with additional needs, and children with medical needs or medical uncertainty—in other words, those children who have been identified as waiting the longest for a family—it makes no mention of children from an ethnic minority.

Why, I ask myself, when Barnardo's have identified BME children as a group needing special consideration, does Adopting Together miss them out, unless they also fall into one of the other categories? That, of course, is a question more properly put to Adopting Together, but are you concerned about the apparent difference of approach and whether such a difference could potentially affect the number of parents putting themselves forward to adopt BME children?

It's difficult to find out if the agencies and local authorities that operate adoption services in Wales are fully open to interracial adoption. Do you agree with me that the overriding concern when finding a permanent family home for looked-after children should be the ability of the adopting parent or parents to provide a loving and stable home? And, just as we are rightly completely open to adoptions by gay couples, we should also be open to adopting children into families of a different ethnicity to themselves.

Another point that prospective adopters may find off-putting is that one agency says potential adopters should either be home owners or have an assured tenancy. I'm concerned that this excludes a huge amount of potential adopters. Assured tenancies are pretty hard to come by in Wales and renting is on the increase, what with prices and deposit requirements being the way they are. We're going to have a huge problem finding loving and stable homes for children if we discount generation rent from the pool of potential adopters.

It seems a very cruel irony that an agency would be content to leave a child in a situation where they may have to regularly and unpredictably move from foster home to foster home or care home to care home simply because an agency doesn't want to place them with a family that may have to move. Moving to a different house is a physical act, it's not the same as moving to a different family.

So, are you happy that either a mortgage or an assured tenancy should be a prerequisite for adoption? If you are, rather than stop shorthold renters becoming adoptive parents, shouldn't you bring forward policies to increase the duration of shorthold tenancies? How is the Minister ensuring that the National Adoption Service and Adopting Together are co-ordinating their work to the benefit of children and young people? 

It's encouraging that health boards are also looking at working together to provide improved access to clinical psychology input. And I would ask the Minister how he will learn lessons from this work, and roll those lessons out throughout Wales. Finally, I would like to join the Minister in celebrating adoption. And I very much hope that, the next time the Minister comes to this place to report on adoption in Wales, he will be able to report that the measures he's taking now will have resulted in very positive results. Thank you.

Thank you very much, Michelle. If I can start with the first point that you raised there, after your welcome for this celebration this week and promotion of adoption, you laid down the challenge about what the results we were having are. I touched on some of them in my opening remarks, but I'm happy to clarify: more than 300 children were placed last year in a new adoptive home; approximately 300 children had their adoption orders granted; and there are a further 350 children with the legal authority now to be placed, who are waiting to be matched or placed with a new family at the end of the year. What else? We've got more than 500 children with adoption support services in place. The national service has facilitated nearly 3,500 active letter-box contact arrangements. They've provided a service to more than 320 birth parents, and so on. All of those show an improvement in performance, from a national perspective, although, as I touched on previously, one of the issues that we have to do is get consistency right across Wales, in all the regions.

I think you touched as well on the aspect of speeding up the process—was that your point?

Not really.

Just to raise to Assembly Members' understanding, we have a couple of pieces of consultation currently live in the field of adoption legislation, and they're to do with actually speeding up the process. There's the first, which covers the new regulations required, which flow on from the risk regulations. And the second covers the proposed introduction of the two-stage system for assessing and approving adopters, which covers some of the points that you were raising there, but it's also focusing on reducing the timescale within which children and approved prospective adopters have their details added to the register for Wales to a maximum of one month, which would be a huge leap forward.

Many of the points that you raised in terms of the criteria for adoptive families I haven't actually had raised with me as major issues. It's been more to do with actually matching up the right family with the right child or young person; it hasn't been to do with mortgages, and so on. But I'll go away and look at that, and I'll write to the Member on it. She asked what confidence we have in driving this forward. We do have that confidence—one, because of the performance improvement that we can see already, but also because we have the national framework in place, because we have now a strategic national outlook with the national service, and because we have assessment going on of what we are doing as well. But I'll happily write to you on the issue that you raised to do with security of tenure. I would come back to the point that I said to Dai as well: everything we do within this sphere is always with the best interests of the child paramount, first and foremost, as well as matching with adoptive families. But I'll write to you on that issue, because it hasn't been raised with me before, and it hasn't come up as a problem, so I'll go away and find out if it is. If you have any particular examples of where that's been a problem, I'd be happy if you shared them with me too.

Finally, Rhianon Passmore.

Diolch, Llywydd. Firstly, I wish to very much welcome the Minister for children's statement celebrating Adoption Week, and the active cutting-edge work now taking place across Wales, both in homes and across our agencies. The Minister, along with the Cabinet Secretary, has long championed a collaborative approach between our partner agencies, as emphasised in 'A Healthier Wales'. So, will the Minister recognise formally in this Chamber the groundbreaking and innovative practice in this field now taking place, particularly across south-east Wales? The south-east Wales regional collaboration, consisting of the National Adoption Service and the Aneurin Bevan Local Health Board, have worked strategically together to secure improved access to needed clinical psychology inputs. So, will he then recognise such examples of excellence within the new national framework, and ensure that such cutting-edge work is celebrated, enhanced and replicated across Wales, not just for current adopted children, but for future adoptees and their much-needed forever families?

Rhianon, yes, thank you very much. And, again, thank you for your support for this area and for championing adoption as well. And certainly the south-east is driving forward. There are other examples, I have to say, in other parts of Wales as well, but what we've done in the south-east area, particularly with access to clinical psychology, has been groundbreaking and one of the things that the NAS will be looking to do is to see how we can then replicate this more widely across Wales. Because that's the way, in that sort of partnership, collaborative, strategic approach, but driving through best practice and making it common, that we'll see real improvements. Because very often for adoptive families they need to know—and the studies will show us, the Cardiff University study will show us—they need the right support at that timely moment, when they need it, to avoid things worsening or getting to a crisis point. So, the sort of work going on in south-east Wales is something that we should shout about and then try and make sure that it's happening across the piste as well. We have many of these examples of good practice now and I think a lot of it is being driven through the national framework and through the national service as well. So, yes, and when she leaves here today I'm sure she will—I hope very much that she will—go and make sure that within her local media and so on she is again driving that need for more families to come forward.

Thank you, Minister, and that brings today's proceedings to a close.

The meeting ended at 18:51.