Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 6:32 pm on 16 October 2018.
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.