Changing adoption – adopted children’s views

We contacted all the voluntary adoption agencies in England, all the adoption support agencies in England, and half the local authority social care adoption services in England (so we contacted 76 local authorities in total). We chose those local authorities at random, and chose to contact half of the local authorities in the country for this survey and the other half for another survey we are doing on adoption (that will be on adoption breakdowns).

We sent secure logins and passwords to the adoption services we contacted, for them to pass on to adopted children to take part in the survey. The children could use these to log on to the survey through our website. The aim of using passwords was to make as sure as possible that all the children who responded to the survey were adopted children – it was not open to the general public. Our survey ran from 20th November 2012 to 11 December 2012.

Some survey questions – like voting on the government’s proposals for new laws about adoption – asked children to choose an answer. Others asked them to write their own views without us suggesting anything. For this second type of question, a member of our team at the Office of the Children’s Rights
Director has analysed the answers sent in to give us the categories of answers we have put in the report.

As always in our reports, we have written in this report what the children told us, and not our own views. We have not added our comments. We have not left out any views we might disagree with, or which the government, councils, professionals or research people might disagree with. Where we have used a direct quote from what a child or young person said, this is either something that summarises well what many had said, or something that was a clear way of putting a different idea from what others had said.

As with all our reports of children’s views, we have done our best to write this report so that it can be easily read by young people themselves, by professionals working with young people and by politicians.