EFFECTIVENESS OF A SAMPLE OF LOCAL AUTHORITIES IN RECRUITING BLACK AND MIXED PARENTAGE ADOPTERS

There has been concern for some time about the needs of black and black mixed parentage children within the care system. It is argued that once in the care system the children are likely to remain there longer and to have poor outcomes. This reduces the life chances of ethnic minority children who cannot return home. More recently, there has been growing concern that black children are waiting longer for adoptive families and some never find a permanent substitute family. There is little known about this area of social work practice or what constitutes best practice. Adoption practices will be examined within a sample of three local authorities and two NCH projects to answer the following more specific questions:

• How do local authorities/NCH attempt to recruit black and mixed parentage adopters?
• How are local authorities/NCH considering the placements needs of black and mixed parentage children?
• What are the barriers to successful recruitment
• Which strategies or innovative policies and practices have been used successfully?

Methods
1. The first stage of the study has been an extensive trawl of the literature in the UK and USA to identify what is currently known about best practice.
2. Ethnic minority population data from each of the authorities will be collected to match against current resources and a demographic profile will be drawn up.
3. Key personnel within the organisations will be interviewed to discover more about best practice and barriers to successful recruitment and matching
4. All ethnic minority prospective adopters who approached the agency between 2000-1 will be contacted. Prospective adopters will be interviewed to discover the factors which encouraged them to apply and to take forward their application or to withdraw from the process.
It is hoped that this study will provide agencies with a more evidence based approach to planning and delivering high quality services to children from ethnic minorities who cannot return home.