Thirty years on: the achievements of a voluntary membership organisation.

Hall, Tony ; Collier, Felicity ; Holmes, David 等

Tony Hall, Felicity Collier, David Holmes and John Simmonds, all of whom have been closely involved with BAAF since its foundation in 1980, review the organisation's achievements and frustrations with regard to improving the welfare of separated children.

Introduction

'People start writing histories when they run out of ideas' retorted the historian Royston Lambert when invited to write something for his school centenary celebrations. But while this article relies in some part on the reminiscences of BAAF officials, it is not a history in the strict sense of the term. 'You can only understand what you are like by explanations from your past' continued Lambert when justifying his subject to a group of sceptical children, so it is in this spirit that four people closely concerned with the organisation came together to consider BAAF's development and future role.

BAAF was officially established in 1980 but this was not a new birth. It emerged from the Association of British Adoption and Fostering Agencies (ABAFA), which had itself expanded from the Association of British Adoption Agencies by the addition of the F word. All of this was largely the brainchild of Jane Rowe, the Director at the time. Jane was an exceptionally gifted and insightful reformer who had a clear view of what a children's service should look like. Assisted by Lydia Lambert, she had conducted and published a large (2,812 children in 33 agencies) and extremely influential piece of research on children in long-term care titled Children who Wait (Rowe and Lambert, 1973). As Roy Parker explains in the opening article in this journal, the situation with regard to looked after children was quite different from the situation now; residential care was a frequently used placement and the idea of long-term planning for children was little developed. Nevertheless, the findings from Jane and Lydia's study came as something of a shock: of the 626 children who had been in care for more than six months, were aged under 11 and were not living at home, 22 per cent were in need of a permanent family and were, basically, 'drifting' in the system. These findings coincided with similar research from the US and the growth of a movement seeking 'permanence' for children long separated from their birth families.

Given her startling evidence and an auspicious political climate, Jane, as Director of ABAA, saw the need for the organisation to include fostering. This was because so many of the children who concerned her were in either long-term foster homes or in temporary placements awaiting adoptive families, and adoption was often a way of finding them a family. So, in 1976 ABAA became ABAFA. Naturally, some fostering agencies, such as the National Foster Care Association (NFCA), were worried about this change but Jane argued that so much work was needed to improve substitute care that this should be seen as less of a 'takeover' and more as a robust response to the needs of children at risk of 'drift'. In fact, a merger with NFCA was considered a number of times over the next few years but the membership and aims of the two organisations were not quite compatible, and closer collaboration on a number of projects was seen as a better alternative.

In the late 1970s, there was further pressure to strengthen the organisation. The Children Act 1975, which gave more protection to separated children, was running into implementation difficulties and social services departments were only beginning to settle down after the Seebohm (1968) reorganisation of 1971. In 1978, Jane Rowe decided to stand down as Director of ABAFA to concentrate on her research interests. Her successor, Tony Hall, a lecturer in social policy at Bristol University, had acted as a research adviser to Jane on the Children who Wait study while a research student at the London School of Economics. Despite this early collaboration and his first book on reception and intake into children's departments (1975), Tony was surprised to be invited to apply for the post. He was not a social worker and claimed to have limited knowledge of child care. His research interests and publications were more generally concerned with social services management and processes.

Tony Hall took up his appointment in September 1978 and before Christmas had reached an agreement with John Fitzgerald, Director of the Adoption Resource Exchange (ARE), about the shape of a merger between the two organisations. 'To an outsider it seemed so obviously necessary,' he said. Both organisations worked in the same field, had the same agency membership, had more than 50 per cent overlap in membership of their governing bodies and were potentially in competition for the same funds. Each organisation's plans for the future projected increasing areas of overlap, provoking either unhelpful competition or the need for constant collaboration. Merger was by far the most sensible option. Once the two management boards were agreed to the principle, the biggest headache seemed to be finding a suitable name. Many supported the existing ABAFA title but this was rejected as seeming too much like a takeover rather than a merger. The rather unsatisfactory name of British Agencies for Adoption and Fostering was the compromise and it took many years (and much media confusion in the interim) before the word 'Agencies' was sensibly replaced with 'Association'.

A new organisation also needed a wider group of trustees and a further link with Bristol University was made when Professor Roy Parker was invited to be Chair in 1980. He was eminently suitable for this post because of his academic standing, his publications on children in care and experience at running a large university department with a distinguished track record of research into services for children and families. His book, Caring for Separated Children (1980), discussed in the first article, was obviously extremely pertinent. As well as other aims, Roy wanted BAAF to be a 'streetwise pressure group'. He held the post for six years, the maximum period allowed in the new Articles of Administration, standing down in 1986, the same year that Tony Hall left to become Director of the Central Council for Education and Training in Social Work (CCETSW).

Issues in the early years

In those early years, the dominant issue was improving the situation for 'children who wait'. There were still large numbers of children in long-term care, many in residential provision, who had no prospect of a permanent family, whether with relatives or new carers. An early mission statement from BAAF set the pattern for the future by emphasising that its aim was to provide a service for children in need of families, and not to be a child-finding service for would-be adopters.

There were several more specific concerns within this general aim. The Children Act 1975, in which ABAFA had been heavily involved, had been passed, but much of it remained unimplemented following government agreement with local authorities not to add to their existing workload without additional resources. Nevertheless, directly as a result of ABAFA representations, further key sections of the Act were implemented, including section 26, which, for the first time, allowed adopted people access to their original birth records at the age of 18.

At the same time, the Government funded a major programme of Children Act-related research. ABAFA managed four projects, all of which were completed on time and published. Research covered permanency (Adcock and White, 1979), long-term foster care (Rowe et al, 1984), step-parent adoptions (Masson et al, 1983) and transracial adoption (Gill and Jackson, 1983).

The concept of permanency and the relevance of models developed in the US were also debated at BAAF conferences where keynote speakers included the hugely influential Kay Donley and Vera Fahlberg, who affected the attitudes and approaches of a whole generation of child care workers. One initiative emerging from this US experience concerned advertising children requiring placements. Initially, Be My Parent was launched as a loose-leaf A4 book, advertised widely and located in the waiting rooms of adoption and fostering agencies, libraries and other public offices. Each page contained the photograph and details of one child or sibling group looking for a new permanent family. This gave rise to regular (free) newspaper adverts--initially in The Guardian newspaper--that presented individual children looking for a new home, and a television series with the same purpose. Be My Parent later evolved in various stages to the publication that has become so well known today. Those who initially criticised the public advertising of children in this way were rapidly silenced by pointing out the unattractive alternatives for those children and the obvious care with which the newspaper was produced.

These developments highlighted five major issues at the time, which had to be addressed. The first concerned the interpretation of permanence and a view held by some critics, such as the Family Rights Group, the Children's Legal Centre and influential thinkers like Bob Holman, that BAAF's working definition meant, in practice, tearing children away from their birth families and placing them for adoption. After all, they argued, nothing is permanent in life; 'constancy', 'stability' or 'reliability' were better concepts. It was at times difficult to convince those concerned that permanence meant a child's need for a stable and continuing home, whether with the birth family (preferably), with relatives or with strangers. What was crucial was that whatever the plan, a decision should be made about how best to achieve permanence with a clear sequence of steps to make that happen within the child's timescale. Although BAAF's expertise was with separated children, its approach did not ignore or diminish the importance of family support and reunification services whenever these were possible.

The second issue concerned international adoption. As the supply of healthy white babies available for adoption significantly reduced from the late 1960s onwards, the response of adoption agencies across much of the United States and the rest of Europe was to look to overseas countries for a new source of supply to meet the needs of prospective adopters. This usually meant seeking babies from poorer countries and those affected by war and other devastations. ABAFA, and initially BAAF, were publicly very critical of this practice and sought both to plug loopholes in the UK's border practices and publicise an alternative approach. This was not a popular stance in the media, but it was an excellent platform from which to expose the needs of previously hard-to-place children drifting in local authority care. Largely as a result of this early position, intercountry adoption remains far less prevalent in the UK than in most developed countries around the world.

The third issue, linked with the second, concerned foster care, adoption and 'race'. When applying for funds in 1978 to undertake further research on transracial placements, Tony Hall was able to write that 'there had never been a reaction against the practice in this country of the kind that had occurred in the United States'. Three years later, when the first results from this research were being presented prior to publication, things had changed beyond recognition. The severity of the critical response from black social workers to the practice took everyone by surprise, coinciding as it did with the creation of the Association of Black Social Workers. BAAF's response was to create the Black Perspectives Committee (alongside the existing Medical and Legal Groups) to advise and assist BAAF in the development and presentation of its policies in this area.

BAAF's considered view was that while same-race placements are desirable whenever possible, and more should be done to find black families for black children, children should not be denied families because same-race carers were not available when needed. The nuances of this position were not always reflected in press coverage or by some workers who presented the argument as black children should only be adopted by parents of the same ethnic origin. There was a backlash, too, from white parents (some of whom were 'celebrities') who had adopted black children in the 1960s as a radical gesture to promote a 'melting pot society'. The arguments became extremely heated and policy confusion added to the number of children left to wait. A 1984 BAAF seminar based on the recent publication of Triseliotis and Russell's Hard to Place: The outcome of adoption and residential care (1984), added fuel to this storm as it confirmed that rigid views about who were and were not appropriate adopters for black and mixed ethnicity children were reducing the opportunities of many children in need of families, since adoption placements for these children were difficult to find.

A fourth related issue was the definition of the children who were considered fosterable or adoptable. For many years after the implementation of the Children Act 1948, the choice for children entering care was simple: either a foster home or a residential placement. Although in 1964, there were considerable differences in the policies of different authorities--for example, East Suffolk fostered nearly 80 per cent of its children in care, compared with around 30 per cent in Worcester--the criteria for deciding were summarised by the mnemonic SEMAPHORE, a term used by one deputy children's officer to indicate which new entrants to care should go to the local children's home - siblings, mentally and physically handicapped, older children, recidivists (delinquents) and those already ejected from foster care. These criteria may still have a predictive ring to them but Jane Rowe and other reformers, such as Nancy Hazel (Hazel, 1981) in Kent, worked tirelessly to establish an alternative and positive perspective, leading Jane Rowe to summarise her life's work, in response to a question at a conference in 1990, as 'fostering the unfosterable'.

BAAF's work throughout these early years--through the Resource Exchange and Be My Parent, through its publicity machine, through its response to intercountry adoption and its publications--helped to promote the view that no child or sibling group in care is impossible to place in an adoptive home or long-term family placement. By the end of the 1970s, the Exchange had a waiting list for children deemed 'hard to place', including babies of mixed race, Down's syndrome babies and 'handicapped' children, older children and large sibling groups. Placements for these children were considered routine (if not straight-forward). Organisations such as Parents for Children developed placement practice that enabled children who were previously thought to be impossible to place to find a secure home.

Finally, as we have seen, the type and ages of children in need of permanent families were changing and many were older and had close links with relatives. The notion of 'open adoption' became possible with arrangements for continuing contact with relatives, especially siblings placed elsewhere. This again brought BAAF into discussion with strong pressure groups, such as those representing the interests of grandparents. In barely a decade, adoption had moved from secrecy (where often adopted children were not told of their status despite agency advice to the contrary) to open adoption and a right of adopted people to have access to their original birth records. Inevitably, BAAF was, in these years, drawn into parallel debates in the field of surrogacy and artificial insemination (AID) and helped to influence the policies and safeguards on these issues.

But not everything was a success. One strange omission was the failure of BAAF to give evidence to the subsequently influential House of Commons Social Services Committee on Children in Care chaired by Renee Short, which reported in 1984. It brought child abuse and neglect more squarely into the discussions about substitute care and so highlighted the psychological and medical dimensions of child placement to which BAAF had to react.

The role of specialist charities in the early years was somewhat different to that which developed later. Government departments initially tended to look to particular voluntary organisations for expertise and funded action in areas of policy and practice of concern to them. Jane Rowe, for example, had been crucial to the framing of the 1975 Act and ABAFA/BAAF was seen as offering a link between policy, research and practice at implementation. This spirit of collaboration declined in the 1980s when much activity was drawn back into government and quangos, which were easier for the Government to control. BAAF managers felt that by the end of the decade, meetings with ministers and civil servants had a different atmosphere. There was less reliance on external expertise and less sympathy for views that might question preferred policies. Child care had also become more political in a way that it had not been before; indeed, in 1948 a gentleman's agreement was negotiated with other government departments by the Home Office (then responsible for children in care), that child welfare be kept out of party politics.

Despite these struggles, BAAF's initial vision that it should build on the strengths which it had inherited was quickly realised in that early period and the organisation achieved a reputation for sound cross-disciplinary research, policy and practice advice, and training. It caught the ear of those involved at all layers--from government ministers to social workers, doctors, lawyers and foster carers and adopters. There was also an important administrative and financial need to maintain previous levels of membership, particularly as the number of voluntary adoption agencies was declining.

By 1986, BAAF had grown beyond recognition with a budget (one million pounds) ten times larger than in 1978. All local authorities and voluntary adoption agencies were still in membership, active and influential legal, medical and black perspective groups were in place, Be My Parent and the adoption exchange were doing well (the 2,000th placement was achieved in 1985), local and national advertising of children was successfully established and personalities, including Bob Monkhouse and footballer John Fashanu, gave their support to the organisation's policies. In addition, real change had been achieved in the definition of special needs children, with no child or family group regarded as unplaceable in a permanent family. Huge efforts had been made to find black families for black children, so exploding the myth that black families do not adopt; the concept of permanence was part of social work thinking; there were effective arrangements for handling the press and media; a set of authoritative publications had emerged and the need for clear decision-making on children's futures was better acknowledged, despite continuing practice shortcomings.

There are dilemmas facing all charities in that the vigorous pursuit of policies can sometimes undermine scientific rigour and objective standing. This is often counterproductive when public suspicion of exaggeration leads people to think that the problem does not actually exist. In those early years, BAAF took a cautious but cumulative approach, remaining strongly focused and active on specific issues, not growing too fast, establishing an interdisciplinary ethos and treading a delicate path with governments, while remaining credible to them.

The 1990s

In the early 1990s, new projects were undertaken and specific political issues continued to arise. For example, after the fall of Communism and the Balkan wars in the 1990s, there was a need to help children who had been brought up in dreadful institutions. BAAF's policy was to do as much as possible to help reform domestic systems, for example, by providing training and advice in Kosovo. Similarly, on the home front, an unanticipated debate flared up about the use of single people as adopters. In addition, by the middle of the decade, there were financial difficulties and something of a crisis of confidence in BAAF, including the loss of a number of local authority members.

In the midst of these problems, Felicity Collier was appointed Director in 1995. She had worked in child care social work and family court welfare and, latterly, as an Assistant Director of Probation in Oxfordshire where one of her responsibilities was young offender institutions. This desire to improve outcomes for children in care, a sizeable proportion of whom went on to prison custody, and her experience as a senior manager led her to apply for the directorship (retitled Chief Executive from 1997).

Felicity's initial aim was to restore confidence in BAAF as an organisation that could make a real difference to children and provide services to members, which were perceived as essential for good practice and giving value for money. In recognition of the growing number of individual members (as opposed to agencies), the name was changed again in 2001 to the British Association for Adoption and Fostering. In addition to restoring BAAF's stability, she led the expansion of its range of services, including a carefully planned conference and training programme backed by a range of authoritative publications and a modular qualification system. Specialist social work and research groups were established to join the flourishing legal, medical and black perspectives advisory groups and the board of trustees was trimmed and reappointed to make it more representative of members' interests and able to give effective governance. In 2000, John Simmonds, an academic and trainer from Goldsmiths College, was also appointed Head of Policy, Research and Development to strengthen the management team.

Alongside these organisational reforms, controversial issues and the Government's hostility to what was seen as a 'politically correct organisational culture' had to be addressed. Especially salient among these were intercountry adoptions, the emergence of independent fostering organisations and the suggestion that children whose single mothers could not support them should be compulsorily adopted.

With regard to intercountry adoptions, Felicity was concerned to move the organisation from the oppositional stance it had taken in the past while recognising that intercountry adoption was not a solution for the thousands of children living in poverty across the world. There was additional work to ensure that when it did occur, it met legal and human rights conditions. Training and advice were also offered to the sending countries to help them improve their own services.

The growth of independent fostering organisations posed a more serious ideological challenge. The principle of fostering for profit jarred with BAAF's core beliefs and there was a fear that, if invited to join BAAF, the organisations would use their membership status to convey professional approval. BAAF therefore campaigned for registration and inspection and set up a forum for the promotion of good practice and exchange of ideas.

The proposal on compulsory adoption coincided with a fall in the number of available babies, reflecting sympathetic attitudes to single parenthood and abortion. To deal with this, the founding principle that BAAF was primarily a service for children was evoked and a coalition of like-minded organisations formed to influence pending legislation. This led to the widely supported statement, Adoption: Myths and realities (ADSS/BAAF, 2000).

Throughout this period, there was growing concern about abuse in substitute care and horrific revelations of events, especially in residential care. But foster and adoptive homes were not immune from suspicion and BAAF found itself giving a considerable amount of advice to its members to deal with these problems and encouraged the Government to increase police checks and other safeguarding devices.

By 1997, the Conservative Government had been in power for 18 years and appeared to be running out of steam. Although they had been careful with public money, children's services had fared relatively well and its Children Act 1989 was a landmark of reform. The Act said little about adoption but it freed foster care from the shackles of less eligibility by acknowledging its place in the spectrum of services and giving social workers more freedom to provide whatever they deemed appropriate for a child in need.

Later that year, the Government changed and children became an integral part of New Labour thinking. There was a sharp focus on disadvantaged groups, in which looked after children commanded a high profile. In particular, there was a review of adoption ordered by the Prime Minister himself (Performance and Innovation Unit, 2000).

BAAF's proposal for a national adoption register, modelled on its successful BAAFLink service, was endorsed and although the initial contract to run this was placed elsewhere, it was awarded to BAAF in 2004 and grew into an effective service. This complemented the Be My Parent family-finding service, a development from the earlier 'exchange' system, which itself was expanded to provide a monthly, later colour, newspaper and which is now also online.

Another important part of Labour's child care policy was to increase the number of adoptions from care. This resulted from evidence that hopes to reunify many children with their birth families had proved too optimistic, by which time their age and experiences of changes of carers and other adverse circumstances made them more difficult to place. There was also a growing voice of people whose applications to adopt had been rejected without appeal. The Government introduced the Independent Review Mechanism (IRM), which BAAF successfully tendered to operate.

Finally, a significant legacy of this period was the adoption statistics research project. Prior to 1996, there was a dearth of information about adoption the children, the adopters, the agencies, etc. Funding was secured from the Department of Health for a substantial project which provided details on 95 per cent of children adopted from care (Ivaldi, 2000). The results were highly significant as they showed that the majority of children later adopted had entered care as infants, had never been returned home and had experienced several changes of carer. Black and mixed heritage children, siblings and disabled children were the most poorly served. Given the more sympathetic political climate, BAAF campaigned successfully to introduce features now accepted as the infrastructure of family placement, namely:

* appropriate legislation;

* national adoption standards;

* early care planning;

* monitoring of permanency plans;

* a national adoption register;

* mandatory assessment for adoption support;

* parental leave for adoptive parents;

* the acceptance of unmarried and same-sex adopters;

* access to an intermediary service for birth parents trying to gain non-identifying information on their adult adopted children;

* tighter legislation on private fostering.

One major disappointment was that while the Adoption Support Regulations introduced the right to an adoption support assessment and plan, it did not require the local authority to provide those services.

With a more sympathetic government in power, the issue of how far BAAF should maintain its independence, as opposed to becoming a quasi-governmental agency, resurfaced. Tony Hall's original stance was vindicated in that it was agreed that relevant contracts had to be tendered for if BAAF was to play its part in improving services for children, but the stance should be that of a 'a government's critical friend', with activities where BAAF's voice was constrained tightly ring fenced.

Felicity Collier stayed until 2006 and throughout her directorship was fortunate to be well supported by the Chairs of BAAF. Terry Connor, Director of a leading Catholic adoption agency, was responsible for her appointment; Ian Sparks, Chief Executive of The Children's Society and with a financial services background, held the post from 1996 and Sir Edward Cazalet, a newly retired judge in the Family Division of the High Court and a skilled fundraiser, was Chair from 2000 until 2003. He was followed by Anthony Douglas, a local authority children's services director and, since 2004, Chief Executive of CAFCASS, who is still Chair today. An indication of BAAF's successes after 1997 was the size of the annual turnover, which had grown threefold to almost six million pounds by 2005. There was also 100 per cent local authority membership across the UK--no mean achievement given that local government in the UK had been reorganised between 1996 and 1998, creating over 40 more potential members.

The past decade

David Holmes became Chief Executive of BAAF in early 2006. A solicitor by background, he was the lead official on the Adoption and Children Bill as it made its passage through Parliament and also managed the national implementation programme for the new legislation from 2002 to 2005. David joined BAAF because of the charity's success in finding permanent new families for looked after children and its ability directly to influence relevant policy and practice through its publications, training, project and lobbying work.

Under David's leadership, recent years have seen BAAF continue to concentrate on the delivery of its core values and beliefs in promoting permanency planning and permanent solutions for children separated from their parents. In doing so, it has also focused on the importance of solutions other than adoption--particularly family and friends care and foster care and, of course, returning children to their parents wherever possible. As a membership organisation, particularly unusual in professional social work practice, BAAF's history marks out the importance and contribution that interprofessional co-operation and perspectives can make to meeting the needs of children separated from their parents and families.

The multi-disciplinary focus of BAAF is also unique. Social work, health and law were at the cornerstone of its activities from the start, added to by black and minority ethnic perspectives and, in the last ten years, the research community. Education is and continues to be the one missing element of membership, although various initiatives, such as Kate Cairns's Learn the Child (2004), a special edition of this journal edited by Sonia Jackson (2007) and the Supporting Children's Learning training programme (Pallett et al, 2010), indicate some progress.

An extremely significant feature of the last decade has been the impact of devolution on the development of child care policy in the UK and in 2006 BAAF opened an office in Northern Ireland to join the existing eight offices in England, Wales and Scotland. Links with the four governments and Parliaments continue to be equally important, the significance of which is clearly emerging in the different policy contexts across the UK.

While the focus of policy for children 'in care' across the four UK countries remains broadly similar in objectives and principles, particularly the welfare of the child, there is no denying that the different legal frameworks and systems, and policy initiatives, are introducing divergence and diversity that make day-to-day practice across these countries all the more challenging. This has been especially so with different timetables for the modernisation of adoption legislation in England and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. The availability of different legal orders marks some of that divergence with special guardianship in England and Wales and the permanence order in Scotland. Northern Ireland still awaits its new legislation. These orders provided different solutions to similar kinds of problems and only in time will we discover their relative merits in relation to the children whose lives they will affect. Divergence can also be found in the use of residential care, family and friends care and responses to juvenile offending.

Developments in fostering have been equally significant, with concerns about the recruitment and retention of carers, the 'professionalisation debate', the contribution of the independent sector and the importance of a recognised skills and knowledge framework including those required for specific interventions and treatments. Again, the four countries have their own important perspectives on these issues. Other divergences will be found in the organisational structure in the delivery of services such as children's services in England, combining social services and education, and the Health and Social Care Boards in Northern Ireland.

What does remain coherent across all four countries is a belief in the importance of adoption as a permanent solution for children who cannot return to their birth parents or families. Whatever differences might be found in the detail and whatever debates there continue to be about human rights questions, there is nothing to suggest that any of the four countries have moved away from that belief and a legal and policy framework that supports it. Where there is a notable divergence is the difference in position between UK countries and Europe over the use of adoption. In most of Europe adoption is focused on--and indeed means--intercountry adoption. Conversely, as we have seen, intercountry adoption in the UK has been viewed with considerable ambivalence under the anxiety of its colonial past, significant anxieties about transracial placements and a belief in the importance of services being developed locally to preserve the nationality and identity of families and children. Most European countries, where the human rights issues associated with legally severing a child from its family of origin against the wishes of the parents are barely even an issue, do not share this perspective on the advantages of domestic adoption in relation to children in state care. This reminds us that ethics and law are as important as a child's needs and development, and the ways in which these are worked out in the creation of a nation's child care policy has profound consequences.

This specific divergence is not confined to adoption. Lessons from Europe have not been particularly significant to the UK, although there has been some interest in the advantages of Scandinavian approaches to child welfare, and the contribution that the North European tradition of social pedagogy might make to the over-bureaucratised, risk-adverse and impersonal approaches to working directly with children. Neither has Europe been particularly interested in lessons from the UK, although attachment, especially Schofield and Beek's The Attachment Handbook (2006), has excited interest in Scandinavia. A French translation is also close to agreement and other BAAF books have appeared in a variety of languages. The extent of influence is somewhat different in the accession countries, with BAAF making direct contributions to the development of adoption and fostering services in Romania, Serbia and the Czech Republic.

Family-finding in both adoption and permanent foster care remains at the heart of BAAF's services. The contract to run the Adoption Register in England and Wales became a significant addition to BAAF's role in family placement and now finds families for someone in four of the children referred to it. In 2010, the Adoption Regional Information System (ARIS) was launched in Northern Ireland, incorporating a database that will provide agencies with centralised information about children waiting for an adoptive family and waiting adopters. In addition, BAAF has contracts to manage family-finding consortia in Wales and Scotland. The benefits of modern technology have also led to the establishment of Be My Parent as an online service as well as the development of video profiling, with the 'Opening Doors' project using it to overcome the limitations of written profiles of children, especially where they are disabled. The advantages of doing this were quickly established and funding allowed for a new video research project to be created for nearly 70 children, more than half of whom went on to be placed within the duration of the project (BAAF, 2010a). The Adoption, Search and Reunion website (BAAF, 2010b) is another example.

The opportunities that BAAF creates for the professional exchange of information among peers, and the opportunity to reflect and learn from experience and to understand the needs of practitioners, have led to a number of important research projects based on BAAF's partnerships with leading UK universities: 'Permanency in Foster Care' led by Gill Schofield at the University of East Anglia; the British Chinese Adoption project led by Alan Rushton at Kings College, London; and 'Unaccompanied Asylum Seeking Young People in Foster Care' led by Jim Wade at York University and Ravi Kohli at the University of Bedfordshire--to name just a few. Other developments are internally generated and often initiated by advisory groups themselves; BAAF's health forms, its Guidance on genetic testing and obesity, and Mather and colleagues' Doctors for Children in Public Care (2000) are important examples.

A significant part of the organisation's direct influence has stemmed from the extensive commitment it has made to providing training, consultancy and education. BAAF trainer/consultants provided some 2,500 days of training across the UK in 2009 and chaired over 30 adoption and fostering panels. The first PQ course in advanced child care came about through a BAAF initiative and Margaret Adcock's link with Goldsmiths College in the early 1980s. In recent years, under the leadership of Barbara Hutchinson, BAAF's recently retired Executive Director, the organisation has developed its post-qualifying training to offer a degree level GSCC-validated PQ course in Safeguarding and Family Placement, in partnership with Sheffield Hallam University in England and equivalents in Scotland and Northern Ireland and, at the planning stage, in Wales. BAAF also brings a multi-disciplinary audience together at more than 20 conferences a year. Adoption & Fostering is an internationally recognised peer-reviewed journal.

Campaigning and media work are another major part of BAAF's responsibilities - November 2010 marks the 14th year of National Adoption Week, bringing to wide public attention the value and significance of adoption generally and, specifically, the needs of children profiled throughout the week itself.

In 2009/10 BAAF's turnover was close to 7.5 million [pounds sterling]--the highest ever. There were some 2,000 corporate and individual members including every local authority (Trusts in Northern Ireland) across the UK. The vast majority of voluntary adoption agencies and independent fostering providers are in membership and BAAF operates a range of thriving special interest groups on subjects of particular interest, such as special guardianship and private fostering. The latter deserves a special mention being a subject of significant concern to BAAF for many years. Government funding was made available to develop a series of awareness-raising campaigns, and the available evidence suggests this has led to a significant increase in understanding among professionals and the general public.

Looking to the future

As BAAF celebrates its 30th anniversary, it is clear that that there is much to acknowledge and celebrate. But while a sense of achievement is appropriate, there is also cause for both regret and real concern. There remains widespread concern about the position of children in society. Social and economic inequality is still marked and where a child is born and the social and economic position of their parents still too often determines their life chances and pathways. This is not to say that things have not changed, as demonstrated by the recent report on equality (Equality and Human Rights Commission, 2010), but as The Spirit Level (Wilkinson and Pickett, 2009) has also shown, society is structurally stuck in perpetuating gross inequalities and a context less sympathetic to minorities and vulnerable groups. This is, of course, a matter beyond social work, although in the 1970s many social workers would have seen it as a matter of direct, primary professional concern. Political activism has largely evaporated from social work but the consequences of political decisions reverberate on those with whom social workers are most concerned. For children on the edge of care or in care, social inequality plus maltreatment creates serious developmental consequences. Direct abuse or toxic neglect, together with parental drug and alcohol misuse, mental health problems, domestic violence and learning difficulties have profound consequences for children and are at the core of family placement work. The impact and consequences of these issues on assessment, planning and decision-making and family placement need knowledge, skill and resources. They require health, education and social work to work together with carers and adopters, often in the long term. A loving, stable, resourceful and determined family for life has been BAAF's key message over 30 years and that remains unchanged. But the full meaning of what it demands and how it might be enabled in the current context is quite different from the past, both at the individual child level in relation to their needs, and in the general population in terms of those families most at risk. The demand on the system as a whole is enormous in understanding and properly addressing these issues. But whatever demands there are on professionals, it is the children and their adopters, foster carers or carers who carry the 24/7 weight of responsibility. The public image of social workers and the care system as a whole does not help. While BAAF continues to support and develop best practice and expends a lot of energy in presenting a more accurate and positive picture of social work and care, there are complex systemic and structural forces at work which have made this an uphill battle and one that does not seem to get much easier. There are also continuing concerns about delay for all children in care, and about the non-delivery of adoption plans or other permanent options for a significant number of children. There is further serious anxiety about the identification of effective interventions and the availability of support services in health, mental health and education to manage effectively the consequences of maltreatment. Building this into the placement from the start and making it available as the child and family develop still tend to happen according to a postcode lottery. Adequately addressing the issues for young people leaving care also makes frustratingly slow progress.

As a professional membership organisation, BAAF is as much needed today as it was 30 years ago. But as has happened over those three decades, it has had to develop and respond to changing circumstances and demonstrate its worth for the investment made by those who provide the resources for BAAF's work. As this article is written, deep cuts are being planned in public funding which will impact on all of BAAF's stakeholders. The organisation is having to ride a wave of uncertainty about its future. At the same time, the demands on services from local authorities, the voluntary sector and the courts are rising. The numbers and complexity of the issues presented to BAAF's information and advice service are also increasing.

BAAF will continue to work with its professional membership to address these complex issues as it always has done. It will not lose its primary focus on those children who are most vulnerable in society - those who are permanently or temporarily separated from their families of origin and those who care for them. It will undoubtedly have to adapt to survive. But the needs of professionals working with those children and carers have not lessened; this was the motivation for creating BAAF and this is the need that exists for such work to continue. Whether through its publications or advice lines, its policy work or campaigns, its training or its family-finding, the work goes on. The organisation is a home for professional practice in family placement and a secure and loving home is what we all need.

Happy 30th Birthday BAAF!

Key words: BAAF, adoption and fostering, voluntary membership organisation, history, children's services

References

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[c] Tony Hall, Felicity Collier, David Holmes and John Simmonds 2010

Tony Hall was Director of BAAF (formerly ABAFA), 1978-1986

Felicity Collier was Director, then Chief Executive of BAAF, 1995-2006

David Holmes has been Chief Executive of BAAF since 2006

John Simmonds is BAAF's Director of Policy, Research and Development