Blog: National Adoption Week – looking at the data on VAAs and diversity

At CVAA, which represents voluntary adoption agencies (VAAs) across the UK, this message feels very important when it comes to finding the right families for children. We want people from all walks of life to see this life path as an option to them, and feel comfortable taking steps to learning more about adoption.

It is therefore vital that adoption agencies fully measure how well they are doing at welcoming people from all backgrounds, to learn and improve. As a result, this National Adoption Week we have carried out new analysis on Coram-i’s ‘adopter characteristics’ data, to understand the statistics on VAA adoption orders and adopter diversity.

We first looked at the number of adoption orders made to LGBT adopters. We were blown away to find that over one in four VAA adoptions (27%) are to LGBT adopters. This is a phenomenal increase from 16% in 2018/19 and even from last year when the proportion was 21%. It is also significantly higher than statutory agencies, for which fewer than one in five adoptions (17%) are to LGBT adopters.

We then looked at the number of adoption orders made to adopters from minoritised ethnic backgrounds. We discovered that VAAs have consistently been around twice as likely to have AOs made to people from these communities, compared with statutory agencies. Yet after some improvements increasing diversity in recent years, the latest year showed a slightly less diverse picture with 12% of VAA adoptions being to those from minoritised ethnic groups rather than 15% in 2021/22.

This last graph shows that VAAs have more work to do to support people from these backgrounds considering adoption, which is a challenge we are rising to. Our strategy published in April focuses on adopter and sector diversity – supporting VAAs to embed learning so that those from a wide range of ethnic, cultural and social backgrounds, feel confident coming forward to adopt and that all services are delivered through an equitable and inter-sectional approach, rooted in anti-discriminatory practice.

At our upcoming November conference we’re very pleased that Dr Tam Cane, University of Sussex, will be delivering a morning session on how agencies can better support children and families from culturally diverse backgrounds and embed these principles at the heart of what voluntary agencies do.

We’ll keep publishing updates on our progress on our blog.

25th October 2024