Children in care waiting over a year to move in with adoptive families as council misses targets

Children in care are waiting over a year to move in with their adoptive families in Peterborough.

Council data suggests the average waiting time between a child entering care and being moved into their adoptive placement is 580 days.

The average wait between courts authorising the council to place a child into a home with an adoptive family and a match being approved is 298 days, it adds, or around 10 months.

This is below Peterborough City Council’s (PCC) target of 120 days, or around four months.

The council’s latest scorecard for its role as a corporate parent – a body responsible for the care of some children and young people – shows several missed targets.

It paints a picture of “declining performance”, Michaela Berry, acting head of service for corporate parenting at PCC, said at a meeting this week.

The scorecard was produced in December, the same period in which Ofsted inspected children’s services at PCC before rating them ‘inadequate’.

A council report accompanying the scorecard says that the adoption figures have been affected by outliers in a relatively small data set.

“The ‘timeliness to adoption data’ shows that we are under performing in relation to the target for both ‘time to placement’ and ‘time to match’,” it says.

“Of the 18 children adopted in the last year, 10 were within the required timeframes, and five were just outside. There are three children who have experienced significant delays and they have contributed to the overall significant increase in time.”

But other targets were also missed. Initial health assessments of children entering care were completed on time in just 9.4 per cent of cases, far below the target of “above 95%”.

Annual health assessments for children in care were completed on time 84.6% of the time, while annual dental checks were completed on time 87.2% of the time, while the target for both is “above 90%”.

The scorecard also shows that PCC aims to have less than eight per cent of the children in its care placed in three or more different homes in a year, but the figure for 2023 was 15%.

The target for the number of statutory visits the council carries out on time is “above 98%”, but this only happened 90.6% of the time.

In total, there were 823 children under PCC’s care in December when the scorecard was produced.

After its Ofsted judgement, PCC pledged more money for children’s services as well as greater staffing capacity.

It also agreed to a Local Government Association (LGA) peer review of its corporate parenting committee.