CLOSER NEWS REPORT
This National Adoption Week, a new campaign aims to help the thousands of UK children desperately hoping to find a family…
After Ash Watts and her husband Graham got married in 2019, they started talking about having a family. Ash, 42, who lives in Durham, has Cerebral Palsy and even though there is no physical reason she couldn’t conceive her own child, she knew that giving birth would be hard on her body.
SAD DECLINE
She says, “I knew there were a lot of children out there who needed to be loved.”
Sadly, Ash is right. There has been a 23 per cent decline in children leaving care via adoption over the last five years. Last year, just 2,950 children left care via adoption – 900 fewer than in 2018.
Sixty per cent of children waiting for adoption come from specific groups who repeatedly face the longest delays in finding a home. These include children aged five or over, children with additional and/ or complex needs, brother and sister groups and those from an ethnic minority.
This week, the group You Can Adopt have launched a campaign that aims to show how adoption has changed over the decades and to encourage potential adopters to come forward.
Ash admits that, at first, Graham was daunted by the prospect of them becoming adoptive parents. She says, “We approached an agency – Adoption Matters – and they answered all of his questions and made him feel comfortable. I was frightened that I would be turned down on the grounds that I was disabled, but I work as a disability trainer and in the workplace you make something called ‘reasonable adjustments’ so a disabled person can perform a role. It was the same process with adopting.”
It took around a year for Ash and Graham to get approved. She says, “Once background checks had been done, we got assigned an adoption social worker called Kate. She liaised with my doctors to make sure they were in agreement that I could parent a child. I had to prove myself a little bit more than someone who was able-bodied. We also did our adoption training with Kate and she came to visit us at home once a week.”
When it came to finding a match, one child’s profile stood out to the couple. “Bill was so cute, with lovely dark curls,” says Ash. “His notes said that he had a rare chromosome disorder and I could see that 31 people had already looked at his profile and turned him down. It was that which made really me want to meet him.
UNDERESTIMATED
“When we had meetings about Bill, we were warned that he might never talk and he would definitely end up in special education. I said I’d make him the best version of himself. And when I met him, I thought, ‘This child has been underestimated, but it’s going to be my job to prove myse
