New Family Social receives grant to help work with LGBT adopters

26 July 2016

 

Our colleagues at New Family Social, the UK’s peer support charity for LGBT adopters and foster carers, have received a £100,000 grant to help agencies work with gay, bisexual and transgender adopters. The grant from the Department for Education’s Practice & Improvement Fund is to improve the assessment, matching and ongoing support of LGBT people going through the adoption process.

New Family Social will work with existing adoption agencies and the new Regional Adoption Agencies across England over the next 18 months to raise their awareness of the evidence around the matching of LGBT approved adopters with children. Recent research by the charity showed that three in four LGBT adopters actively considered adopting siblings, often described by social work professionals  as ‘hard to place’. However, the majority of those adopters willing to parent sibling groups were then matched with single children first.

The charity will also work with agencies’ staff to reduce unconscious bias against LGBT adopters. Recent research has shown alarming – although isolated – incidences of discrimination against LGBT adopters throughout the adoption process. Feedback from LGBT adopters will also help the charity identify adoption agencies that need tailored training interventions to improve their practices with LGBT adopters.

Tor Docherty, chief executive of New Family Social and an adoptive mother herself, said: ‘In every adoption case the needs of the child are paramount and it’s only right that the widest pool of potential parents is considered. While 1 in 12 adoptions in England in 2015 were to same-sex couples, there’s still much work to do to make LGBT adopters’ experiences uniformly positive across the country.’

 

 

 

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