Scotland's first adoption activity day: evaluation

4. Why hold an Activity day?

4.1 Finding families for children is a difficult process and in Scotland there is a shortage of suitable families wanting to adopt a child. There can also be a miss- match between the children who prospective adopters have in their minds and the children who are available. Most prospective adopters are aware that even if they want a young baby they are unlikely to be matched with them. However research ^[5] has shown that the majority of prospective adopters would prefer a child under the age of five years.

4.2 The most recent research on disruption in adoption has found that three-quarters of children who experienced a disruption were more than four years old at placement with their adoptive family. Children who were four years old or older at placement were 13 times more likely to disrupt than those who were placed as infants. These findings support much of the previous research and the government's attempts to reduce delay in decision-making. This much larger dataset highlights the impact of delay.

4.3 The work of Scotland's Adoption Register steering group found that as of 21 ^st September 2015, 149 children and 61 families were seeking placement - again reflecting the usual disparity between children in need of adoption and families available to adopt. ^[6] There is a real need to try every possible means to find more families for children and where appropriate to speed up the process of matching children with families. The Activity day is one potential way of doing this.