Changes and Continuities in Adoption Social Work: Adoption in Scotland Since the 1968 Act

Abstract

This article charts changes and continuities in the social work role in adoption since 1968. The Social Work (Scotland) Act 1968 established the Children’s Hearing System, Scotland’s unique approach to child welfare in which lay volunteers make decisions on compulsory intervention relating to children. Although the Act was not intended to reform adoption practice, it has had two major impacts. First, as adoption moved from ‘relinquishment’ to more complex and contested legal routes, the Children’s Hearing came to occupy an integral role in decision-making for children in need of care and protection. Secondly, since 1968, adoption has become understood as a resource for children who are unable to remain within their birth family or kinship networks. Using documentary analysis of adoption files and interviews with key informants, the research focused on three key periods: 1968, 1988 and 2014. The study found that fragmentation of the social work role has decreased the potential of adoption records to be a resource for adopted individuals curious about their origins and story. Paradoxically, over this period, there has been growing understanding of the identity needs of adopted people. Such unintended consequences suggest the need for more a thoughtful approach to adoption record keeping.

Thoughts on files

“…Therefore, alongside any of those children who have been in care who have become adults now and will be privy to their electronic records, for the foreseeable future, the physical record, the one that can be held in the hand, will still be the most commonly accessible. Indeed, recent writers have noted an increase in the amount of physical material – from the adoption worker’s two page assessment in 1968 to one that runs to seventy pages in 2014 (Critchley et al 2018). Before we consider The File, it must be acknowledged that the information contained in social work files has been of interest for decades.…”

“…These contents, for want of a better word, assemblages, are at the discretion of the social worker and the social worker’s discretion and choices are regularly determined by political, social and cultural influences which are rarely stable: ‘The increases in recording appeared driven by concerns about accountability for decisions and evidencing decision-making in court. So that there are less balanced descriptions of birth families and a loss of ‘soft information’ as it gets ‘crowded out’ by ‘evidence’ and accounts of the decision-making process’ (Critchley et al, 2018: 13). The authors go on:As the interviewees in this study highlighted, social work records have also become more negative about birth family in order to provide evidence in formal processes of the need for separation and permanence for the child, with a decrease in ‘soft information’.…”

“…For the most part the texts show that social workers knew the families and the children well. Yet symbolic and detailed representations of the small acts of affection within birth families became harder to find in records as the years went on (Critchley et al, 2018: 18).Ultimately, the file is an institutional record, it also represents and symbolises authority, but it is also a document ‘replete with “misinformation” and “misdirection”’ (Ferguson, 2018) as we shall see later when we look at two high profile battles by ex-care people to claim their files.…”

“…For the most part the texts show that social workers knew the families and the children well. Yet symbolic and detailed representations of the small acts of affection within birth families became harder to find in records as the years went on (Critchley et al, 2018: 18).…”