Television And Radio Campaign To Raise The Profile Of Adoption

BBC News adoption season aimed to encourage people to think about whether adoption or fostering could be for them.

The two-week season, entitled ‘Family Wanted’, began with a special edition of the family history programme, Who Do You Think You Are?, in which celebrities explored their family history. The first edition featured adoptee Nicky Campbell tracing the roots of his adoptive family.

It launched two weeks of radio, television and internet coverage, including five programmes telling stories of real-life adoption and foster care in the UK today.

The BBC’s Controller of Learning, Liz Cleaver, said: "There are more than 70,000 children in care in the UK, a shortage of more than 10,000 foster carers and more than 4,000 children needing adoption every year.

"The Family Wanted campaign aims to encourage people to think about whether they can become potential adopters and long-term foster carers".

The campaign also extends to a storyline in the medical drama Casualty, interviews and features on local radio, coverage on the BBC Asian Network, dramas and documentaries on Radio 4 and discussions about adoption and foster care on Radio 2’s Jeremy Vine Show.

At the end of each of the season’s television programmes, an appeal will be shown featuring a child who needs a family to adopt or foster him or her.

There will also be two other short films combining excerpts from the child appeals, with messages from celebrities with personal experience of foster care and adoption.

A pack will be available containing an information magazine and a newsletter relevant to individual areas, with profiles of children who are in need of adoption or long-term foster care, along with contact details for agencies and Adoption UK.

More ethnic-minority adopters needed

The children’s charity NCH has used the BBC’s adoption season to draw attention to the shortage of black and ethnic-minority adopters.

The ‘Family Wanted’ season came to an end after a fortnight of television and radio coverage, including documentaries, appeals and a storyline in the hospital drama Casualty.

NCH spokeswoman Jean Smith told the BBC Asian Network that with three black or Asian children needing adoption for every one home with adopters of a similar background, more ethnic-minority adopters were needed. She suggested placing ethnic-minority children with white parents leaves children without a sense of cultural and religious identity later in life.

Adoptee Nick Pendry is of Indian origin and was adopted by white parents in the 1970s. He told the radio station: "My cultural and racial sense of self was missing and that can't be made up later in life.

"I had a period of time when I wanted to be white and every time I looked in the mirror it was a bit of a shock to me that I wasn't.

"There's something inherently unfair that white children in care have the option of having a cultural match more times than black and Asian children".

Currently around 10,000 of the UK’s 80,000 looked after children are black, Asian or of mixed heritage. Agencies try to find cultural and racial matches, but the shortage of prospective adopters from these communities can mean black and Asian children waiting a long time.

David Holmes, from the British Association for Adoption and Fostering (BAAF), said cultural and racial matching was about trying to "reinforce the child's background and ethnicity", suggesting: "We think that's one of the factors that can really help a child to settle in a new home".

Ismail Aman, Director of Foster Care Link, which specialises in black, Asian and ethnic-minority placements, told the BBC that more Asian children were being put up for adoption because of social changes within their communities leading to increased family breakdown.

He suggested drugs and alcoholism had become more prevalent, and domestic violence and child abuse were increasingly dealt with publicly rather than within families.