The Narey Report.

I have been reading the above report on adoption.  I was involved for much of my working life with adoption - admittedly a long long time ago - so I was interested in his conclusions.  I found myself somewhat at variance with him over the question of the taking of children into care.  I have to bow to his far wider breadth of experience, but my feeling always was that taking a child into care should be the last, the very last resort.  There will always be bad parents, but at least there is always the possibility that bad parents may become, if not good parents, then at least less bad parents, whereas once a child is in care, that's it - they are on a one-way train with no turning back, and their chances of a good outcome are at best slim.  Where I do agree whole-heartedly with Narey is that once a child is in care it is imperative that they are adopted - or at the very least placed in a stable long-term fostering situation - as soon as possible.  In general, once a child is about three years old, if they are not already in such a relationship, there are almost certainly going to be problems.  It's a very difficult area, and as Narey says, it badly needs sorting out.