The Consortium of Voluntary Adoption Agencies (CVAA) commissioned Alma Economics to undertake a three-part study for the publication of the Adoption Leadership Board quarterly data reports.

We initially assessed the credibility of data returns from local authorities (LA’s) and Voluntary Adoption Agencies related to children waiting to be adopted and prospective adoptive parents. This allowed us to produce two cleaned, complex datasets that could be used for analysis.

For the second part of the project, we summarised the data returns for Special Guardianship Orders (SGO’s) from LA’s in England and produced LA-level, regional and national SGO statistics as well as analysis highlighting key population and regional characteristics.

We also analysed the information collected by the CVAA on adoptions, children’s characteristics, adopters’ characteristics and timings through the adoption process to understand the trends and characteristics of the sector and produce conclusions with policy implications. We studied how inter-agency placements vary over time and across different children’s characteristics. Finally, we created a forecasting framework that could be used in the future to predict the gap between children waiting to be adopted and prospective parents on a quarterly basis.