The grounds for making an Adoption Order are incredibly vague. Under the
Adoption Act 1976, the Court must take various factors into account but not the
'welfare checklist' in the Children Act 1989. The Court is required primarily to
consider the interests of the child and his/her wishes so far as they can be
ascertained.
In fact, there will have been an inexorable process leading to the stage at
which an application is actually made for an Adoption Order. The children will
probably have been the subject of previous court proceedings which approved a
plan for adoption. The adopters may or may not be given information about
these.
What is usually more important is the process of obtaining the consent of the
birth parent(s) to the adoption or dispensing with the need for consent. It is
there that the court battles are fought.
Even so, the applicants, the prospective adopters, may well have been through
a series of hoops to get this far, interviews, investigations, enquiries of all
and sundry. Those that have gone through the Adoption Agency process deserve
praise for persistence. There are many others, though, who will not have been
through this but will find the requirements quite bizarre. They are the ones who
apply for step-parent adoptions or who have been looking after children as a
result of some informal arrangement. For some, adoption may not be the right
approach: see Alternatives to Adoption