The history of adoption in Britain

Before legal adoption

Children whose parents could not look after them have always existed. What changed in the twentieth century was the law's view of them.

For most of the nineteenth century, a child whose mother could not keep them — usually because she was unmarried, often because she was poor — went to the workhouse, to a charitable institution, or to whichever member of the extended family could be persuaded to take them in. None of this was adoption in the modern sense. The child’s legal parents remained their birth parents, regardless of who was actually raising them, and there was no reliable way to make a placement permanent. A birth parent who turned up years later and demanded the child back had the law on their side.

The institutional precedent for organised care of these children was the Foundling Hospital, established by the philanthropist Thomas Coram in London in 1739. The Foundling Hospital took in babies whose mothers could not keep them, raised them through childhood, and apprenticed them out at fourteen. It still exists today, in a different form, as the children’s charity Coram. Other Victorian organisations followed: Dr Barnardo’s homes, established in 1866; the Waifs and Strays Society, founded in 1881, which still exists as the Children’s Society; the Salvation Army; a long list of regional charities. Most placed children either in their own institutions or with families on terms that today would be called fostering, sometimes for life, but never with the full legal transfer that adoption would later mean.

There was a second route, organised by the state. The Poor Law Amendment Act of 1889 gave Boards of Guardians the power to assume parental rights over orphaned and deserted children — what came to be known as "poor law adoption". The motive was not always benign. Boards of Guardians often took these powers in order to pursue the absent father for maintenance, or to break up families considered morally unfit. The children themselves had no rights and no recourse.

A third route was simply private. Unmarried mothers placed their babies with strangers, often through advertisements in newspapers, sometimes for a fee. Some of these placements were good. Others were the abuse pattern that came to be known as baby farming: a single woman would take in many infants for a one-off payment, and large numbers of those infants would die. The Infant Life Protection Act 1872, and a stronger version of the same Act in 1897, were Parliament’s first attempts to regulate this trade. Neither worked particularly well, but they established the principle that the state had an interest in what happened to children whose mothers could not keep them.

The First World War changed the picture sharply. A generation of fathers had been killed; a sharp rise in non-marital births had followed soldiers home on leave; the country had a public-health problem with tens of thousands of children whose legal status was unclear. Parliament started taking the case for legal adoption seriously. The Hopkinson Committee Report of 1921 recommended a legal framework. The Tomlin Committee Report of 1924 supported the idea, but raised early doubts about whether the law should sever a child’s link with their birth family entirely — a question that has remained live in British adoption ever since.

Between 1922 and 1925, eight separate Bills were introduced to Parliament to legalise adoption. All of them failed. The ninth, in 1926, succeeded.

The 1926 Act and the inter-war years

The Adoption of Children Act 1926 was the first legal framework for adoption in England and Wales. Northern Ireland passed its own equivalent in 1929; Scotland did the same in 1930.

The 1926 Act did three things that mattered. It transferred parental rights from the birth parents to the adopters by court order. It required the consent of the birth parents to that transfer, and set narrow grounds — abandonment, persistent neglect, refusal to maintain — on which a court could dispense with consent if it had to. And it created the Adopted Children Register at the General Register Office, where every adoption order had to be recorded. For the first time, an adopted child was legally a member of their adoptive family, and the law could prove it.

The Act was less generous in other respects. An adopted child still had the right to inherit from their birth family, but did not yet acquire the right to inherit from their adoptive family — a gap not closed until the Adoption Act 1949. And the Act did not require secrecy. For the first twenty years of legal adoption, court papers gave the full names and addresses of both adopters and birth parents. Until the Second World War, courts were often reluctant to make an adoption order at all unless the birth mother appeared in person at the hearing.

The parliamentary debate was sharper than the eventual Act might suggest. Some MPs and peers argued that legal adoption would lead to "fecklessness", by giving unmarried mothers a way to discard their children without consequence. Others took the opposite view: that a legal framework was needed precisely to protect adopters from birth parents who might otherwise reclaim a child years later, once that child was old enough to earn a wage. The 1926 Act was a compromise between the two positions, which is why it gave adopters a court order but did not yet give them anonymity.

The law on illegitimacy was changing alongside it. The Legitimacy Act 1926, passed in the same parliamentary session, allowed children to be legitimised by the subsequent marriage of their parents, provided neither parent had been married to a third party at the time of conception. It was a small reform, and it did not extend to children of adulterous relationships, but it was the start of a long process of dismantling the legal penalties of being born outside marriage.

Through the 1930s, with adoption now legally available, the practice grew faster than the regulation. Unsupervised placements through small voluntary societies became common, and some of those societies were not careful about whom they placed children with. A government inquiry led by Florence Horsburgh MP reported in 1937 with detailed evidence of malpractice. Its recommendations became the Adoption of Children (Regulation) Act 1939, which required local authority notification of informal adoptions, supervision of placements made through third parties, and a probationary period before an adoption order could be granted. It also made it a criminal offence to advertise children for adoption or to pay a third party to take a child. The 1939 Act was significant, but the war intervened, and most of its provisions did not come into force until 1943.

The mid-century peak

The Adoption Act 1949 tightened the regulatory framework that the 1926 Act had set up. It introduced a probationary period of three months under local authority supervision before a court could grant an adoption order. It set a minimum age of six weeks before a birth mother could give legal consent to her baby’s adoption. It closed the inheritance gap left by the 1926 Act, giving adopted children full inheritance rights within their adoptive families.

And, for the first time, it allowed the adopter’s identity to be concealed from the birth parents. Applicants used a serial number rather than their name on the application form. The birth mother could be required to consent without ever knowing who was taking her baby.

This was the beginning of secrecy as the structural norm in British adoption, and it lasted for the next twenty-five years. By the early 1950s, the apparatus was in place that defined the mid-century pattern: a young unmarried woman became pregnant, was sent away to a mother-and-baby home for the final weeks of her pregnancy, gave birth, was given a short period with the baby, and then was strongly pressured by family, social workers, professionals and clergy to relinquish the child. The baby was then placed with a married couple whose identity she did not know. The records were sealed. She was expected to return to her former life and never speak of it again.

This is the period now described as forced adoption. It ran from roughly the late 1940s to the early 1970s, and it produced the great majority of British adoptions in those years. The Australian government issued a formal apology for its equivalent practices in 2013. The UK government has so far declined to do the same, and the campaign for an apology continues.

Until the 1970s adoption largely involved the relinquishing of young babies by a parent or parents with no expectation of any future contact. Children placed under this arrangement were usually very young and had no attachment or memory of their birth family.

— Public Law Working Group, Recommendations for best practice in respect of adoption, November 2024

The Adoption Act 1958 consolidated the legislation, following the Hurst Committee Report of 1954. It extended agency regulation to local authority placements, prohibited anonymous adverts offering to care for children, and tightened the procedure by which a court could dispense with parental consent. It did not change the underlying pattern.

The intellectual case for that pattern came largely from one place. John Bowlby’s Maternal Care and Mental Health, published by the World Health Organization in 1951, set out the maternal deprivation hypothesis: early separation from a primary caregiver caused lasting psychological harm, and the harm was hardest to undo the older the child became. The practical conclusion drawn from this — and it was drawn quickly and widely — was that children should be moved into permanent adoptive placements as young as possible, that the placement should be treated as the start of a new life, and that the past should be sealed off behind them. Bowlby’s later work was more nuanced than this, but the simplified version was the version that shaped fifty years of adoption practice.

The peak year was 1968. In England and Wales, 24,381 adoption orders were made — the highest figure recorded before or since. Most were of relinquished babies. A smaller number were of step-children, where a remarrying parent’s new spouse adopted the child to consolidate the new family. At that point, British adoption was overwhelmingly an answer to non-marital pregnancy. Within five years, the picture would change completely.

The transformation

Two pieces of legislation from the late 1960s removed the supply of relinquished babies almost entirely. The Abortion Act 1967, in force from 1968, legalised abortion in Great Britain. The NHS extended access to the contraceptive pill, initially available only to married women from 1961, to all women through the late 1960s and 1970s. By the mid-1970s, the number of babies offered for adoption had fallen sharply, and it has continued to fall ever since.

The legal framework was also changing. The Family Law Reform Act 1969 gave children born outside marriage the right to inherit on the intestacy of either parent. It was followed by the Family Law Reform Act 1987, which removed all remaining legal distinctions between children of married and unmarried parents. The legal penalties of being born outside marriage, which had driven so much of mid-century adoption practice, were being dismantled.

The Houghton Committee Report of 1972 set the direction for what came next. The Committee, chaired by Sir William Houghton, recognised that the supply of relinquished babies was falling, that adoption practice should pivot towards finding families for children already in local authority care, and that the criteria for adopters should be about their suitability for the child rather than their marital status. It also argued, for the first time at the level of a government committee, that adopted adults should have the right to access their original birth records.

The Children Act 1975 implemented most of the Houghton recommendations. It granted adopted adults the right to obtain their original birth certificate on reaching eighteen. It made local authorities the lead agencies for adoption. It allowed adoption by single applicants, divorced applicants and step-parents on the same footing as married couples. The Adoption Act 1976 consolidated these reforms into a single piece of legislation, which would remain the main statute on adoption for the next twenty-six years.

The shape of the sector changed alongside the law. The Association of British Adoption Agencies, formed in 1970 to represent voluntary adoption agencies, added the word "Fostering" to its name in 1975 — a deliberate acknowledgement that the work of finding families for children in care was no longer separable into adoption and fostering as distinct disciplines. In 1980 the body merged with the Adoption Resource Exchange to form the British Association for Adoption and Fostering (BAAF), which became the principal sector body for the next thirty-five years.

By the late 1980s, the model that had defined adoption since the 1949 Act was effectively gone. Adoption was now mostly of older children, children with histories of abuse or neglect, sibling groups, and children with disabilities. Secrecy was no longer the default; open adoption and post-adoption contact were starting to appear in practice, though not yet in statute. And the question the Tomlin Committee had raised in 1924 — whether adoption should sever the link with the birth family — was being reopened from the other side.

The Children Act 1989, in force from October 1991, set the framework for everything that has followed. It established the welfare of the child as the paramount consideration in every decision a court or local authority makes about that child. It introduced the modern apparatus of care orders, placement orders and section 31 threshold criteria. And it imposed on local authorities a positive duty to promote contact between children in their care and their birth families — a duty that did not extend to adopted children, opening a divergence between the two regimes that has been a live issue ever since.

The modern statutory framework

Through the 1990s, it became increasingly clear that the adoption regime — still operating under the 1976 Act — had not kept up with the realities the 1989 Children Act had set in motion. Children placed for adoption were now older, with memories of their birth families and often with continuing contact through siblings or extended kin. Open adoption was becoming more common in practice but had no statutory framework. Same-sex couples and unmarried partners, who could foster and could each adopt individually, still could not adopt jointly.

The Adoption and Children Act 2002 was Parliament’s answer. It received royal assent in November 2002 and came into force on 30 December 2005. It is the legal framework that still governs adoption in England and Wales today.

The 2002 Act did several things:

• It replaced the 1976 Adoption Act outright.

• It aligned the adoption regime with the welfare principle that the 1989 Children Act had established for children in care, so that the child’s welfare throughout life — not just through childhood — became the paramount consideration in any adoption decision.

• It allowed unmarried couples and same-sex couples to adopt jointly for the first time.

• It created the placement order as the formal route by which a court authorises a local authority to place a child for adoption, replacing the previous freeing order.

• It required courts to consider contact arrangements at the placement-order stage, under section 26, and again at the adoption-order stage, under section 46(6) — though without imposing the duty to promote contact that exists for children in care under section 34 of the Children Act 1989.

• It introduced the Adoption Contact Register, where adopted adults and birth relatives can record their willingness to be contacted by one another.

The Act also introduced Special Guardianship Orders as a new permanence option short of full adoption. A Special Guardian — usually a relative — acquires parental responsibility for the child without the birth parents’ parental responsibility being extinguished. The order lasts until the child is eighteen. Special Guardianship was intended for situations where adoption was inappropriate but long-term fostering offered insufficient security. Its use has grown substantially since 2005, and it now accounts for a meaningful share of permanent placements for children leaving care.

This is the framework that governs adoption in England and Wales today, with the modifications introduced by the 2014 reforms covered in the next section. For the statute itself, see legislation.gov.uk.

The 2014 reforms

The Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition that took office in 2010 made adoption reform an early political priority. Michael Gove, Education Secretary from 2010 to 2014, had been adopted himself, and used his position to push the agenda. In a set-piece speech at the Isaac Newton Centre in February 2012, he argued that the assessment process had become excessively bureaucratic, that too few children in care were being placed for adoption, and that the system needed structural reform. The operational work was led by the Children and Families Minister, Edward Timpson, who had been raised in a family that fostered more than ninety children and had two adopted brothers.

The reform landed in two main vehicles. The Adoption Agencies (Miscellaneous Amendments) Regulations 2013 restructured the assessment process into two stages — Stage 1 statutory checks, Stage 2 the in-depth assessment — with a six-month statutory target from registration of interest to the agency decision. This is the structure still in use today on every adoption assessment in England, including Jigsaw’s. The Children and Families Act 2014, given royal assent in March 2014, made the wider statutory changes: a 26-week limit on care proceedings, a formal statutory basis for Fostering for Adoption (the early-permanence model in which an approved adopter takes a child as a foster carer while the court is still deciding the case), equalised pay and leave for adopters with birth parents, and the removal of the existing statutory duty to give due consideration to a child’s racial, religious, cultural and linguistic background when matching. The last of these was the most contested element of the reform package, and the merits remain disputed.

Alongside the legislation came money. In the summer of 2013, the Department for Education announced a £16 million funding package, available until 2016, to expand the capacity of the voluntary adoption sector. The bulk — £13 million — went to an expansion fund administered by the Consortium of Voluntary Adoption Agencies, which made grants to existing agencies to grow their recruitment and assessment work. A separate slice of the package funded three new voluntary adoption agencies, each receiving a start-up grant of around £500,000 and each committing to recruit more than 100 adopters in their first three years. The three new agencies opened on 4 April 2014.

None of the three start-up grants went to a fully new organisation. One went to a subsidiary that a private fostering company set up by registering its in-house adoption team as a voluntary adoption agency. The other two were partnerships in which an existing local authority delegated its adoption functions to a newly formed voluntary agency, often with much of the same staff transferring across.

The 2014 reforms are the legitimate endpoint of any historical account of British adoption, because the framework they set is the framework that still applies. What has happened since 2014 — the establishment of Regional Adoption Agencies, the collapse in the number of children being placed for adoption, the contraction of the voluntary sector — is recent enough to belong on a different page.

Jigsaw

Jigsaw was founded in the same year, 2014, independently. There was no government start-up grant. There was no religious foundation, no corporate parent and no partnership with a local authority. The agency was set up by two people, Khalida Lovell and Erik, who had no funding from anyone. This is unusual in the UK voluntary adoption sector, where most agencies trace their origins either to the church — PACT to the Diocese of Oxford, Adoption Matters to the Diocese of Chester, Catholic Caring Services and others to their respective dioceses — or to Victorian-era philanthropic charities, of which Coram, Barnardo’s and the Children’s Society are the largest. For more on how Jigsaw was set up and how it differs from agencies that took the more conventional route, see Why Jigsaw.

Further reading

• The adoption process — How adoption works in the UK today, stage by stage, from first enquiry to the adoption order.

• Adopting a baby or child — Who is being adopted in the UK now, why babies are rare, and what the realistic options are for adopters.

• Checking the facts — Jigsaw's analysis of current adoption data and policy, including how adoption numbers have changed since 2015.