In 1996, Catholic Children's Society (Nottingham) was granted Government Funding to undertake research and consultation into the experiences and service needs of adopted adolescents and young adults. This initiative, entitled Project 16-18 [1], also considered the perspectives of other parties to an adoption, for example birth parents, siblings and adoptive families.

The Agency was particularly well placed to gather information, partly due to its long history of adoption work but also because a policy decision in the late 1970s had increasingly shifted its focus away from the placement of infants with childless couples towards the inter-agency placement of older and special needs children from care.

To inform Project 16-18, a brief postal questionnaire was designed and distributed to 88 adopted people aged between 14 and 20 years[2]. Although our target population included all those born during the period 1.1.77 to 31.12.82 and for whom we had an address, of necessity certain exclusions were made.

For example we did not seek the involvement of young people unless their adoptive parents were in agreement. In situations known to us where divorce, a serious illness or bereavement had recently occurred we also decided against an approach, or at least delayed the request until a more appropriate time.

Additionally, and most importantly for the purposes of this paper, we did not contact five families where we knew the placement was in extreme crisis or where the relationship between the young person and the parents had broken down completely and they were no long living together.

Apart from the insensitivity of including young people in these circumstances, it would also have been inappropriate to send a research instrument designed to elicit information about matters which were already well known to the agency following the prolonged involvement of its Post-Adoption Service.

Having addressed these ethical concerns, it was then necessary to look at other ways to compensate for the bias that would inevitably result in a study which excluded these extreme circumstances. Despite stringent resource constraints within Project 16-18, we considered that the issue of post-adoption disruption[3] was of such importance that we should gather information in order to produce a practice paper focusing exclusively on this highly complex area of work.

As agencies and individuals involved in post-adoption services to families know, when placements fail, it is at an enormous emotional cost to all the individuals concerned. The majority of 'stranger' adoptions now involve damaged and vulnerable children from the care system, a trend which gathered pace during the 1980s and 1990s and which looks set to continue.

It is a reality that a proportion of these placements will disrupt, some many years after the child joined the family. What are the issues for the key parties when this happens? How do families describe their experiences? What are the policy and practice implications for adoption agencies? This paper begins to address these and other questions associated with disruption.

It is in four parts: Sources of information, key issues, views of adoptive parents and implications for agencies.

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