When Better Law Doesn’t Mean Better Lives
This article completes a short Rhetoric series examining legal reasoning, access to appeals, and long‑term outcomes in public law children cases.
It explores adoption outcomes, the limits of predictive certainty, and why adult voices may ultimately be the most reliable measure of harm.
Rhetoric Series: Risk, Permanence and Access to Justice in Public Law Children Cases - Part Three
Over recent years, appellate courts have tightened how risk, proportionality, and necessity should be applied in public law children cases. That shift matters. It raises standards, disciplines reasoning, and reinforces that permanence is an exceptional intervention.
But improved legal reasoning does not automatically lead to better lives — particularly when permanence is equated with adoption, and adoption is assumed to deliver better long-term outcomes than family preservation or supported care.
This assumption deserves scrutiny.
The Promise of Adoption — and the Evidence Gap
Adoption is often presented in public law proceedings as the option that offers:
stability
security
permanence
and improved life chances
Yet population-level data does not consistently support the claim that adoption, as a group outcome, delivers better educational, developmental, or mental health results than other forms of state care — let alone better than supported family preservation.
Decades of research show that children who grow up looked after by the state face significantly poorer outcomes on average than their peers.
Care-experienced children, including those adopted, remain statistically:
less likely to achieve expected levels in education
more likely to experience disrupted schooling
more likely to have unmet mental health needs
over-represented in youth justice and adult criminal justice systems
These are not marginal differences. They are persistent, structural patterns documented across successive cohorts.
Importantly, these outcomes are not explained by care alone, nor do they imply that every child in care fares poorly or adoption harms every child. Many LAC/adoptees thrive. But they do challenge a simple assumption often made in public law proceedings:
that state intervention necessarily reduces long-term harm.
More importantly it does mean that adoption cannot honestly be described as a guaranteed route to better outcomes — particularly when separation from biological family is itself a major developmental rupture.
At population level, the picture is more complex.
Early State Intervention and System Trust
When children are removed at an early age, they do not simply lose day-to-day care. They often lose:
continuity of identity
family narrative
cultural and relational anchors
and, crucially, trust in systems meant to protect them
For many care-experienced adults, early intervention becomes associated not with safety, but with disruption, surveillance, and loss of agency.
This matters because confidence in institutions is not abstract. It shapes how individuals later engage with:
education
healthcare
social services
the justice system itself
When early experiences of the state are experienced as disempowering or unjust — even when well-intentioned — mistrust can become rational, learned behaviour.
Risk, Prediction, and the Limits of Certainty
Public law decisions are made in real time, under pressure, with imperfect information. Courts are asked to predict futures that cannot be known.
Recent appellate guidance has been clear that:
risk must be evidenced, not assumed
fear must not substitute for proof
and permanence must be justified by necessity, not anxiety
But even perfect reasoning cannot eliminate uncertainty.
What is rarely acknowledged is that risk does not disappear when children are removed. It shifts.
Some risks are reduced. Others are introduced.
Those introduced risks — instability, identity fracture, institutionalisation — are not always given equal weight at the point of decision-making, because they unfold over decades rather than months.
When Permanence Becomes a Substitute for Certainty
In court, adoption is often justified not because it is proven to be superior, but because it feels decisive.
It resolves uncertainty.
It ends proceedings.
It creates legal finality.
Recent appellate guidance has warned against exactly this logic:
permanence must not be chosen to relieve professional anxiety
risk must be evidenced, not assumed
alternatives must be genuinely tested, not discounted
And yet, adoption is still frequently positioned as the safest answer to predicted risk — even when the long-term evidence base is fragile.
What follows is a paradox:
The most irreversible decision is sometimes made on the least certain evidence.
What a Future Public Inquiry Might Reveal
Public inquiries into children’s services often begin with frontline practice failures. But history suggests they rarely stop there.
A serious inquiry — whether in Herefordshire or any other county — would likely examine not only social work decision-making, but:
how evidence was framed and filtered before courts
how predictive risk was treated as fact
how professional confidence substituted for proof
how time pressure shaped outcomes
and how appellate principles were applied — or not — at first instance
In other words, such an inquiry would not only ask what decisions were made, but how courts reasoned their way to them.
This matters because court judgments do not operate in isolation. They crystallise institutional assumptions into permanent legal realities.
Who Ultimately Gets to Judge the Harm?
There is a limit to what judges, professionals, or policymakers can definitively conclude about long-term harm.
Ultimately, the only people who can safely answer the question
“What did this do to me?”
are the children themselves — once they become adults.
History shows this clearly/makes this unavoidable.
Forced adoption policies were once justified as necessary, protective, and benevolent. It was only decades later, when adult adoptees spoke in large numbers, that the state acknowledged the harm done and issued formal apologies.
Those acknowledgements did not arise from courtroom predictions.
They arose from lived outcomes.
But rather than stopping this practice, like most of the developed world, in Britain we have repackaged it and continue to sell it.
A Question the Present Cannot Avoid
If:
adoption does not reliably deliver better population outcomes
care-experienced adults show persistent disadvantage
trust in institutions is eroded by early intervention
and appellate courts now caution against over-confident prediction
then a difficult question follows:
Are we sufficiently open to the possibility that, in some cases, the greatest risk of future harm did not come from families — but from the systems, institutions, and judgments that intervened?
This is not an argument against safeguarding.
It is an argument against certainty without evidence or humility.
Looking Forward
Improved appellate reasoning is essential. So is access to justice. But neither can replace the need to listen — seriously — to those who lived with the consequences.
As care-experienced and adopted children grow into adults, their voices matter not as anecdote, but as evidence over time, increasingly shaping how today’s decisions are judged tomorrow.
History suggests that when enough of those voices are finally heard, institutional confidence gives way to institutional reckoning.
The question is not whether that moment will come — but whether we are willing to listen — before another apology is required.
Submitted by:
H. Currie, LLB (Hons)
January 2026