After a quarter of a century helping to shape adoption legislation, solicitor Deborah Cullen talks to Catherine Baksi about her career


The year 1983 saw robbers pull off the infamous £25m Brinks Mat Heathrow gold heist, Culture Club top the charts with ‘Karma Chameleon’ and the racehorse Shergar disappear forever.



It was also the year solicitor Deborah Cullen took over as consultant and secretary to the legal group at the British Association of Adoption and Fostering (BAAF). Now, after 25 years in the post, she is retiring, and has taken the opportunity to give the Gazette an overview of a quarter century that has seen the social and legal landscape change dramatically.



Unsure of what career path to take, Cullen did a general arts degree at Bristol University. She tried her hand at teaching before a careers adviser suggested law.



After Law Society finals at London’s College of Law, she did articles with a firm in Gray’s Inn, where, she recalls: ‘I spent most of my time doing trust accounts in a room with three other articled clerks and only met a client about twice in the whole two years.’



Qualifying in 1975, she landed a job with a firm in Harlesden before joining the legal department at the London Borough of Hounslow. ‘At that stage there wasn’t really “children work” as a separate thing, and it was the first time the local authority had employed a solicitor specifically to deal with care work,’ she says.



Then, in 1983, she joined BAAF, becoming one of the country’s leading experts on adoption and childcare law. In her time there she has played a significant role in the development of legislation, regulation and guidance in this area.



The group that became BAAF was founded in 1975, in response to the growing interest in the role of the law and legal professionals in matters relating to the welfare of children. Set up in the aftermath of the 1974 enquiry into the death of Maria Colwell at the hands of her stepfather, BAAF’s work is not limited to adoption and fostering, but covers the whole care set-up. Since its foundation it has been at the forefront of the debate on childcare issues.



‘When I first started out we had the 1969 Children & Young Persons Act, which enabled local authorities to go to the juvenile court and seek a care order on certain specified grounds,’ recalls Cullen. ‘The child was a party to the proceedings, but the parents were not parties and hearings were dealt with on oral evidence with virtually nothing in writing, and were often over within a half-day.



‘The parents would at most have seen a copy of the paediatrician’s report describing the child’s fractured arm, but they were given nothing to tell them what they were supposed to have done wrong and why the local authority thought they should have their child taken into care, and there was no requirement for the local authority to produce any plan saying what they wanted to do with the child in the long term.’



Cullen remembers that the children, if aged over five, would come to court themselves and at the end of the hearing be told they were going to be put in care. ‘The chairman of the bench would ask if the child had anything to say, and they’d say something like “can I take my bike with me?” It was just such a different landscape.’



Wardship was another route used to get children into care. The local authority had the advantage that it did not have to prove a child had already been abused; proceedings could be brought on the basis of likelihood of harm. Crucially for parents, wardship proceedings meant that they were at least represented.



In addition, the 1948 Children Act covered voluntary reception into care, ‘so children came into care in various ways, and if they were going to come out of care you had to go back the same route [to release them]. It was a terrible minefield to find your way round,’ she recalls.



‘Just after I started working for BAAF, a select committee report recommended the law should be reformed as it was contained in several statutes, all of which had been amended, and the bits and pieces didn’t fit together.’



The 1975 Children Act, which followed the Maria Colwell enquiry, amended both care and adoption law. ‘It improved things to an extent, and introduced the role of the guardian ad litem to represent the interests of the child, but was brought in piecemeal,’ she says. ‘It showed things were beginning to change, but not as drastically as they did after the Children Act 1989.



‘That act was long overdue and a very good piece of legislation – it focused on support for children and families, and on clarifying the law, it enabled local authorities to bring proceedings to protect children even where they hadn’t already suffered abuse, and required local authorities to provide a care plan detailing the long-term plan for the child.’



The 1989 act also introduced more in the way of written statements, which, while making it fairer for parents, says Cullen, had the downside of lengthening proceedings.



The 1960s and 1970s also saw major changes in adoption and fostering as well as childcare practices. Back then, adoption was largely an outcome for babies born to single mothers who could not bring them up themselves, says Cullen, but a combination of improved birth control, abortion legislation, changing public attitudes and more practical support for single mothers led to a fall in the number of babies available for adoption.



‘In the mid-70s, about half of the adoptions were step-parent adoptions, but this has also decreased because there are so many reconstituted families it’s not so peculiar to have a child with a different surname in the family,’ she notes.



As the number of adoptions has fallen – from a high of 21,000 in 1975 to around 4,000 last year – the focus of adoption practice has changed to finding families for children in long-term care, with a particular drive to place black children, and children of mixed heritage or those with special needs, explains Cullen.



Adoption law has generally evolved through separate acts to other childcare legislation, which she says is not ideal. In the 1970s it was governed by the 1958 and then the 1976 adoption acts. The 1989 act did not deal with adoption, as the changes from the 1976 act were still being implemented.



The government decided to conduct a review of adoption law, and Cullen’s expertise was drawn on during the review, which eventually led to the White Paper Adoption: a new approach, and in turn to the introduction of the Adoption and Children Bill in 2001 (enacted in 2002).



‘As far as the law goes, the major change was getting rid of ‘freeing for adoption’ and the introduction of placement orders. But the change that got all the publicity was allowing unmarried couples to adopt,’ says Cullen.



It was, she says, not such a huge change as children were already being placed with unmarried couples, but with only one of them getting the adoption order.



‘The 2002 act saw the introduction of special guardianship – a halfway house between residence and adoption, intended for children who have been in long-term foster care, but don’t want to be adopted,’ she adds. ‘Other changes were more technical, but the real change in practice followed the Prime Minister’s review in 2000. It was felt that too many children were being left to drift in care when they should be placed for adoption.



‘The review didn’t find the anti-adoption bias among social workers that some had suspected – simply a lack of drive to get things moving once children were in care.’



To a large extent, she says, that is still the case – the focus is often more on child protection, ‘the urgent cases where you need to stop a child being beaten to death. Once the child is in care, they tend to breathe a sigh of relief’.



Looking back over her time with BAAF, Cullen reflects on a career with which she is very satisfied. ‘I’ve been very lucky to have this job. The work that went into the 1989 Children Act and the secondary legislation was a very stimulating period – people were enthusiastic and worked together. There was a sense that we all wanted to make it work.’



Cullen, who lives in Dulwich, south London, has made no plans for her retirement. ‘Others have warned me not to commit to things, but to give myself some space,’ she says, though, as with many professionals in retirement, her hobbies of theatre, modern dance, gardening, reading and idling will struggle to satiate a mind so active and – in her case – so influential.