An excerpt from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW) submission to the Inquiry into Responses to Historical Forced Adoptions in Victoria – Reporting date due 21st July 2021:
“The AIHW is unable to provide information on how adoptees and adoptive families fare after an adoption is finalised. This is because it is difficult to identify an adoptee in administrative data, as they are legally not different from a child still living with their non-adoptive parent(s), and there are rearely requirements for adoptees to report their adoptive status as part of demographic data collected by services. This makes gathering data on access to supports by adoptees and their adoptive families difficult. For the same reasons, the long-term outcomes of adoption (such as rates of disruption or levels of educational attainment) are difficult to ascertain.”
Australian Institute of Health & Welfare, Submission 20
In November 2018, the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Social Policy and Legal Affairs Inquiry into Local Adoption tabled its report. In recognising the importance of evidence-based decision making, the Committee made a number of recommendations. Key among these is that the Adoptions Australia national collection should be upgraded from its current aggregate data table supply arrangement to a unit record collection. In its response, the Australian Government gave in-principle support to this recommendation in September 2019. This enhancement would mean that data linkage could be undertaken to explore a range of short-and long-term outcomes of adoption. Such a transition is dependent on the renegotiation of existing relationships of data supply between the AIHW and relevant Commonwealth, state and territory agencies, and on the capacity of all parties to develop the necessary supporting infrastructure for data collection, provision and reporting.”
Inquiry into responses to historical forced adoptions in Victoria