Concurrent Planning

Re R (Child of Teenage Mother) ([2000] 2 FLR 660 FD)

It is a misconception for social workers to consider that there is any prohibition on identifying suitable adopters before the final decision of the court, provided that the decision of the court was not pre-empted. To delay appropriate planning for alternative outcomes is contrary to the welfare of the child. In the present case the mother had given birth to a child when she was thirteen years old and both she and the baby lived with a foster family, the foster mother looking after the baby while the mother went back to school. Planning for the baby had been left far too late with consequential distress and disruption when the local authority prepared a care plan for the mother to stay with the foster family and the baby to be adopted outside the birth family. Where a local authority was notified of a teenage pregnancy it should start planning for the baby as well as the mother as soon as the pregnancy was notified. The local authority should not concentrate on the mother’s needs to the exclusion of the baby. They should at the earliest stage consider whether or not the case was suitable for concurrent planning.