‘There were so many children who needed families out there’

Sarah Lockwood adopted her first child with Down’s Syndrome, a six-month-old baby girl named Amy in 1993.

In the nearly 20 years that have since passed, she has adopted a son – who also has Down’s Syndrome – had a son herself, coped with the death of Amy following a cardiac arrest, and dealt with the breakdown of her marriage.

Now Sarah, who lives in Marsden, Huddersfield, wants to be a parent again – and three months ago she welcomed Ava, who is black African Portuguese and also has Down’s Syndrome, into the family.

An adoption order for Ava has yet to be granted by the courts but all being well, the little girl will be Sarah’s third adopted child.

The family set-up Sarah has created is extremely unusual in Britain, largely because it is notoriously hard to place children who have a dual heritage or a disability with adopters.

However, Sarah always knew she wanted to adopt a child with Down’s Syndrome, despite being able to have children naturally.

She and her former husband, Stan, met while working with children with disabilities, which meant they had a good understanding of the highs and lows that can come with looking after a child with Down’s Syndrome. Interestingly, her brother also has three adopted children.

“It was a choice to adopt and it was a choice to adopt children with disabilities. We knew that there were so many children that needed families and so many really special children out there,” says Sarah. “There’s something so special, particularly, about children with Down’s Syndrome.”

For the adoption of all three children, Sarah has used children’s charity Barnardo’s, who specialise in finding adopters for children who are considered hard to place and come from all areas of the country. Amy, Max and Ava were all born outside Yorkshire.

When she first brought Amy and Max home, they were small babies, aged six and four months respectively.

Both were living in foster care after being given up by their parents at birth because of their disability.

With Max, who was in the care of Sefton local authority in Liverpool, the handover was conducted at a lightening pace. “We went down to Liverpool on the Monday morning and brought him back by lunchtime,” she says. “And suddenly we had this four-month-old baby and we were like, ‘what are we doing? We don’t know his routine and we haven’t met him before.’ That would never happen now.”

Both Amy and Max settled in to their new home quickly, and the two children became close before Amy’s death in 2000. Max attended mainstream primary school, where he developed strong friendships, and then to a secondary school providing for children with special needs. He is now in his penultimate year, and Sarah is trying to get funding for him to start up his own small enterprise printing t-shirts.

Despite Sarah and Stan separating in 2001, they remain friends and Max and his brother, Hal, spend a lot of time with their father. But with Ava, who was two-and-a-half when she arrived in Marsden, becoming comfortable in her surroundings has been a much slower process.

Sarah describes Ava as being “in shock” for the first couple of weeks after moving in, having already had two moves during her short life.

Unlike Amy and Max, Ava lived with her birth mother in Birmingham until she was six months old. However, Ava had health problems as a small baby, and it’s likely her mother feared she would not be able to cope with constant trips to hospital.

Ava was then transferred into foster care, where she lived for nearly two years due to difficulty finding her a suitable match.

But her disability was only part of the problem. In 2010, when Sarah first looked through some of the children needing parents featured in Be My Parent magazine – which she describes as akin to an Argos catalogue – a “cultural match” was specified next to Ava’s picture.

But in 12 months of her being in the magazine, Sarah was the only person to express an interest in Ava and a year later, the emphasis had shifted to a person who could “celebrate the cultural heritage” of the black African Portuguese toddler. One of the major arguments against transracial adoption is that it is obvious to everyone that a child has been adopted, but Sarah believes the fact her children are adopted is a cause of celebration rather than a secret to be kept hidden.

“Actually if you ask Max what his identity is and what he’s positive about, he’s positive about having Down’s Syndrome, he’s positive about being adopted, he’s positive about being from Liverpool,” she says.

Finding someone who had the same heritage as Ava was almost impossible and Sarah believes she would have benefited if this requirement had been lifted earlier and she had been found a permanent home more quickly.

“With Ava, I just think she’d been in care too long. When she got here, she didn’t like it when we went out places and I think she thought I was going to leave her because that’s her understanding – you meet someone new and then they go.”

But Sarah has a network around her which includes people with a similar ethnic background to Ava and she attends Huddersfield Down’s Syndrome Support Group, which she describes as “very, very mixed”. Without this network, she admits, it would have been difficult to go ahead with a transracial adoption.

The process of being approved for this third adoption was relatively easy for Sarah. She is 47 but Barnardo’s did not seem concerned by her age, nor by the fact she was adopting as a single mother. She now teaches life skills in the sixth form of the school Max attends and has a large group of friends and family who have supported her in her decision to adopt again.

National need for adoptive families

Throughout the UK there is a national shortage of more than 100,000 foster carers, and 4,000 children are waiting to be adopted.

Adoption is a way of providing a new family for a child when living with their family is not possible. It is the assumption of full legal and parently responsibility for a child.

The child becomes a full member of the adoptive family. The minimum age to adopt is 21 and Barnados looks at a potential adopter’s ability to meet the child’s needs through childhood and beyond.

For more information on adoption contact Barnados on 0870 240 832, email [email protected] or visit www.barnardos.org.uk/ado.