Published 19 June 2026 11:00am BST

Social workers pressured to approve 100 matches a year despite dwindling numbers of people putting themselves forward

THE adop­tion agency that placed Pre­ston Davey with the man who murdered him put its employ­ees under pres­sure to reach strict tar­gets, The Telegraph can reveal.

Adop­tion Now, which cov­ers five local author­it­ies in the North West, repeatedly missed the tar­gets des­pite approv­ing pro­spect­ive adop­ters faster than many other agen­cies.

Jamie Var­ley, 37, was sen­tenced on Thursday to a whole life order for sexu­ally assault­ing and mur­der­ing 13-month-old Pre­ston. His part­ner, John McGowan-Faza­ker­ley, 32, will serve 25 years for allow­ing the death of a child, child cruelty and the sexual assault of a child. Adop­tion Now’s annual reports for Black­burn with Dar­wen, Bury, Old­ham, Roch­dale and Tameside show that, since 2019, social work­ers at the agency have been under pres­sure to approve 100 “adop­ters” – mean­ing couples and single adults seek­ing to adopt – each year. Although they came close in 2019-20, approv­ing 90 adop­ters, num­bers have fallen every year since, drop­ping to 58 in 2023-24 des­pite social work­ers’ “con­cer­ted efforts”. The decline mir­rors a wider fall in the num­ber of people com­ing for­ward to adopt dur­ing the cost-of-liv­ing crisis.

Yet Adop­tion Now was still able to match adop­ters with chil­dren more quickly than most agen­cies. In 2023-24, the year Var­ley and McGowan-Faza­ker­ley were matched with Pre­ston, a third of fam­il­ies were matched with a child within three months, pla­cing the agency fourth nation­ally among 33 regional adop­tion agen­cies.

Julie Sel­wyn, emer­itus pro­fessor of edu­ca­tion and adop­tion at the Uni­versity of Oxford, told that Adop­tion Now appeared to be “an agency under pres­sure”. Prof Sel­wyn, a former social worker who advised on a 2022 Depart­ment for Edu­ca­tion (DfE) review of adop­tion agen­cies, described the tar­get to approve 100 adop­ters a year as “very unhelp­ful” adding: “When you place a child, the place­ment should always be the one that meets the child’s needs, not the cheapest place­ment.”

The 2022 DfE review repor­ted industry con­cerns that fin­an­cial incent­ives to pri­or­it­ise agen­cies’ own adop­ters led to matches that felt “pushed or forced”.

The agency also pledged to focus on “increas­ing the num­ber of LGBTQ+ applic­ants” the year after baby Pre­ston was murdered, and to exam­ine “the bar­ri­ers to single males seek­ing to adopt”.

In its 2023-24 report, Adop­tion Now repor­ted an “unusu­ally high num­ber” of alleg­a­tions against its adop­ters that year, includ­ing baby Pre­ston’s murder, but con­cluded that they did not amount to a pat­tern that should “cause con­cerns about over­all prac­tice”. The Adop­tion Now accounts also show staff short­ages and qual­ity con­cerns.

In 2023-24, the Adop­tion Sup­port Team had mul­tiple social work­ers on long-term sick leave, leav­ing the remain­ing staff “feel­ing the strain of the ongo­ing addi­tional work pres­sures”.

Adop­tion Now said it fol­lowed “a strict and rig­or­ous pro­cess in line with all rel­ev­ant legis­la­tion and guid­ance in the assess­ment and approval of adop­ters”. The case is expec­ted to be examined by a Child Safe­guard­ing Prac­tice Review.