ABSTRACT
THE social security legislation of the immediate post-war period, which brought to an end the existing poor law, enabled the care of deprived children to be transferred to a comprehensive administration. By 1948 the laws of England contained a fairly wide code of protection for children which had been built up over the last hundred years. 1 The legislation of 1933 covered their protection from harmful conditions of employment, from cruelty and moral corruption and regulated their treatment before courts of law and when in the care of public authorities or voluntary bodies. The child life protection provisions had been finally incorporated in the public health measures by the Public Health Act of 1936, which ensured that the child taken for reward would have the protection of a health visitor trained in infant and child care and his foster-mother the skilled guidance and advice she would so often need. There had also been developments in the adoption field. The very popularity of adoption since it became legal in 1926 had led to an increase in the number of adoption societies and an extension of their activities, as well as an increase in the numbers of private individuals who arranged the placing of babies. Adoption work was entirely unsupervised and uncontrolled and the standard was naturally extremely variable and sometimes haphazard. Some attention was needed now to the methods employed and the quality of work undertaken in the responsible task of placing children for permanent adoption. A committee of inquiry was set up in January 1936 under the chairmanship of Miss Florence Horsburgh, M.P. whose recommendations were embodied in the Adoption of Children (Regulation) Act 1939. This legislation empowered the Secretary of State to make regulations about the way in which adoption societies conducted their work, 1 and also laid certain duties with regard to them on the local authorities. Adoption societies must be registered as approved by the local authorities before they could place children for adoption 2 ; and the local authority was required to be notified seven days in advance of all children placed by private persons acting as third parties for adoption, and to supervise these placings until the adoption came to the court. The legislation thus brought protection to the child by ensuring that more skill and knowledge would be applied to placings by all adoption societies and by providing for supervision where the work was undertaken by unskilled and inexperienced private persons. 3
