Yes, she would know but is unlikely to know the actual address (letters etc through SS) unless continued contact was deemed appropriate which is still less usual in UK for birth parents (but common for siblings).
Essentially, once all the support had been put in and there just wasn’t progress and improvement in the parenting or serious risk continued and the children were permanently removed from the family, different routes would have been explored for the children. This would involve continued assessment of the children’s own needs, kinship care and adoption. Sometimes kinship carers are assessed and found not to be able to provide the support needed, sometimes they realise themselves they don’t have the skills required to help a child through trauma and developmental delay or sometimes there’s lots of thinking to do around physical health issues etc if grandparents. SS want the child to have a permanent home where possible as they’ve already been through so much, so if there are questions around how they’d manage long term (eg. Progressive illnesses) this is often discussed too. However, kinship care has a different slightly lighter assessment to adoption (which is very, very in-depth) as remaining with functioning able-to-parent family is seen as less traumatic in general in most cases.
Siblings might be assessed as needing separate homes. This tends to happen due to the needs of the child, but the age can be an impacting factor (eg. Few adoptive parents would take on a 9yo and a 2yo). SS work incredibly hard to avoid this separation, but it becomes harder when less parents are willing to be matched with an older child. Occasionally, children have long term foster care plans together instead and the bond between siblings is a consideration in this. It’s less important in this case as the children were all young, but they may have been assessed as having needs that meant placing them together wasn’t possible.
The adoption process also now has foster to adopt placements and concurrency, which tend to occur for younger children. Both are aimed at reducing the number of moves for young children. Foster to adopt is where the council has decided the best plan for the child is to be adopted, but it hasn’t been decided by a court yet. Concurrency is where neither the council nor the court has decided whether adoption is the best plan for the child yet. In both cases, a number of children return to their birth family, so it’s a very child-centred decision for potential adoptive parents to make, as they may care for and bond with children, but ultimately not become their parents. In these processes, the potential adopters must carry out the same things a normal foster carer would do, including taking the child to birth parent contact sessions.
Lots of parents claim their family are ‘in league’ with SS, but (in most cases) there have to be actual concerns for a child to be removed. Some things can be complex and a child might be placed in Care while an assessment is done, but usually if there are no other concerns and the person reporting has accused a family of things that make no sense, timelines don’t add up and no one else has other concerns, the child won’t be placed in care. Occasionally birth parents succeed in pulling wool - like with little Star Hobson.
IMO, when looking at the normal process, either CM (and potentially MG’s) parents realised they didn’t have the ability to parent children who’d experienced trauma and delay for whatever reason (age and health etc) or that they weren’t found suitable for some reason (doesn’t have to be a huge emotional reason, could be as simple as large amounts of travel that they couldn’t give up for work/charity work, which doesn’t suit a traumatised child or their progressing health due to age etc). All of this would be considered in the context of each child and the children as a unit to find what the court and SS thought best outcome.
CM and MG are likely to have had contact either at a contact centre or (less common) at the foster carer’s home throughout the fostering process. Once adoption was seen to be the best plan by the court, they would have gradually reduced contact and had a final session together to say goodbye. For the child, the introductory period to the adoptive parents (if matched) then begins. So, CM would know her children were in foster care and probably know their carer/s, but would be likely to not know the address and meet in a contact centre in the area. She’d be aware of how the child was progressing and kept up to date until the adoption process started to move forwards.
If they were placed in kinship care placements, there are usually restrictions on when birth parents can see the children (can also be a reason for not being suitable in some cases) and she would be fully aware this was where her children were placed. Even in adoption, birth parents are usually told who is adopting, even if they are only given indirect contact via SS and not the adopters address (letters/emails once a year etc).
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