There is a crisis in the UK adoption system: England alone now has more than 4,600 children waiting for permanent homes. In trying to find solutions, the Department of Education recently funded some extensive research to identify the types of people most likely to adopt so they can target likely candidates more strategically.

More than four million people were polled and the results were “rather unexpected”, according to Catharine Dowdney, spokesman for the Government funded organisation First4Adoption. “The survey found that more than half (55 per cent) of everyone who said they are ‘certain’ or ‘very likely’ to adopt a child described themselves as ‘actively practising a religion’ – that’s a huge proportion of people considering we live in a secular society,” she explains.

But this begs the question: how secular actually are we? Last month another study, conducted by ComRes, revealed the following equally surprising results:

1. Over three-quarters of all adults (77 per cent) surveyed believe that “there are things in life that we simply cannot explain through science or any other means.”

2. A majority of people (59 per cent) said they believed in the existence of some kind of spiritual being.

3. By comparison, only 13 per cent of adults agreed with the statement “humans are purely material beings with no spiritual element”.

Jemima Thackray | Read this article in full on telegraph.co.uk

Image by LisaW123