A drop in the rate of children being adopted is partly caused by improvements in IVF, the head of the public body representing children in care has said.

The success rates for fertility treatment are now nearly three in 10 (29%) for women under 35, almost three times higher than when the process was first developed in 1978.

Anthony Douglas, the chief executive of the Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service, told the Daily Telegraph the adoption process was too slow. “IVF used to be around 7% successful and now it’s around 30%,” he said. “So as a choice, adoption is competing with lots of other ways of having children.”

While the number of children in care has increased in England – the figure stood at 72,670 at the end of March 2017 – the number of adoptions has fallen from 5,360 in 2015 to 4,350 in 2017.

Douglas, who will step down from his role in March, said the wait for children to find their “forever home” needed to be cut. “Every child deserves a family to live and grow up in but adoption still takes twice as long as it should, which puts people off.”

Figures from the Department for Education say that in England the average time between a child entering care and being adopted has fallen from 30 months to 24 months due to improvements in the early stages of the process.