months of temporary foster care in Western homes to help them adjust to Western living.
22. Meanwhile, Foster Parents Plan, an American organization, concentrated its effort on supporting poor children in local homes by providing money, clothes, school materials, etc. By the close of the year there were 1,219 children on the books of the organization.
23. Adoption within Hong Kong has also been increasing apace. Since the Adoption Ordinance came into force in 1956, legal adoption had been steadily gaining in popularity. Last year, there were 210 applications for legal adoption and 144 Adoption Orders were granted by the Supreme Court. The figures for the previous year were 121 and 84 respectively. (See Appendix 4).
24. With the increasing popularity of legal adoption, the number of Chinese customary adoptions registered in the Department has declined steadily. Under the Protection of Women and Juveniles Ordinance No. 1 of 1951, all females adopted otherwise than through a competent court have to be registered with the Director of Social Welfare who automatically becomes the legal guardian of the girls until they are 21 or are married and thereby has the duty of ensuring that girls so adopted are properly treated in their homes. The number registered has decreased from 102 during 1958-59 to 73 during 1959-60 and 57 during 1960-61. In the case of boys adopted under this procedure, registration is voluntary; numbers have dropped steadily here also; some 64 boys were registered during 1958-59 compared with 30 during 1959-60 and only 12 during the past year. The total number of children on the register stood at 3,018 at the end of the year.
25. The same Ordinance also confers wide powers on the Director of Social Welfare in cases where there is reason to suspect exploitation or ill-treatment of boys under 16 years of age or of girls under 21. Apart from such cases, many children require some degree of care or supervision, usually because their parents are temporarily or per- manently unable, unwilling or unfit to look after them properly. There were about 5,500 such children with whose welfare the Department was concerned at the close of the year (See Appendix 5 for further details).
26. The need for day nurseries became more acute during the year as more and more women turned to factory work. Two new day nur- series opened by the American Friends Service Committee at the Lei Cheng Uk resettlement estate and by the Maryknoll Sisters at the Wong Tai Sin Community Centre brought to 16 the number of day nurseries
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