Working in consultation with stakeholders a draft version of a new revised adoption support plan has been developed, including guidance for practitioners.
Adoption England will work alongside CoramBAAF, who are the licence holders of the national documents, to undertake the consultation and pilot process. The pilot is due to start in April 2024.
This adoption support section provides a wide range of resources that will support practitioners and agencies in their work when supporting families.
Adoption England is committed to improving support for families and is currently working on the following outcomes:
- Each child will have an individual adoption support plan at the point of placement, which will identify current and future needs. It will be regularly reviewed with the child, adoptive parents and practitioners to ensure it meets the needs of the child and the family.
- Children and adoptive families across England will have equal access to timely and pertinent adoption core support services.
- Adoption support services are evidence based with measurable outputs
Sub-groups have been created to develop the early offer of adoption support to families.
Adoption support plan
The Adoption UK barometer in 2023 identified that 68% of adopters felt they did not have a support plan in place for their family.
The adoption support plan is an integral part of the Adoption Placement Report (APR) and a working group, with insights from stakeholders, discovered that many adoptive parents did not realise that the support plan should be part of the APR.
Early support model of practice
The early support model of practice aims to ensure that by the time an adoption order is granted the family has started to become established with support from extended family members, the community and key agencies and will feel equipped to support the child’s identity. The families should also have built good relationships with their adoption agency, giving them the confidence to keep in touch and seek any support at the time they need it.
The approach is being developed in partnership with voluntary adoption agencies and other stakeholders. Experts by experience and staff are involved to help shape the framework to ensure that it meets the needs of children and their families.
This early support model of practice approach also aims to:
- be preventative and support the building blocks of parenting in adoption
- enable adoptive parents to start to feel confident and understand what it means to be therapeutic parents
- build resilience through effective social network and peer support
- be responsive to individual needs with access to a wide range of multi-agency support
- offer consistency of support across England for families adopting a child from another region
The early support model of practice has supporting resources and guidance for both the family and for the practitioners that are working alongside the family.
The purple book
The purple book is a reflective tool for adoptive parents to use with their support team along the way. It provides information and guidance as well as aiming to become a source of information that can be shared with professionals when accessing support in the future. The professionals working with the family can use sections of the book to understand the child’s lived experience and aid them in developing any assessment of need or future support planning. The professional can use the book to update themselves about the family circumstances, to prevent parents from having to repeat their story.
The pilots for the early support model of practice with the purple book will start in April 2024 and run until September 2025. Eight regional adoption agencies and two voluntary adoption agencies are participating in the pilot with qualitative and quantitative evaluation gathered at various points from both families and practitioners.
Adoption support transfer protocol
When families are in receipt of adoption support and move house and change location, it is essential that the family continue to be provided with support and that the transition of this support from one agency to another is as smooth as possible for the family. Adoption England has worked to develop a protocol for all regional adoption agencies to use which outlines the expected process, accountabilities and procedures to be applied when the responsibility for the provision of adoption support transfers from agency to another.
The purpose of the protocol is to:
- Ensure adoption support plans for children, young people and families are clearly understood by the receiving agency.
- Ensure children, young people and families are clear about who will support them in the future and what services are available for them.
The protocol (below) was launched in January 2023 and an evaluation of its use and impact is due to take place in Spring 2024.
Adoption support service reviews
Adoption England commissioned brief service reviews of current adoption support practices using the Blueprint for an adoption support service (corambaaf.org.uk) which sets out 17 requirements of a high-quality adoption support system.
Following the initial reviews pilot and an amended reviewing tool, 12 agencies signed up for the review and three consultants were commissioned to support the work. Each regional adoption agency received their own report.
The adoption support service review report was published in Summer 2023 and the findings will be used across our adoption support sub-groups to continue to develop best practice.
A copy of the Summary Report can be found below.
Adoption support data
Adoption England has been working towards the collection of national data to inform and improve adoption support for families and Coram-I are supporting the data collection and presentation.
This new data collection will provide child level and aggregated data that will inform agencies about the level of need, the services provided with timescales and through flow of work across regional adoption agencies. This will identify what is working well and where there are challenges in the system, all of which will inform future planning at both a national, regional and local level.
There are five regional adoption agencies piloting the collection of data which started in October 2023 and be reviewed in April 2024. The data sets may need to be amended introducing a voluntary collection at a national level.
A readiness survey has been conducted with regional adoption agencies to identify any problem areas prior to going live. The readiness survey is available by clicking the following link: Adoption Support - Data Set Collection - Readiness Survey.