National Adoption Week

November 1st - 7th is National Adoption Week as championed by BAAF. Find out more about the BAAF campaign. A newly adopting parent is also writing a blog on the Guardian web pages: Daddy's adoption stories.

Recent E-documents

Department for Children, Schools and Families (2010). Use of force guidance: short summary. This is primarily aimed at teachers but may have relivence for residential settings.
Neil, E. et al (2010). Supporting post adoption contact in complex cases. Department for Children, Schools and Families. From the research brief series. A fuller report will be published by BAAF.
Farmer, E. (2010). An investigation of family finding and matching in adoption - briefing paper. Department for Children, Schools and Families.

Facebook and post adoption contact

The Guardian, June 19 carried an interesting article on Facebook and the challenges which social networking sites present in social work in adoption and fostering. The task of tracing birth parents or birth children has been made much easier for the parties in adoption and has led to a huge increase in unmediated contact between birth parents and children. BAAF are also publishing a new guide Facing up to Facebook: a survival guide for adoptive families.

Adoption - using VAAs and kinship care detectives in the USA

A recent report published by the Policy Exchange, Groves, J. No Place Like Home: improving adoption services in England, asserts that the life chances of looked after children are being affected by local authority decisions not to use Voluntary Adoption Agencies, which they perceive as being more expensive than seeking placement via their own or other local authority services. In addition to this, permanent placments are being delayed as the annual cost of fostering is lower than the one-off cost of an adoption, with local authorities making decsions based on short term budgetary considerations. See also Guardian, January 31, 2010.
Across the Altantic in St. Louis, the Foster and Adoptive Care Coalition uses detective work to seek kinship carers for children in foster care, who are in desperate need of family ties. New York times January 30, 2010.

Adoption research paper from the Social Policy Research Unit, University of York

Characteristics, outcomes and meanings of three types of permanent placement - adoption by strangers, adoption by carers and long-term foster care. September 2009.

Adoption e-document

Adoption and the Inter-agency Fee, a research report from the Department for Children Schools and Families.