​Syd and Elaine have made significant progress in working towards a change in policy for transitions into adoption. They feel their local authority is a listening and caring one, ready to learn from current research and prepared to draw on the experience of the Foster Carers and Social Workers who are engaged in the difficult task of helping Looked After Children move from Foster Care to Adoption.

They have recently emailed us with an update:

​Hello Sophie and Lynne,

We've looked at your web page, the information it gives out will be of great help to folk who, like ourselves, are struggling to find the best way of ensuring good outcomes for the children who are moving on.

Following continued pressure from our small group, our local authority Education and Childrens' Services took our paper "Moving from Fostering to Adoption", and discussed it extensively among the Family Placement and Permanence Teams.

They decided that many of the suggest changes in practice were sensible, and agreed to take them forward.

On Wednesday, our Head of Service presented a half day training, covering the whole process of moving a child on, from approval to adopt right through to contact by Foster Carers after the move to the adopters' home.  The changes to practise initiated by our paper were detailed for the benefit of the Foster Carers present.

The areas in which the ideas put forward by Emma, Marco, Elaine and myself have been implemented:

• Foster Carers are to be invited to visit to the prospective adopters' home, and give information about the child in a place familiar and comfortable to the adopters, rather than a formal meeting room in an office building.
  
• Acceptance that the 7 to 10 day for introductions rule needs to be more flexible and tailored to the individual child, length of time with Carers, age, verbal or pre-verbal, etc.  Up to 21 days will be available if needed.
  
• A Co-ordination Meeting after the child has visited the new home and spent time there with the adopters, in order to gauge their readiness for the final move.
  
• A statement from the outset, especially to outside adoption agencies and other local authorities that the Foster Carers will visit the child in its new home, tapering off the frequency of the visits as the child's attachment moves to the adoptive parents.  The dates/timing for the visits will be set and agreed at the Co-ordination Meeting.
  

We consider this to be a very satisfactory outcome.

On behalf of our small group, I thank you for producing the report "The Children Were Fine" which initiated and encouraged us to go forward with our approach to our local authority.

Also, we thank you on behalf of the children engaged in future transitions. We are sure that your work will ease and improve the transition into their new life and help them become stable, secure and happy young people.

Regards,

Syd and Elaine

My experience over many years fits with your research.
 
It is also an issue for children and young people who move to other foster placements. (As an example - some of our Foster Carers promised two young people when they left that they would never forget them and since then have always sent birthday and Christmas cards and small gifts. This year these have been returned because we are told that the young people are unsettled in their current placement. When we challenged this we were given the conventional wisdom!)
 
I also spoke to a Foster Carer today who is looking after a 16 month old and already trying to get himself emotionally ready for the inevitable departure, knowing that it is likely to be pretty abrupt.
 
Nigel Fenlon
Service Manager
Fostering People
Abercynon

Thanks for your email and I've had a read of your paper that I've found helpful.

I have a personal interest as well in that we have adopted ourselves.

I will ensure our social workers in Fostering People have access to your paper - I agree with your findings.

Thanks John.

John Platt
Director of Operations
Fostering People
Nottingham

Many thanks for alerting me to your website which I will visit and I am sure learn from. I am absolutely confident that debate is needed and that we should all be grateful to you for your initiative.

As you know, I found it very odd that so little attention was paid to the importance or otherwise of the relationships of adopted children to their former foster carers. After all they had often spent most of their early lives with them, and the scope for misunderstanding or misinterpreting the move was considerable (e.g. it would be easy to see it as a punishment or rejection or as yet further evidence of the unpredictability of all relationships).

Professor Ian Sinclair
Emeritus Professor
Social Policy Research Unit
University of York

My sister is a foster carer for a local authority and they are quite good at encouraging contact, at a suitably agreed length of time, after a child has left foster care and entered adoption. She has managed to maintain contact intermittently with all three young children who have moved on as babies. It has worked well.