What Support Will I Receive?

"The amount of help and support we received throughout the process was amazing. As adoptive parents the learning never stops. Training and support groups have provided us with the tools to help us understand our child so we can be the best parents we can be. The professional support we have received from our worker, and others in the team, has been amazing, without all this help and support we would never have reached our dream. We cannot not thank the team enough for what they have done for us and our new family."

In most cases your assessing social worker will support you through the matching and introductions process. After an adoption is granted, you will have an allocated post-adoption support worker from the Fostering and Adoption Team who will create an adoption support plan with you to look at any support that you or your child might need, this may include one-to-one support with life story work, training in therapeutic parenting or ongoing support with letterbox contact. We know that speaking to others who have 'been there and done it' is really helpful when you adopt so we run regular support groups for adopters.

We believe that you can never stop learning about children so we expect you to complete required training in Child Protection and Paediatric First Aid prior to starting introductions with your child. You would also have access to our annual programme of face-to-face training courses as well as online training that can be accessed at any time. We will also pay for you to have a twelve month subscription to Adoption UK which provides lots of support and training to adoptive parents.

We work closely with our Looked After Children's Health team and our Paediatric medical advisor who offer one-to-one consultations to adopters if required.