Concurrent Planning - Adoption/Fostering

[oinker]

Concurrent planning is done by foster carers who are employed by social services. The primary goal is of family reunification, while at the same time, they are also developing an alternative permanency plan for the child. This alternate plan will often include adoption by the foster carer as the alternative to family reunification. If the family reunification efforts fail, then the alternate plan will already be in place and well on its way to completion. Concurrent planning is intended to reduce the total period of time a child is in foster care before being permanently placed with a family.

I wanted to check to see if there are any other people out there who have done concurrent planning with a view to adopting a new born baby.
I am doing concurrent planning at the moment and having already adopted this baby's sibling am interested in talking with others out there who wish to speak about this journey to family life.

Hopefully there are enough of you out there to start a thread.

A couple of weeks ago we did a training day on fostering to adopt. We were told that in 14 years only six children had gone back however due to how the family courts are at the moment this year alone there have been three children go back to birth family.

I'm not sure how accurate these statistics are it was just what we wet told by the social worker.

I am/was a Concurrent Carer and now adoptive parent.

Concurrent care is for children 0-2 where there is a liklihood that there will be a plan of adoption. Our role was to act as Foster Carers to our LO who came to us at one week old while parents and other family members were being found and assessed. Our first aim was to work with the birth parents and support Social Services. If the baby could not be returned to family then the path would change to adoption with us.

Foster To Adopt would usually begin a little further down the legal line when it is clearer that there should be a plan of adoption. Therefore the risk in f2a are slightly smaller.

I also want to make clear that during the fostering section of Concurrent Care we were most definately not 'mummy' & 'daddy' so that might answer Tomatoes thoughts about returning to family being confusing etc. We were foster carer's and known by our names.

We worked with birth parents and met them several times a week at contact sessions.

Once all the legal avenues had been explored a plan of adoption was decided for our LO.

Birth Parents were always aware of possible outcomes and, in our case at least, saw the benefits and appreciated getting to know us too.

I am happy to answer any questions to make any part of ot clearer :)