Adopting outside the county you were approved with

[Italiangreyhound]

Please can anyone tell me the situation if you are adopting outside the county you were approved with?

We have not had a lot of information about children we could adopt inside our county and want to start looking further afield. We have been told that if you adopt outside county you access adoption support from the county you adopt from for the first three years. Does anyone know anything further please?

Our county seems to think we are unusual in wanting to adopt outside county but we just want to be proactive and not wait too long. I find the waiting really hard.

We find the whole thing quite stressful and really just want to see the right way ahead and the right child for our family, regardless of where they come from but it does concern me we may cut ourselves off from help from within our own county.

Any thoughts please, especially from experienced adopters who did adopt outside county or from those who did no, and why, please.

Obviously you know this wasn't relevant to me but lots of people do adopt out of county or out of borough in London.

My experience from friends is that post adoption order your support would be from your local SS so probably less of an issue but yes it can be annoying having to negotiate visits and support (if you need them) from distant council pre final order.

Someone I know adopted from several hundred miles away and there were attachment issues with one of the children which were difficult to resolve. I have no idea though how much the difficulties where caused by the practicalities of distance or the specific social worker.

i'm also not so very up to date about how things work these days.

Thanks Kew.

I think the only bit that has changed is that it isn't 'up to adoption order' but 'up to three years' that the support is supposed to come from the 'sending' LA, then from the LA you live in (which in our case is not the LA we are adopting through).
Don't know how well it works in reality, perhaps the local LA can be a bit miffed that you didn't adopt through them/one of their children and hence be a bit reticent with providing support?

It's mainly a money thing.

Your (and/or the child's) LA provides support for 3 years after adoption order. Then the LA you live in.

They want you to adopt from them because they have gone to all the trouble to assess you, so they would like to get the benefit for one of 'their' children.

LAs also prefer to adopt with couples they assessed as they are a 'known quantity' and they don't have to shell out money to another LA. They know/beleive they did a good assessment, so they have more faith in you.

You benefit from more likely having 'joined up' thinking/support if you adopt from the LA you are approved with.

You can go on adoption register after 3 months, though some LAs prefer you to wait 6 months. Children on adoption register may be harder to place, or may just have to be placed out of area for their safety.

The waiting is hard. We waited 15months from approval, but it was worth it for the right match.

Thanks Meita and TeenAndTween.

Teen is right, it's down to money.
We went elsewhere - despaired at the wait.
I think LA's are like insurance companies, you don't know how good they are until you run into problems/ make a claim and though we were pleased with the process with the placing authority, we haven't had to call on them for support so far and that's the acid test.
Pm me if you want more info.

Thanks allthingswillpass, will do.

I agree that they want you to go in house because of the money.

WRT post adoption support, I wouldn't worry about that. Because the are so many variables. So much depends on the worker you get and how clued up they are. Staff turnover is very high, so even if you have a good one when you child is placed, they may have I moved on a year or two later when you might need them. It's pretty much a lottery.

If you actually need proper post adoption support ( ie stuff that costs money, rather than a SW coming to your house to eat your biscuits and nod sympathetically ) , then you will have to fight tooth and nail for it, regardless of where you live.

IMO it's much more important to get the child who is right for your family rather than to adopt locally.

Re travel - Once the child is placed it's the SWs job to come and visit you. Remember there are many areas of the UK where the area of each country is quite large, so the In county SW might have to travel more than an hour to get to you anyway .

Hi IGH, as you know I think it is mainly for your agency's convenience, not yours, that they are suggesting you should adopt locally. I adopted a child who was about 3 hours travel away, through the NAR, and there were some short-term inconveniences (introductions week mies from home, with a 4yo birth child and no car wasn't a breeze) but none that outweighed the importance of getting the right match.

Your agency has a financial incentive for you to adopt one of their children, as others have said. It is also a big hassle for your sw to go traipsing round the country for matching and introductions, but that is not your problem.

Post-adoption support: well, you don't know if you will need it or what form it would take, but bear in mind that your child will be entitled to the usual raft of services (NHS, CAMHS etc) where they live i.e. with you. You may have to travel further for specialist post-adoption support, but you may not need it anyway, you may not get it even if you need it, and after 3 years you can get it locally.

I'm a fan of getting on the NAR asap. I've seen it discussed on here as though it's not an option for those who are not looking for 'hard to place' children, but I see it as a wonderful way of matching parents and children who may not be able to find each other locally. I adopted through the NAR a child who would absolutely not be considered hard to place in London (under 1, girl, no developmental delay) but was hard to place in her home authority purely because of her ethnic origin, which they couldn't match locally but could nationally.

I honestly don't think your dilemma here is about whether or not you should use the NAR; it's about how you manage the relationship with your social worker.

Our DS was a member of DH family who lived several hundered mile away, he is now placed with us but this was initially done via family fostering (with the intention to adopt) - we were told to go down this route to save time / he had been in care some time. But I would agree it is money, I have asked several times to go on courses / training in our local area but it just isn't possible unless I travel to where DS is originally from (which isn't feasible with the little one) so unfortunately we have had none. Our SWs etc still travel to see us & this hasn't been passed across to our LA.

Mmh just thought of something, at prep course we were told that if we adopted a child from far away, and needed post-adoption support within the first three years, the 'sending' LA would most likely provide that support locally to us. We would not have to travel, nor would they, but rather, they would 'buy' the services of whatever professional was needed, locally to us.
I do realise that this is pure theory. I can easily imagine that in practice, it would be much easier to get a LA to provide support if they can do it in-house without the need for travel, than to get them to 'buy' the service locally to where you are.
But I concur with others, at the end of the day the ins and outs of post-adoption support is not something I would take into consideration when thinking about potential matches/looking at children in CWW/BMF, or going on the adoption register.

Yes, that is what happened when we adopted a child from an area about 2 hours drive away. The placing authority put an extremely comprehensive package of post placement services in place, including support from a more local voluntary agency.

However this was a few years ago and was for a very hard to place child. I've no idea what is done now.

Thanks all. Yes, Meita I heard that about buying in too.

I guess for me the experience just made me feel a bit like I was being a bit disloyal for looking elsewhere and should stay put. It's just this whole process is so emotional and DH and I have not felt a shared connection to any other child so this is the one we want to pursue even if it comes to nothing.

Please don't for one second feel that you must be loyal to your county. It works both ways across country boundaries - you might take a child from elsewhere and they might place one of their children in another area.

It happens all the time in the public sector -children from one county go to school elsewhere , patients use the Heath service in a different region. We live on the boundary of three counties -we live in one and our children go to schools in the other two!

An element of local authority funding comes from central government and that they have a statutory duty to provide adoption services. They did not approve you as a personal favour to you -you are a resource. If they cant match you within a certain time frame, that resource has to be made available elsewhere.

It's about finding the best possible family for each waiting child, not about SW budgets or feelings.

Thanks Kristina I actually feel for the child waiting too, if waiting is hard for us, how is it for the children!