Newbie type question

[fledtoscotland]

Sorry in advance for what is probably a stupid question but we are in stage 1 of adoption process and have a million & one questions

If you are nearing panel in terms of assessment can your social worker start to look at possible matches before you are officially approved? Do you ever get children placed before formal approval in a foster capacity? I know that there is a huge shortage of foster placements in our area and they are desperately short of home for under 5s.

I don't want to foster but would consider it if the child would ultimately be ours to adopt iykwim.

If you are nearing panel in terms of assessment can your social worker start to look at possible matches before you are officially approved?

Yes, they can, I know of a couple matched with two children (sibling pair) I am sure it was before they went to approval panel but if not it was very soon after and I am sure others on here have said they were matched before approval panel.

Do you ever get children placed before formal approval in a foster capacity?

I have not heard of this. If you are fostering to adopt or doing concurrent planning I would imagine this would be discussed with you before approval panel but you would not be able to start until you had been approved, but maybe someone else will know more. The best person to speak to about this would be your social worker.

I know that there is a huge shortage of foster placements in our area and they are desperately short of home for under 5s.

You could talk to social worker and ask fostering to adopt. You would need to communicate your thoughts with them and see any requirements and things might be different in different areas so best to check what is the case where you are.

Fostering is very different from adoption. I am sure you know that but it is not just a case of the fact the children are not yet released for adoption. There might be contact sessions you needed to take the child to, with birth parents or other relatives, there would be uncertainty about the final outcome, although probably/possibly this would only be considered when there was a very strong likelihood of the child being adopted.

Good luck.

Thankyou Italian. That was v helpful. I don't know much/anything about fostering as it not something we would consider.

I can't imagine that a child would be placed with you before approval. However I CAN imagine that they would hurry through to a quick approval (quicker than planned) and make it a double approval (to foster & to adopt) if they had a child in mind for you who they wanted to 'get out' of FC in order to make that FC place available for another child.

The thing about fostering to adopt is that it is never 100% sure that you will actually get to adopt the child who has been placed with you. It is highly likely though; social services wouldn't place a FtA child with you unless they were pretty sure that things will work out. But there might well still be a number of delays, court decisions and assessments to wait for, etc. During this (indeterminate) time you wouldn't qualify for adoption leave but would be required to stop working. This is a pragmatic issue with FtA that you'd need to keep in mind.

There might also be an issue regarding the kind of info you would get for matching purposes. As there wouldn't yet be a placement order for the child, your agency may follow the law and not disclose the full CPR to you (if indeed a final CPR already exists) as the birth family's privacy needs to be protected too. I've heard that some LAs bend the rules a bit here though. But if not, you'd find yourself committing to fostering AND then adopting a child of whom you only know the 'need to know' type of information which FC typically get.

But if you're happy to deal with these uncertainties (and I can tell you from experience that it is hard, emotionally) then it would definitely be a great thing to do!

Thankyou again. I know a lot of social workers professionally who are childrens SWs. I don't want to ask all these questions as not wanting to out myself to them and our intentions. They are always going on about needing to find homes and how they are desperate and struggling to find adoptive placements. I've got a list of questions already for our agency but don't want to scare them off with random stuff. I'm trying to sort things out in my mind as our SW was v keen for us to think about a birth+ when DH & I were initially thinking of a 2-4yr old