The inital meeting-what will they ask?

[Cyclingpast]

We've got our first home visit/initial meeting soon. We have already been to the first information evening. They say it'll take about three hours. What will it be like? What will they ask and what will we talk about for three hours?

I have already got some nice biscuits in...:-)

Sorry not much help but following as per other thread!

Hi there. I had initial meeting last week and it lasted around 2 hours. The social worker spent around half an hour explaining the process to us and some legal bits and the rest of the time was her asking us questions. The following topics covered were:

• motivation to adopt - spent quite a bit of time discussing this as our infertility is unexplained and we choose to adopt rather than try fertility treatment. A lot of the questions here were quite invasive (were we now using contraception etc.)
• a brief introduction to our own childhoods. Again, this was quite invasive as I don't have a great relationship with my family and my husband's sister was adopted out of the family, so a lot of questions surrounding this.
• questions about our health, any medications we were on etc
• basic questions about our home, how many spare rooms we had etc (she didn't look round the house though.)
• questions about how long we intended to take off work, what would plans be for after adoption leave etc

There was some form filling and we asked a lot of questions too.

I would point out that I suspect every agency is different. This is a local authority but we've also had meetings with a VA and they didn't ask as many questions or go in to as much depth, but they did look around the house. Hope this is useful!

catlover1987 that is so useful! Thank you very much! I've been cleaning and tidying up most of today (still messy though) so I hope she at least goes to the bathroom ;-)
It's good to be prepared for the kind of questions they might ask, thank you :-)

No problem at all. I really hope it goes well for you. Let me know x

Good luck.

Good luck.

Thanks. Well, it took about three hours and we talked about our child hoods, why we want to adopt, how adoption works, our family back ground. Had a quick look round the house.

Now we "just" need to decide what to do next! We have a few things we want to do to the house and they said we need to do that first.