How long before panel did you get to read your PAR?

[poppet31]

Our approval panel is in 6 weeks and I'm not sure our social worker has even started writing our PAR yet. And she's off for 2 weeks over Easter. I'm starting to get the fear that it won't be ready on time but she doesn't seem concerned. We've had all our meetings so I feel so helpless at the moment as it's out with our hands now.

I'm not sure our social worker has even started writing our PAR yet.

Bet she hasn't. Much like a uni essay, many SW put it off and then do it all at once.

I'm starting to get the fear that it won't be ready on time but she doesn't seem concerned.

It's 6 weeks off, stop fretting. If it doesn't get done she'd get her arse kicked. I think we got ours a couple of weeks before. You need some sight of it because you have to sign it off, but you should have a fair idea of what it will say already.

Email her. Agree a timescale. Then enjoy the lull.

When you do see it, keep an eye out for errors (likely to be some, it's a lot of words) and make sure it sounds really positive and comes across accurately. Don't be afraid to suggest amendments.

I sent mine back with lots of red pen, a score out of 10 and some targets- do that, they love that :-)

We signed ours about 3 weeks before panel. We had received the first draft maybe 10 days before that. We asked for a couple of changes to be made and that was it.

Thanks all. You have reassured me a little. I try so hard not to compare our journey to others but I know someone else going to panel in April who's PAR was all done and dusted weeks ago, so think I just started to panic. Fingers crossed it all goes smoothly!

Ours had loads of mistakes on it and my partner said we couldn’t red pen it as we are both teachers and it would look bad... still got through - even with the really bad grammar and spelling!

First glimpse about 2 weeks before, via email, sent back with a couple of amendments and I don't think we saw it again!

Read it carefully - ours was a 'warts and all' report, which we thought was standard as so much of our conversations with SW had been around complete honesty (and we thought that was what a PAR was supposed to be, as we hadn't seen any others). We did question it but were told it couldn't be changed. It caused massive problems at panel, and we didn't get approved first time. With hindsight it was biased and borderline nasty, and we were allocated a new SW to go back to panel, successfully this time.
I think it's unlikely that you will experience what we did OP, but just wanted to put the warning out, as I wouldn't want anyone to go through what we did.

About a week before panel, if that! Ours was warts and all honest but framed positively which is how they generally are supposed to be written as, if your social worker had any doubts about you, you shouldn't be at panel yet.

You have chance to add or correct info rather than remove it. We had to fact check more than anything as our social worker had mixed up the two of our backgrounds but that was it. One evening of intense reading for both of us.

I'm sure yours will be fine!

Thanks so much for the replies everyone and for sharing your experiences. We are on holiday at the moment and I must admit, it's lovely just to have a bit of time away from thinking about it all. I suspect our next holiday will be very different indeed!

We had less than a day to check ours and it was full of errors. In hindsight I wish i'd complained more about this but you are so vulnerable at that point in the process.

About 2 weeks before. Our's was really good. We had to have a sw change shortly before panel, because our sw fell ill. I wrote a lot of things down for our new sw, so big chunks of our PAR were actually quotes (marked as such) from what we had written.