What questions to ask at initial enquiry stage?

[Mooey89]

Hi,

After 18 months tic, DH and I have decided to seriously consider adoption rather than ivf in order to grow our family.
We are both social workers with adults so understand and often work with people who grew up in the care system or who were parented chaotically and more and more I think this is the right path for us.

My question is, what to ask when calling to initially enquire?i know that seems like a silly question but I want to appear and feel prepared and ask all that I cab whilst I have the chance!

We’ve been looking into foster to adopt because I like the early stability this can provide for little one and avoiding multiple moves, so I’m planning to ask about whether they will consider this when we already have a birth child
How long the process generally takes
Do they place children outside of our LA (because we work in our city)
What else? Thank you!

@Mooey89 All really good questions. I would just be calling to expressing an interest in adopting and asking for further information. You should be invited to an information event.
In terms of where you work as SW I would be up front about that and consider the relative pros and cons of going through the process with your LA or whether it may be best to adopt with a neighbouring LA. Bear in mind lots of LA's Adoption services have merged to form 'consortiums' giving greater coverage for family finding.

Thank you! It looks like ours is a consortium so that makes sense.
I’m anxious just about calling!

I purposefully adopted with a neighbouring LA as I got a better vibe from them and we live quite near a city centre so I thought if I adopted through our inner city LA we would either be turned down for matches due to geography or I'd be constantly on edge visitting our city centre etc. SWs will be reluctant to tell you this explicitly but they'll always look to match with their own adopters first so even with the new consortiums I would go with an LA that is likely to place children from areas you have no links with and who you get good vibes from. My understanding of consortiums is just that it opens up matches in the local area more seamlessly but SWs tend to approach adopters in their own LA before extending to other LAs (this is how we were matched with our LG) and I doubt that the new system has especially changed that. Happy to be corrected if anyone else knows different though xx

@Mooey89 I worked in healthcare and due to contact with certain clients had to only accept matches outside a certain area. It worked well for us. You should be able to work out what area your consortium covers and whether this may still throw up some concerns in respect of your jobs.
Please don't be nervous about calling, although I remember I was! 😉

Register as an foster career with the option to adopt.

Thank you so much everyone.
It looks like our consortium covers our city, the neighbouring city and the county in between, so should I avoid contacting them altogether and contact the next county along do you think?