Advice for social workers

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For when visiting adopters homes…

1. When trying to locate the home, use google maps or Waze or any other app. It helps if you look at the forms you have been sent three times over, and then copy and paste the address into google. I can’t tell you how to get to our house. I don’t use public transport.

1. Give a time you are arriving. Not an estimate, a time. And then arrive either at that time or up to 30 minutes after. Don’t give a time and then turn up an hour early. We won’t be there, because you told us you were coming at a certain time.

1. Have a purpose to the meeting and explain it. Maybe have a list of 10 questions you want to discuss. If it’s just to observe, tell us. If it doesn’t have a purpose, tell us this. Have some conversation starters so it’s not painfully awkward. Some good ones are: “gosh this weather!?!?” Or: “have you been anywhere nice on your holidays?” Or “have you been anywhere this week?” Or “what have you been watching on Netflix?”

1. If it’s clear you’ve overstayed your welcome, leave. It’s hard enough parenting without having to worry about the stranger sitting in our living room, whilst we are all having lunch. If you are having trouble booking a taxi, tell us, we can help!

Hope this is useful to social workers who work with adopters.

Let me know your worst social worker visits so I can feel better about the 2 hour visit I’ve just had after placement………..!

We tried to get our boys down for naps when SW was due. One day one of the boys woke himself up having a poo and smeared it all over the cot, walls, himself, everywhere! SW bid a hasty retreat! He never did it before or after that day!

@Nosilayak gosh okay I’ve got it much easier than this!!! Also I know social workers aren’t paid very well so that might explain the biscuit stealing…

Main grade social workers are on an ok salary, starting at around £30k where I am so I doubt it was a cost saving, more likely they had a very long day still to go and knew they wouldn’t be getting a meal break. That doesn’t excuse things at all, but I doubt the motive was financial - did you comment to them at the time?

I’d routinely do 12/14 hour days as a social worker in child protection which, at that time, included post placement support. More often than not I’d have my diary planned and a crisis would come up - which either involved trying to find a new placement for a child where things had broken down or trying to remove a child urgently, getting an application to court, arranging medical exams etc so not stuff you can either plan for or do much about in terms of scheduling - you have to be available when the paediatrician is free, or when the court has space to hear you and be there with all the paperwork in good order (a CPO application at that time was around 45 pages long and you need one for each child).

I’m not trying to excuse very poor practice, and sw are notorious for not being on time etc but some of it really isn’t in their control. And usually the child that is safely placed will come down the list of priorities, so in terms of them needing to visit post placement (which they are required to do), if there’s anything that can be moved it’ll be the post placement visit.

There’s no excuse for not apologising for lateness, missed meetings etc but there are usually very good reasons for things going pear shaped.

@Jelkycatspyjamas You've linked me into the wrong comment. I didn't say that Social Workers were on a low pay, that was another poster. Also, no I didn't mention it to them when they stuffed their pockets full of biscuits, dh and I actually found it quite funny because, let's face it, you need to keep a sense of humour, along with many other attributes, when you start on the adoption journey.

I must just say that all the Social Workers we met through adopting were lovely people, doing a hard, demanding and emotionally draining job. Like any workplace, you get the odd "eccentric" one but, they brought us our gorgeous 3 year old ds, who is now a 21 year old, strapping, 6 footer who is doing well at Uni and life in general, which is amazing after his unfortunate start in life.

@Jellycatspyjamas I do obviously understand that it’s a very stressful and I can imagine at times thankless job. I do think the level of qualification vs salary is poor when compared to teaching. I’m not fully aware of the qualifications required but I think it’s similar to teaching, whereas the pay appears on the face of it significantly less especially if you consider holidays.

Our own social worker is amazing as is our family finder and I don’t think we’d have our children if not for them. It’s just a frustrating thing that me and my partner have to laugh about and we know they are statutory visits that have to happen.

I'm afraid that my experience of social workers throughout out adoption journey has left me with a sour taste! They lied in court - luckily despite their many attempts to avoid emails, I did have written evidence to prove this! My advice to them would be to listen, and not alienate the prospective adopters. The team manager was down right rude and simply could not understand that the situation we were in was very upsetting and emotional. Fortunately we have the AO now and only have to have dealings with them when we discuss sibling contact.

The good ones:

Our AO took a long time due to various reasons but our LO's social worker was so good. She had to travel quite a few hours to see us every 6 weeks and because our LO would get upset when seeing her ( they associated her with change we think), she would stay for 20 mins and then head on home. We knew our LO was settled when they were fine when she showed up :-)

SW who took us right up to panel:

We will be forever grateful to them. They had to spend 60 plus hours with us learning everything about us. I would never like to do the job they do but I am glad they do it.

Now for the bad:

For the first LAC review an independent contractor was sent due to the normal person being away.

1. She would only refer to us as the prospective adopters and made us introduce ourselves as this
2. She refereed to the birth parents and mum and dad despite out LO being placed with us for some time.
3. She used the words IF they end up staying permittivity a you a lot.
4. She wanted us to go to the health visitor instead of them coming to us so we can be seen. Just to make sure the more people who saw us all the better for our child safe guarding. Our Health visitor who was there did not take her advice.

We consider this our LO's forever home once placed but this social worker seemed to treat us a temporary placement. This was not done unkindly and was not personal it was just how she viewed Adoptive parents.

Needless to say she did not do further LAC reviews with us.

After the adoption Order was made we were on our own.

All in all we aside from one all the SW's we dealt with were warm, kind and only wanted the best for us and our LO.

1) She would only refer to us as the prospective adopters and made us introduce ourselves as this
2) She refereed to the birth parents and mum and dad despite out LO being placed with us for some time.

I’ve heard adoptive parents referred to as foster carers/carers pre adoption order, while legally that’s correct in that it reflects the legal status of your relationship with the child, it stings. In all honesty, birth mum and dad are the only mum and dad the child has until the adoption order is granted, how would you have wanted them to be referred to?

@Jellycatspyjamas In all honesty, birth mum and dad are the only mum and dad the child has until the adoption order is granted, how would you have wanted them to be referred to?

As biological parents/birth mum and dad. I think if you’re going to adopt a child, you don’t suddenly become their parents on the day of the adoption order. You are their parents from the day they move in.

Would you expect a child placed with adopters to call it a temporary placement? When speaking to them, would you expect the social workers to say - here are the people we hope are going to be your new parents, should the courts approve the adoption order. Maybe.

It would be very confusing for my older adopted child to hear this language and he is around at the LAC reviews, and I would be putting in a formal complaint if it was used!!

Yes legally appropriate, but children are often present during lac reviews due to childcare/being recently placed, so not appropriate!!

LAC reviews are formal meetings, they need to reflect the legal status of the child and adults present, it’s one of the challenges of early placement and a lengthy legal process. You are busy bonding and parenting your child, but legally they aren’t yours until the Adoption Order, if a child is old enough to attend their LAC review there needs to be some work done with the child around the formal language used.

in practice I usually just refer to everyone by name and ensure the minute of the meeting is accurate.

I’ve seen there be problems when the birth parents challenge the adoption through legal process, saying the outcome was predetermined and using the example of being referred to as birth parents (and potential adopters as the child’s parent) in LAC reviews and Children’s Hearings. It’s a hard one to push back on, while most people round the table know by far the most likely outcome is that the child will go on to be adopted, it’s legally not a foregone conclusion.

It sounds as though social workers are in firefighting mode most of the time. Is that because there aren't enough social workers or because of bad management? (Question for the social workers)

I have nothing but praise from our SWs. They were extremely professional but also kind and understanding. I still have a huge amount of replacer and fondness for both of them.

I’d say it’s both @praps, social work budgets are cut to the bone, there isn’t the time for good relationship based work which would support struggling families, services are crisis led and the thresholds for intervention incredibly high. In children and families work any one of your cases could tip into crisis at any point and where crisis used to mean things were bad, it now often means things are life threatening. So SWs get pulled in every direction which means if you know a child is in a safe place, the work to support that placement will drop down the list in favour of the rest of your case load who aren’t safe.

Legal processes are more complex and often very urgent, there literally aren’t enough hours in the day, and huge pressure to make the best assessment and right decisions. More social workers, more social resources, more competent management to represent the work of their staff would all help.

I’m not surprised adopters have a poor experience, the resources simply aren’t there and, as more experienced SWs leave for less stressful, non-practice based, roles there isn’t the depth of experience needed to train and support new workers coming through.

Thank you for your answer, jellycatspyjamas. Has threshold changed, then, officially?

I can’t speak for other areas, but not where I am. If you suggest they have you get challenged pretty strongly, but really they have. I’m not in practice now but I know children I would have removed 5/10 years ago aren’t even on the CP register now. I suspect that’s the case in many of not most areas now.

I am confused, because the numbers of children in care were at a ten year high in 2020?

Where I am numbers of children in care have dropped year on year for the last 8 years, there was a small (1%) uptick in 2020, this coincided with a 3% increase in children on the CP register. That’s hardly surprising given what’s known of the impact of Covid and repeated lockdowns on families last year, whereby there was less access to usual supports and an increased risk to children.

I think it’s fair to say 2020/21 is far from representative of the direction sw has been heading for the last 10 years, for better or worse.

I am not doubting your experience, but it appears to be unusual, because according to a government website numbers have been increasing year on year for ten years, so not covid related other than the last year. It says "Councils have seen a 53 per cent increase in children on child protection plans – an additional 18,160 children – in the past decade. In the past decade, there has been a 139 per cent increase in serious case where the local authority believes a child may be suffering, or likely to suffer, significant harm, an additional 117,070 cases (up to 201,170)."

Which website are you looking at? I’m in Scotland so quoting Scottish statistics, I imagine it’ll differ across the four nations.

The one I quoted from was local.gov.uk, referring to UK figures

I think the local gov one covers England and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland have different processes so the figures aren’t directly comparable.