Agency ignoring us

[FlowersSunflowers]

Hello All. Would be really grateful for some advice.
We made contact with an agency , had an initial phone meeting and then a first home visit which lasted 3 hours with a social worker from the agency and that went very well. At the end of the meeting the social worker said we should start to think about who we would use as references and should start to contact them asap. So because of this we thought it was all very positive.
after nearly a week after this meeting we hadn’t heard anything more from the agency so we emailed her and she said she would chase the office and we are so keen so know if we are progressing/been accepted to stage 1. Well still still haven’t heard anything from the agency as this was a month ago now. We have sent more follow up emails and left a voicemail with the SW that visited us but nothing.
I have also emailed the colleague that initially arranged the appointment for us and they haven’t replied.
Do you think this is a bad sign? If we are not accepted onto stage 1, surely they would have let us know rather than ignore us completely.
time isn’t in our side so I am thinking of starting the ball rolling with another agency now.
thank you for reading.

[sunshineandskyscrapers]

These kinds of delays are not uncommon, I'm afraid. It's not necessarily a bad sign. Adoption social workers are stretched very thinly and when you factor in someone on the team being off long-term sick, someone having left with no backfill in place yet or perhaps needing to be trained and perhaps someone else on leave, you are left with a tiny team who need to prioritise the most urgent deadlines, which are likely to relate to panel dates and placing children. It is likely that they don't have capacity to get you into the system at the moment, or even engage in a proper conversation about how long you might be waiting for.

Have you submitted a registration of interest form yet? If you have then I think a clock is now ticking against your application and I would persevere. If you haven't then I would start looking at other agencies.

[Jellycatspyjamas]

As @sunshineandskyscrapers said it’ll be a capacity issue at their end. Social work teams are incredibly pressed for time and, if it’s a voluntary agency, they won’t start the process with you unless they have someone available to proceed because they really need to meet timescales to be paid. It won’t be anything about your suitability - if it was they’d tell you simply because that would get you off their case load.

The adoption process is full of stops and starts, if you go into it expecting delays you’ll find the whole thing much less frustrating.

[FlowersSunflowers]

Thanks so much for your replies. It is very helpful. The SW was going to submit the registration of interest for us a month ago but because we haven’t heard a thing I don’t know if it has been processed.
it does feel like dead time when we could be getting on With sorting medical etc.

[Ted27]

@FlowersSunflowers

Just to add its also been half term so likely people will have had time off.

It needn't be deadtime- there are loads of resources out there you could be reading and looking at.
I wish there had been all the you tube and podcast stuff around when I started out.
The more research you do the better.

But patience is definitely a virtue in adoption world

[onlytherain]

As others have said, delays are very common. We waited 3 months to be assigned a social worker, and those were not the only delays we experienced.

Maybe you could call and ask for a time frame? We spoke to several agencies and with one we could have started the process straight away, with another we had 6 weeks waiting time. We went with the 6 weeks wait and it was one of our best decisions ever.

You could start here:
https://www.adoptionukforum.org/topic/a7e76f8d-f8a9-4161-bf80-9c0c674e7155