Hand on heart if we had known what it was going to be like we wouldn’t have done it. I do not recommend adoption in the slightest as our experience with the process has been awful.
my comments have nothing to do with the children and families that need help. Without wanting to sound too dramatic but it breaks my heart. We want to help. We want another child in our family. We have a hole in our family that we could have filled ourselves as we have no issues with fertility. But we chose to forgo having kids of our own because we wanted to help a child in care.
3 years later we still have not had a child placed.
3 years.
When we first contacted the adoption agency our birth son was 2 he’s now 5. He’s getting used to being the only child in the family but also has all the insecurities that comes with being an only child.
if you didn’t already know the adoption process has 3 stages:
Stage 1: paperwork
more paperwork than you can possibly imagine. Medical assessments, dbs checks. 40 page forms asking you to go into detail about the most minute things from you life. That relationship from 17yrs ago? They want to know about it. Doesn’t matter if you haven’t seen them for nearly 2 decades, they need 3 sessions to discuss the impact of the relationship to be sure you’re appropriate for adoption. Oh and references. It took 6 attempts over 3 months for one of our references to send in his paperwork because the agency kept misfiling it or losing it. They needed a reference from our gp and took over a year to send out the form to them. I think in total they’ve had 12 references from various people in our lives. But because one reference hasn’t been filed properly we couldn’t progress forward.
stage 2: assessment
this is where a social worker gets assigned to you and they come round your house to discuss the stuff you’ve written in stage 1 paperwork. This is so they can fill out another separate 60 page form that basically regurgitates everything you’ve written in the 40 page stage 1 form 6months prior. They tell you the stage 2 assessment takes 4 months. Ours took over a year - between dozens of visits being cancelled and rescheduled by our social worker, to extra investigation needed into why you gained 2stone in weight when you were 20 (because apparently that’s relevant to your parenting ability now).
They will spend months (or in our case years) having a good old rummage around through all your bad memories and your relationships and judging every decision you made in your life. And you’re not allowed to react to any of it because then they’ll tell you you’re not emotionally strong enough. At the end of stage 2 you have a panel date. An online meeting with you and half a dozen dinosaurs from the local authority who have never met you before, casting judgement on every decision you’ve made in your life so they can put forward their recommendations to become approved adopters. Our panel date got cancelled and rescheduled 4 times over a period of 8 months.
stage 3: family finding
Throughout your process you will be told “we don’t know how long stage 3 will take because it depends what children are available at the time”
This is utter bullshit. I promise you there WILL be kids suitable for your family available for adoption. The reason stage 3 has an undefined length of time is because social workers are now responsible for giving you information. No longer are they extracting information from you. Now the shoe is on the other foot and you’re extracting information from them. It took over 2 years to get through stage 1 and 2 and at every single meeting, every single phone call, we were told “this is taking too long” or “you’ve been in the system longer than we would like” Or a snide remark was made about how long it was taking (despite them being the reason meetings etc were cancelled or postponed). Now we’re the ones aalong for information from them suddenly were told “social workers work to their own timeframe”!!!
They tell you that once you’ve expressed interest ina child, the next bit takes approx 2months before your stage 3 matching panel.
Well we were approved at stage 2 panel in April 2024, at time of writing its now end of July and we still have no matching panel date because the one originally booked for august got cancelled…again! Our last meeting with the little boys foster cater was 28th June a month later and nothing has been done. No progress at all.
We have been in the process so long that the medical assessments and dbs checks we had to do (and pay for) in stage 1 have now expired and need to be done again.
You would think that the little boy we expressed an interest in 3 months ago would be a higher priority for them seen as they placed him in a foster carers home who lives round the corner from his birth mum. There is a significant safety issue there. But no, we’ve had to wait 2 weeks with no movement from anyone because our social worker is on yet another holiday, so all proceedings grind to a halt.
Heed my warning:
The reason these kids stay trapped in these system is because of social workers.
3 years we’ve been trying to get through the process. 3 years.
Our whole life in limbo whilst they file your paperwork. We could have had 2 kids of our own in the time it’s taken to get this far - we don’t have fertility issues. I was made redundant in January and we decided that I wouldn’t go back to work because I was on the eve of needing time off for adoption leave so would be unlikely to get hired anyway. 6 months later and we’re still waiting. I could have gone back to work. We have a 4bed detached house on the edge of the Cotswolds, we have the finances to support a child. We have parenting experience as we are already parents, we have a strong support network. And yet we still can not seem to get past the frankly ridiculous adoption process
The amount of hoops we have to jump through and barriers social workers put in place between the kids and families that NEED help and the people that WANT to help, is nothing short of criminal.
Like a HR dept of a corporation: Priority 1 is covering the company’s arse first. THEN and only then, will they meet the kids’ needs. Kids will only be saved so long as social workers can deflect blame away from the local authority, usually onto the very people who are trying to help them. Social workers love to tell you that they are there to support you. But the second you need that support you are judged for not being strong enough. They are professionals at putting vulnerable people in a rock and a hard place whilst taking zero accountability themselves.
We naively thought we could make a difference to a child’s life but pursuing this has turned into the biggest regret of our lives - and it has nothing to do with the children in care.
Make no mistake: despite what the adverts tell you, there is NOT a shortage of people that want to help. There is NOT a shortage of prospective adopters. The shortage is of people they can get through the system.
The kids in care are being utterly, utterly failed by social services.