Fostering for early permanence

[Fallulah]

OH and I did the online information session for our local adoption service recently. Lots to think about, no decisions made but they are big advocates for early permanence, where you foster with a view to adopt to reduce the moves for the child. They were very responsible and also emphasised the risk of the child not being removed from birth family and it not working out.

I was struck by a thought though.

Adoption and maternity leave are the same in my place of work, and we have adopters on the team, work have been great and flexible for them, so no concerns there.

I know you get paid while you’re doing the fostering part of early permanence, but presumably you have to give up work rather than going on adoption leave. So how does that work? Do you just resign, leaving you with no income once it becomes adoption, rather than having paid adoption leave if you didn’t leave to do the fostering part first?

I’m not sure I’ve expressed that question very well!

Early permanence gives you the same entitlement to adoption leave as traditional adoption. You do not have to leave work etc and would be entitled to statutory adoption pay etc as normal. It's becoming alot more commonplace for the reasons you list above. It also saves the local authority alot of money by not paying foster carers (who usually are paid more than EP carers) and addresses the shortage of good foster carers in many areas.
We did traditional adoption last time but are considering EP this time round.

From the people I know that followed this route they took a career break (unpaid authorised leave) until they were formally matched for adoption then adoption leave can start. Hope this helps

We did early permanence and my husband had the standard adoption leave, it was a little trickier for H.R to understand as there wasn’t a matching cert but our social worker emailed the H.R dept to explain and it all got sorted in the end.

However one thing to think about is if the case takes longer that a year (our took 19 months) then adoption leave ends after a year,

if family time is still happening, plus social worker visits, reviews, health reviews etc still taking place regularly, it would be difficult to go back to
work.

My husbands work was good(ish) and kept his job open (unpaid, as expected) but they did start to lose patience by the end, and it was looking like he might have to quit his job which was an extra stresser in an already stressful time.

Social services gave us financial help to get by. it’s a bit
of a worse case scenario but it might help to plan for a worst case, make sure u can afford it, what might happen if you need more than the year old in regards
to work, and then never need
to have, than not plan for it and find urself stuck if it happens
x

We had a similar situation to @Pollylong . I took adoption leave and my work had a letter confirming EP placement rather than the matching cert. My partner took an unpaid sabbatical because we were getting paid foster allowance by the LA. (Not the case with every LA by any means, I know we were lucky with getting this.) So our income was greatly reduced but we managed. (We had some savings which covered our mortgage for a couple of months ) I ended being off for 14 months - 12 months adoption leave and 2 months accrued annual leave. My partner got made redundant during his sabbatical, which was weirdly helpful as we had unexpected redundancy pay. Again not tonnes but helped us get through to the end of my adoption leave. Our whole process took just over the full year.

Gosh thanks that’s all really helpful!

I’m a teacher so would be doing shared parental leave because you can’t accrue annual leave, so planning for it to take more than the year is definitely a consideration!

My work would not sign me off for adoption leave without a matching certificate. Instead, they allowed me to take unpaid carers leave from work for as long as it took for me to either return to work, should LO return to family home or until I had a matching certificate that enabled me to then get adoption leave pay. I lived off foster allowance until matching and then got adoption pay. There does not seem (yet) to be a system in place that makes it the same for all employers.

Might be worth chatting with your agency/LA r.e. shared parental leave. We were told we couldn't take shared parental leave because EP usually took a full year or longer and there needed to be one person named as the main foster parent for the LA. In the midst of EP you have to bear in mind you are providing a service to the LA as a foster carer. You are "employed" by them and as a result you will often be the last to know how things are developing legally, etc, which is weird and frustrating. I was interviewed for the podcast The First Six Months about our experience if you are interested. https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-first-six-months-sarah/id1724983619?i=1000642207047

I would second @Parksitting on checking the shared parental leave. We floated the idea and got told that it was definitely better to have just one person off. However as a teacher my leave was accrued and I had an extra month and a half at the end of my year off, so worth double checking. The problem with teaching is that it has excellent holidays but they are incredibly inflexible in all other regards, which actually isn't great in lots of respects! If you work with a MAT, it's worth checking the MAT policy not just your school.

Many people find they need to reduce working days or hours after adoption, sometimes for the reasons you have outlined above, and I have known of several other EP adopters whose cases took longer than a year, so definitely a situation worth preparing for.

Shared parental leave doesn’t have to actually be shared - the name is misleading. In teaching if the timing works it means you can take three blocks of leave, so ‘return’ for the holidays and get paid for them and then go off again.

This is all useful and food for thought. Thank you