Sunday 27 March 2016

A summary of Adoption - a Vision for Change

Key new announcements  of the Adoption - a Vision for Change 
include:

Regional Adoption Agencies

·         Providing funding and support via a RAA development fund, with up to £14m available across 2016-18 to support the implementation of RAAs

Workforce

·         Developing a robust continuous professional development programme to enable social workers to develop the skills they need to make and support robust permanence decisions.


Innovation and Practice Fund

·         Introducing two new funding streams for RAAs, voluntary adoption agencies and voluntary organisations, with up to £16 million across 2016-18.


Adoption Support Fund

·         increase the ASF in 2016-17 to £21m and £28m in 2017-18, with further increases in every year in this Parliament;
·         extend support to adopted young people up to age 21 (from April 2016);
·         allow children adopted from other countries via intercountry adoptions to use the ASF (from April 2016); and
·         extend support to special guardians who care for children who were previously looked after (from April 2016).

Health

·         By summer 2016 setting up an expert group to advise DfE and DH ministers on new care pathways for adopted and looked after children. These will set out best practice to be followed in the treatment/support of these children.

Education

·         Use legislation to expand the role of virtual schools heads and consider how designated teachers can continue to support children who have left care under an adoption order;

see here for the announcement


4 comments:

  1. I think we need to mention the ideology that promotes adoption over other forms of permeance with language about children in care. Expect they are languishing again.

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  2. Thanks for the breakdown of the report. I'd be interested to know how much do you think will happen? And if it will it make a difference?

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    1. Hi, I think that the gov are pretty determined to see it all come to pass. What it will actually look like on the ground will be interesting. I do think that the game changer will be the regionalisation agenda and the impact that will have on the LA teams, VAAs and the pool of staff. Adoption SW was historically seen as the vanguard of SW with high threshold for entrants to the teams. That seems to have changed and it must be difficult times for SWs with such uncertainty hanging over them either stat or non stat.
      Generally I'm a pragmatist and see good in most of this but I also see that there's more to do, as there always is, but I do worry that we're stripping resources from other areas and adoption is being funded inspite of reduced budgets in other social care depts. That is intriguing but I understand that gov allocates money in different ways so the ASF is not stripping money out of the family support budget but it does feel a little complicated. I apologise for the rambling reply.

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