That’s why last week CVAA launched a series of reports designed to help shape, policy practice and also sector action.

We kicked off with our new strategy which will guide our work and focus for the next 3 years. It lays out a vision for shaping the future of adoption services centred around creating a diverse, inclusive and modern adoption system which can truly meet children’s identity needs.

Underpinned by a thriving voluntary sector, our strategy argues that the transformation of adoption must be centred around three core objectives.

• Meeting adopted people’s identity needs
• Tackling sector and adopter diversity
• Championing the modernisation of adoption

These themes are not new, and across both voluntary and statutory agencies work is already underway to drive best practice. Our strategy builds on this work and sets a series of goals which will either embed what is working well more widely or develop new ways of working to the benefit of families, and ultimately adoptees.

To ensure that our ambition is backed up by action, last week also marked the launch of My People a blueprint for a new network and hub to transform how we support adopted children to maintain relationships with the people who are important to them. We know this is critical because adoptee voices are repeatedly telling us that the experiences of being separated from parents, brothers and sisters, as well as others significant to them, continues to have a detrimental effect on their lives as adults. Despite good work going on within agencies on this, the pace of change has not been fast enough, and we hope My People can bring some much-needed coordination and structure to the existing best practice going on across the country. My People also sets out ideas for supporting adoptees through adulthood when they need services, something which currently does not exist.

However, it is also clear that the sector alone cannot deliver the scale of change that is needed. Many of the challenges facing VAAs, and ultimately families, are driven by current funding models, legal frameworks or national policies which stand in the way of child-centred decision making or prevent adoptees and their families getting the support they need.

Reforming these will take action from the next government to lay the right foundations for change. For this reason, our final publication last week was our Manifesto for Adoption which sets out the key steps political leaders must take. This draws not just upon the voices of our members but those of adopters, adoptees and birth families and is focused on five key themes:

1. Recognising the value of adoption
2. Reducing delay for all children, but particularly those who wait the longest
3. Supporting adopted children’s identity needs
4. Timely support which prioritises early intervention and developing more trauma-informed schools
5. Acknowledging the lifelong impact of trauma

Key recommendations within this include levelling the inter-agency fee in England, a commitment to the ongoing funding for the Adoption and Special Guardianship Support Fund beyond March 2025, creating multi-disciplinary support plans (with a duty to deliver them) for every adopted child and ensuring that support continues past 18 to recognise the lifelong nature of adoption and it’s associated trauma. A full copy of our Manifesto is available here.

To mark the culmination of this important work, we were delighted to bring together members and partners from across the children’s social care sector, including Ofsted, Department for Education, the Judiciary and academics, at NCVO last week.

The launch was also an opportunity to hear from individuals with lived experience adoptees and adopters, about why the work VAAs do is so important and why we must continue to come together to push for the change that adoptees and their families deserve.

We know that there is much work to be done but our portfolio of publications sets out our vision and ambition, which we believe can be realised if the sector comes together. To enable this CVAA will convene an Adoption Sector Summit later this year to ensure that all relevant stakeholders, including adoptees themselves, contribute to our efforts in shaping the future of adoption services.

In response to this, work is already happening across the adoption sector in the UK to change practice, update legislation and improve outcomes, which all feeds into the overall concept of modernising adoption. This includes the important work of the Public Law Working Group on Adoption who published their interim report last year which you can read our response to here.

However, if we understand what the impact of loss in adoption is, it is imperative that we work towards minimising the negative effects.

In 2022 PAC-UK focussed on the ‘Voices of adopted people – identity and relationships’ for their conference which can be viewed here.  CVAA is also committed to listening to adoptees and learning from them as we continue the journey of shaping the future of adoption. Part of our ambition is making adoption fit for the next generation but to do this effectively we have to also understand the expectations that the next generation will have of an intervention such as adoption. This debate generates many different viewpoints, including whether adoption should exist at all, and we believe that this is a question that should always remain one to be posed, because complacency can mean that adoption services are not as good as they can be or should be.

CVAA wants all children being adopted across the UK, whether from care or abroad, to be placed with adoptive families who are well prepared, supported and steeped in understanding the impact of adoption on the life of their child and their whole family. The concepts of identity and connection therefore are crucial in this understanding and must be overlayed with the deepest empathy possible. No one who is not adopted can understand how it really feels but we do know that the impact is lifelong, which is why the role that VAAs play in supporting children and families is so important.

It is also why alongside launching our strategy we will also be publishing a new paper My People which lays out our vision for a new network and hub that can help better support adopted children to maintain relationships with the people who are important to them. We hope this will be an important first step towards ensuring all adopted children can develop a full sense of self and make sense of their early life experiences as they grow, ultimately shaping an adulthood where they can truly thrive.

Warm regards,

Satwinder

The Strategy centres around three key priorities:

• Identity and connection – Ensuring that adoptees are supported by informed, empathetic adopters and VAAs, so that they develop a lifelong positive sense of identity and belonging, underpinned by continuing connections and ongoing meaningful relationships with the people that matter to them
• Adopter and sector diversity – Supporting VAAs to embed learning and changes so that adopters from a wide range of ethnic, cultural and social backgrounds, with varied lived experiences, feel confident coming forward to adopt and that all services are delivered through an equitable and inter-sectional approach, rooted in anti-discriminatory practice
• Championing the modernisation of adoption – Working with members, adopted people and their families, and stakeholders across the UK, to influence and shape the modernisation of adoption, increasing understanding of the imperative for change and the benefits for children and families

To read the strategy in full, download it here.

That’s why CVAA is delighted to today being launching  ‘My People’, our vision for a new network and hub, that would generate cross-sector collaboration, to consolidate, expand and sustain work being done in adoption services to strengthen the experiences of children after they are adopted. Specifically, My People is dedicated to preserving children’s lifelong connections with their birth families and other key people in their lives.

The My People proposal has four core goals:

1. Hosting an online resource for making practical information on supporting children’s lifelong relationships easily available for children, their carers’, and families – realising the rights and aspirations of care experienced people and creating efficiencies for local authorities and adoption agencies who would no longer have to duplicate these resources.
The hub would be backed up by an experienced practitioner acting as co-ordinator to manage, assess and signpost enquiries.

2. Developing knowledge and expertise among professionals, through the network being a maintained as an up-to-date central source of guidance, research and best practice relating to preserving and promoting children’s connections at each stage of their development.

3. Evolving cultures and entrenched ways of thinking about contact and connections by working closely with practitioners across the sector to pool resources, reassess ideas and explore barriers which may be obstructing progress. Additionally, by drawing upon the newly created support network of ‘connection champions’ the network would spark new
thinking and expertise among leaders in workforces to take back and embed into their local organisations and services.

4. Co-ordinating delivery at local level with VAAs and RAAs and gathering data to understand the structure of support services today, to inform an insight-driven strategy for funding support services tomorrow. Mapping where support for families is most needed, and in what form, to ensure that all children and families are treated with equity wherever they live and have equal access to flexible support.

You can download a copy of the full report here.

Drawing on the expertise of our members and the lived experience of adoptees and adopters, this CVAA manifesto focuses on five key areas which are:

1. Recognising the value of adoption
2. Reducing delay for all children, but particularly those who wait the longest
3. Supporting adopted children’s identity needs
4. Timely support which prioritises early intervention and developing more trauma-informed schools
5. Acknowledging the lifelong impact of trauma

Taken together, we believe that  the steps we have laid out can help not only make the adoption system fit for the needs of children in the modern era but will ensure that adopted people are given the support they need to help make sense of their identities and experiences and thrive. You can download a full copy of the Manifesto here.

The discussion with voluntary adoption agencies (VAAs) since then has gone onto shape one of our strategic ambitions which is to address both adopter and sector diversity through both gathering more evidence and data on these issues and supporting VAAs to ensure that all services are delivered through an equitable and intersectional approach, rooted in anti-discriminatory practice.

In 2022 the Adoption & Special Guardianship Board published its findings on Ending Racial Disparity in Adoption, and CVAA was pleased to be able to contribute to that work. Despite this, we know that racial disparities remain an issue at many stages of the care system and recent findings from the Nuffield Family Justice Observatory back this view, so there is still much to be done. CVAA plans to support our members by leading new initiatives at a national level that can then be applied regionally and locally.

We know that we need to recruit more adopters from Black communities, but crucially they also need to be able to truly meet the complex needs of the children who continue to wait and not just be a good match because of their ethnicity. We have the expertise and resources as VAAs, and a great example of this was the London Black Families project. Unfortunately, this knowledge has not been applied strategically and systematically across the sector, so now is the time to do this.

Alongside this we also need to ensure that the workforce across VAAs is more representative of the children we work with, particularly at leadership and managerial levels. At present only one VAA in the whole of the UK is headed by a Black colleague so CVAA wants to support changes by working across our membership to encourage more Black colleagues into senior roles and help agencies to identify what will make this happen.

We believe that our work will help us to see meaningful and sustainable changes by 2027 and we look forward to reporting on this in our annual reports.

It may sound daunting, but adopting a child with additional needs is incredibly rewarding and gives them a chance to flourish. Many of the thousands of children in care waiting for an adoptive family who have additional needs wait much longer than other children.

We want to help change that. In this guide, adopters from voluntary adoption agencies, share their experiences of adopting a child with additional needs and offer practical advice to prospective adopters.

A copy of the guide is available for download here.

You can also find information about support for adopters that is available via the Adoption and Special Guardianship Support Fund at: www.gov.uk/guidance/adoption-support-fund-asf.  The adoption and special guardian support fund (ASGSF) provides funds to local authorities and regional adoption agencies (RAAs) to pay for essential therapeutic services for eligible adoptive, special guardianship order (SGO) and child arrangement order (CAO) families.

CVAA celebrated its 30^th anniversary last year and this year we are set to launch our strategy for 2024-27. In shaping the strategy, we have taken stock of where the adoption sector across the UK is today and what we think voluntary adoption agencies can and should be doing to shape the future of services. The recent thematic Ofsted report on Regional Adoption Agencies (RAAs) demonstrates that the need for this input remains as strong as ever and CVAA remains committed to supporting Adoption England in their own strategic priorities.

We have already been working on cross-sector initiatives to modernise adoption and our strategy sets priorities to go further.  By modernising we essentially mean that adoption needs to be much more focussed on the needs of adoptees, and at each stage of life particularly in relation to supporting their identity needs.

To help support this, we are very fortunate to have benefitted from the input of adoptees and their families into our new strategy, as ultimately, they are the most acutely affected by adoption, including the current policies and practices across our sector.

Voluntary Adoption Agencies recognise this too and many of our member organisations already run services for adoptees of all ages, such as teentalk to help children and young people to fully understand not only their whole identity but the impact that adoption will continue to have on their lives. But has the law kept up with practice? CVAA has been actively involved in the Public Law Working Group on adoption and we are optimistic about the positive changes to outcomes that shifts in the law and regulations could bring.

We fully believe that adoption needs to continue to change, not only at a practical level to better meet the needs of children and young people, but also as a legal construct so that it remains fit for the future. Society is unrecognisable from when adoption was first formally legalised and so it is inevitable that adoption should evolve too. We are interested to monitor the impact of changes like the ones introduced in New South Wales, Australia, where since October 2020 adoptees have a dual birth and adoption certificate, known as an Integrated Birth Certificate. Surely such changes can only impact the lives of adoptees positively.

There are suggestions that adoption could be more like guardianship, but every decision has consequences so a lot more research and consultation is still required.

Now that we have touched on modernisation, over the coming weeks, ahead of our formal strategy launch, we will focus on each of our other strategic priorities and explain why they are so important and what role they might play in shaping the future of adoption.

The world of adoption has seen some seismic shifts in the past 30 years, but there has been at least one constant: adoption has continued to provide, evidentially and unequivocally, a pathway to permanence and successful adulthood for some of the nation’s most
disadvantaged children.

Voluntary Adoption Agencies (VAAs) have a long history of championing children; of finding innovative means to achieve successful ends and of securing permanence and supporting families in the long term when the State has struggled. Their specialist perspective has supported ways of finding and using data to help the wider system focus on what is important. But, as events continue to remind us, they are
relatively small, vulnerable organisations.

CVAA was formed to harness collective wisdom and to present a consistent, value riven approach to what has become an increasingly fragmented statutory sector. It has contributed to the development and implementation of some of the most
successful system changes of the past 30 years; its members have been consistent in offering practical solutions to complex problems and have been endlessly willing to innovate and adapt in the interests of children and families.

To celebrate this long history of working to advocate for change across the adoption sector, Norman Goodwin CBE has brought together ‘A Short History of CVAA’ which lays out some of key milestones the organisation has achieved and the key people who made it happen.

You can download the full document here

A full copy of our response can be dowloaded here