Who this is for

Adoption practitioners and managers (Voluntary Adoption Agencies, Regional Adoption Agencies, Local Authorities, and independent social workers), children’s social care services, children and family social workers, foster carers, kinship carers, designated teachers, and other professionals working with children and families.

Details

This expert-led training session will assist social workers and management with exploring the possibilities of digital tools when considering adopted or care-experienced children’s plans to stay in touch (contact) with their birth relatives or those important to them.

The Nuffield Family Justice Observatory published a report based on their ‘adoption connections’ project (Barnett-Jones & Manning, 2021). This project involved consultation with over 80 people and organisations with a focus on modernising mediated post-adoption contact. The project explored how digital solutions might address some of the known difficulties of letterbox contact, identifying potential benefits and drawbacks of a digital system. In addition, it highlighted: the need for any such system to consider children’s rights to both contact and online safety; data security; interoperability (for example how families’ data could be moved between different platforms); and financial viability.

Moderninsing adoption is part of Adoption England’s strategy. In 2022 from the report published by the Nuffield Family Justice Observatory a project was commissioned to trial a digital system. The system was Letter Swap created by Link Maker and the University of East Anglia were academic partners producing an evaluation of the findings. There are also other products in the market, such as, Arc box and Charms.

Using digital tools to support plans for children to remain connected to their birth identity is a much-needed innovative step to explore, given the issues with the traditional ‘letterbox’ system. Many indirect exchanges do not get started, lapse with no review, offers a lack of diversity of information that can be sent and has no feedback loop’- has my letter been received?

Safe and meaningful connections are vital to adopted and care experienced people as they grow, and reach independence and beyond. Some of the risks of not maintaining these connections are-

• Identity struggles and concept of self
• Unanswered questions
• Access to birth heritage, culture, and religion
• Known medical history
• Lost sibling connections
• Emotional difficulties in major life events

In this bespoke training event, we will look at the origins of digital connections, the outcomes of the Letter Swap pilot, and how a culture of modern adoption can support connections for adopted and care experienced people. We will also hear from providers of systems available.

Learning 0utcomes

• Explore the lifelong needs of adopted and care-experienced people and how a digital system may support staying in touch.
• Consider a digital approach to planning staying in touch (contact) for adopted and care experienced children and young people.
• Identify culture and practice changes when using digital approaches to support children and young people’s plans to stay in touch.
• Consider the positives and negatives of a digital system.
• Consider the support needs of birth relatives, adoptive parents and adopted / care experienced people when using a digital system.
• Explore if digital systems can be used as a bridge to meeting up (direct contact)

About the trainers

Dr. Beverley Barnett Jones MBE

Beverley Barnett‑Jones is Associate Director for System and Impact at the Nuffield Family Justice Observatory. She is a registered social worker with a career spanning over 25 years in local authority and other statutory children’s and family services, having switched career planning from lawyer to young person’s counsellor before training as a social worker. She holds an LLB honours Law Degree and a Master’s in social Science. Beverley has been committed for many years to improving the help and support offered to children, their families, and their wider community. She has promoted the use of evidence and research to inform practice and service design. Beverley was awarded an MBE in the 2018 Queen’s Birthday Honours List in recognition of her management of frontline services for children and families.

Vicky Swift

Vicky is a qualified social worker who joined the Adoption England national team in June 2022. Vicky is skilled in working with vulnerable children and families and is committed to promoting the experiences and voices of birth families and relationships important to children pre adoption. Vicky leads on the maintaining relationship workstream, focused on finding ways for adopted children to have safe and meaningful relationships with the people who were important to them pre adoption. Vicky is passionate about exploring new ways of modernising adoption and the way that adopted people maintain links and connections to their birth identity. She works on several projects with adoption agencies and partners looking at improving services for birth relatives and also adopted people’s experiences of accessing their records and post adoption support. Vicky says- “I really feel passionate about listening to the voices of people who experience services to drive forward the change we hope to achieve.”

Instructions

A member of staff will be in touch with attendees one week prior to the event to share a pre-event delegate pack.

If you have any questions regarding this webinar, please contact us at info@cvaa.org.uk. We will aim to answer your query within two working days.

CVAA accept online payments only. In case you do not have instant access to your company card, we suggest using your personal card instead to book a training event and claim it back with your agency in your expenses. Requesting an invoice to pay for our standard practice events is not possible.

Who this is for

Adoption practitioners and managers (Voluntary Adoption Agencies, Regional Adoption Agencies, Local Authorities, and independent social workers), children’s social care services, children and family social workers, foster carers, kinship carers, designated teachers, and other professionals working with children and families.

Details

This expert-led training session will assist social workers to support adopters and children in keeping safe online.

The internet is a fast-changing, fantastic tool when used in the right way. Rather like Pandora’s box, once opened it will never go away. Stopping young people from accessing it, is not a solution or a possibility, teaching young people to navigate it safely is the only solution.

This is a constantly changing arena, where we are seeing risks to children changing on an almost daily basis.

“It was a real eye opener! Very real about the different areas where there are high risks. And giving practical tools to help educate and reduce the risk, but with the message that the biggest risk reducer is to come alongside and keep a relational approach.” – Attendee, 2021

For young people who may have experienced a traumatic or unstable early home life, it can support them to reach out and contact other young people with similar experiences, enabling them to share their experiences and gain support from their peers.

However, it can also create risks for any child, where they may see:

• content that can be potentially harmful, such as games which are age or developmentally inappropriate, websites with risky content
• contact from people who are not who they purport to be or with ill intent, including radicalisers and sexual content
• conduct themselves in a way that may impact on their future life chances, as anything published online, is there forever
• commerce where young people may be drawn into gambling online

Adopted children are even more at risk where they may be contacted, without preparation, by birth parents and family members or groomed by people offering them friendship, but darker intentions.

This year will see the introduction of the Online Safety Bill 2023, which will see safeguards being introduced by internet platforms, however this will not reduce the need for vigilance by both social workers and parents.

“This event was eye opening. Technology development moves so quickly it is difficult to stay updated. This event not only highlighted new apps that young people and criminals are using that I wasn’t aware of but gave practical advice that I can pass on to the families I work with” – Attendee, 2022

In this bespoke training session, we will look briefly at key facts, statistics, and research about the internet and mobile technology and the way it’s used by children and young people. We will explore how understanding those risks and how to reduce them to a manageable level. We will also explore what to do when it does go wrong, how to minimise the impact of risky behaviour online and  how to support young people, who may regret their actions online.

We will look at the tools that are available to help us keep up to date on the current risks and explore how we can minimise the risks to this vulnerable group of children.

Learning 0utcomes

• Explore how important it is for young people to be online and connected to their peers
• Consider the positives and negatives of using the internet & the specific risks to children who have been adopted
• Identify what is being accessed by young people and look at the biggest risks
• Consider online safety for the adopter- dos and don’ts
• Explore how to sensitively, raise and discuss internet safety with young people
• Consider how social media is being used by perpetrators to target, groom, and abuse young people
• Think about why young people often do not disclose what’s happening to them.
• Identify how to report concerns around internet and get materials removed.
• Identify what controls are available, the effectiveness of them and where to locate and download the instructions for implementing
• Provide information on resources that can be accessed and used by young people, parents, and professionals

About the trainer

Tammie Redman

Tammie has over 36 years experience of delivering safeguarding children to a range of professionals and volunteers. Originally working with early years’ settings, local authorities, youth, faith provision and schools. Tammie has gained experience of developing, coordinating and delivering safeguarding children training to a multi-agency range of professionals and volunteers within a variety of organisations. Tammie regularly delivers safeguarding training to volunteers and professionals from Preschools, Nurseries, Schools, Childminders, Parish Councils, Local Authorities and the voluntary, private and faith sectors. Tammie was instrumental in developing the Milton Keynes Model Basic Safeguarding Children Course and for training professionals in a variety of agencies to become trainers.

She has co-developed screening tools for FGM and CSE and rolled out training, to support staff to deliver.

She currently delivers training online as well as face to face developing basic and specialist courses to meet the current safeguarding concerns faced by practitioners, parents and children including courses that focus on online safety with separate sessions for children, parents and professionals, tackling concerns from the different perspectives.

Instructions

A member of staff will be in touch with attendees one week prior to the event to share a pre-event delegate pack.

If you have any questions regarding this webinar, please contact us at info@cvaa.org.uk. We will aim to answer your query within two working days.

CVAA accept online payments only. In case you do not have instant access to your company card, we suggest using your personal card instead to book a training event and claim it back with your agency in your expenses. Requesting an invoice to pay for our standard practice events is not possible.

Who this is for

Adoption practitioners and managers (Voluntary Adoption Agencies, Regional Adoption Agencies and Local Authorities),  Independent Professionals and other professionals who are working with children.

Details

In this bespoke training session, we will consider key facts, statistics, and research about the internet and mobile technology and the way it’s used by children and young people. The internet saves us so much time and means information is at our fingertips, but also creates risks. As professionals, we need to identify the risks it may create for us, the risk it creates for adopters and also the risks for children.

“It was a real eye opener! Very real about the different areas where there are high risks. And giving practical tools to help educate and reduce the risk…” – Attendee, 27th July 2021

You will explore the potential risks and benefits of technology & the specific risks to children who have been adopted.

“It was extremely useful to raise my awareness around safety. I is really difficult to help parents with this put falls of internet safety and I now feel I can at least be of some use.” – Attendee, 8th March 2022

Learning 0utcomes

• Identify what is being accessed by young people and look at the biggest risks
• Consider online safety for the adopter- dos and don’ts
• Keeping your own social media safe and secure
• Raise and discuss internet safety with young people
• How perpetrators use the internet and mobile technology for targeting, grooming, and abusing young people
• Think about why young people often do not disclose what’s happening to them.
• Identify what controls can be used and where to locate the instructions for implementing
• How to report concerns around internet
• Provide information on resources that can be accessed and used by young people, parents, and professionals

You will leave the training equipped with:

• CPD certificate
• Copy of the presentation
• Links to supporting information
• Risk assessments for use with children and adopters
• Examples of internet agreements to be used
• Link to Dropbox with additional information and guidance including leaflets and toolkits

Instructions

A member of staff will be in touch with attendees one week prior to the event to share a pre-event delegate pack.

If you have any questions regarding this webinar, please contact us at info@cvaa.org.uk. We will aim to answer your query within two working days.

CVAA accept online payments only. In case you do not have instant access to your company card, we suggest using your personal card instead to book a training event and claim it back with your agency in your expenses. Requesting an invoice to pay for our standard practice events is not possible.