Recruitment & Assessment

Recruitment

Recruiting and assessing more adopters, particularly for the children who wait the longest, is a key priority for VAAs and all adoption agencies given the growing sufficiency gap across the country.

To help our members better understand national and regional recruitment trends CVAA’s team produces annual data analysis dashboards based on the Coram’s Children’s and Social Care Secretariat data

In addition, CVAA brings together marketing leads from across agencies to discuss common challenges in recruiting and assessing adopters as well as working together to create recruitment tools for particular groups of children. This has included creating adopter-led guides for individuals considering adopting sibling groups and children with additional needs. To find out more about the CVAA Marketing Group, please contact alice.talbot@cvaa.org.uk.

VAAs also contribute to national recruitment campaigns, such as You Can Adopt. The @Youcanadopt campaigns can all be found on You Can Adopt.   There is a wide range of freely available podcasts and resources which you can use and these can also be branded to use in local campaigns and on social media.

National Adoption Week is the third week of October each year and is another opportunity for agencies to draw on national materials in their own recruitment. More information about National Adoption Week campaigns can be found here.

CVAA also contributes to mystery shopping projects designed to improve the quality of initial interactions with voluntary agencies.

Improving diversity in adoption

Tackling adopter and sector diversity is one of CVAA’s three strategic priorities laid out in our 2024-27 strategy. We are committed to supporting our members with this important work and are currently developing proposals for a number of projects focused on this area. To find out more, please contact alice.talbot@cvaa.org.uk.

The CVAA Practice Programme has a number of sessions focused on supporting agencies with improving their recruitment and assessment processes to attract more diverse adopters. A full list of sessions can be found here. Additional training is also available from Adoption England. More information about this can be found here.

CVAA supports the Black and Asian Leadership Initiative (BALI) which aims to supports staff within agencies and bring much needed diversity to the adoption sector and has encouraged VAA representatives to go on this course. If you are interested in being involved in future cohorts, please contact info@cvaa.org.uk.

VAAs are also proud to have fed into the work of the Black Adoption Project in London  which aims to understand and respond to the many complex factors that impact adoption in the Black community.

Assessment

Statutory guidance on the adoption process is available here. For those who are completing Child Permanence Reports, you can find guidance and links to relevant resources here.

A good practice guide focused on assessing motivations to adopt can be found here.

Details about recent and upcoming changes to core forms is also available from Coram BAAF here.

CVAA also runs a number of sessions on assessment, including focused on best practice when assessing adopters interested in siblings or coming back to adopt a second time. You can find the latest sessions here.

First4Adoption has an overview of the adoption process which may be useful to share with prospective adopters.