About CVAA

Vision, Mission, Purpose and Values

CVAA’s vision and mission reflect the unique role we and our members have in changing the lives of children and supporting their families. They are the bedrock of our work and drive everything we do to enable all children to thrive in the loving families they deserve.

Our vision: A modern adoption system across the UK which provides lifelong care and support for all the children who need it, validating their identity and ensuring their early relationships are respected through to adulthood.

Our mission: To enable VAAs, in partnership with others across social care, to play an active part in creating a system which is focused on the rights of all children to lifelong care and stability, supports their families and provides the choice of modern adoption for all those who need it.

Our purpose: To support member VAAs to evolve and thrive against the changing backdrop of the adoption sector in order to deliver improvements for children and families across all of our strategic priority areas.

Our values: Children First; Adopted people and their families are at the heart of everything we do; Respecting diversity; Support for adopters; Rooted in evidence; Stronger together; Ambitious for improvement; Collaboration and partnership.

What we do

CVAA delivers a set of services which form the basis of our support to members and our contribution to the wider adoption sector. These are:

• Advocacy, influencing and policy reform: developing bold policy ideas, gathering new evidence and building effective relationships with partners and stakeholders to deliver change.
• Practice development: through the CVAA Practice Programme we deliver training to a wide range of practitioners from across the adoption sector, ranging from expert-led sessions to practice-sharing workshops.
• Data, information and communications: keeping members informed with data and insights to support their decision making and forward planning.
• Networking and collaboration: creating forums for members to come together to share best practice, ideas and problem-solve as a collective.

Our work is centred around our 3 strategic priorities laid out in our 2024-2027 strategy.

Cross sector collaboration

CVAA plays an active part in national decision-making forums and working groups, and meets regularly with ministers and senior officials to ensure our policy work has the maximum impact.

CVAA’s CEO Satwinder Sandhu is Vice Chair of the National Adoption Recruitment Programme Board (NARPB) which exists to develop and deliver a national recruitment strategy to meet the needs of children with a plan for adoption. CVAA also co-chairs the NARPB’s Ambition working groups to raise the profile of adoption, increase adopter and workforce diversity, and improve the preparation and experience of adopters.

CVAA members participate on a number of additional cross-sector groups to improve the adoption system for families, on areas including early permanence, matching, maintaining children’s relationships and access to records.

Our history

The voluntary adoption sector came together to form CVAA in 1993, in order to strengthen agencies’ collective voice and to enable a coordinated approach to pricing services.

For over 30 years we have supported member agencies, advocated on their behalf and provided a forum for networking, practice-sharing and collaboration.

In recent years, we have been at the forefront of national adoption policy.

From 2014-16 we managed the funding for the Expansion Grant programme, which was a significant investment by Government in the excellent services that voluntary adoption agencies provide to vulnerable children and adoptive families. We worked closely with the Department for Education to provide over £10 million across the voluntary sector. Using this investment, our members were particularly successful in placing a greater number of children with special placement needs and in further developing their high-quality adoption services, including concurrency and child-specific recruitment.

From 2016-19 we delivered secretariat and data support to the Adoption and Special Guardianship Leadership Board (ASGLB) (discontinued in 2023). Our secretariat team worked in partnership with Andrew Christie, Chair of the ASGLB, and the Department for Education to deliver the sector-led quarterly data collection and produce intelligence to support the work of the Board.

From 2016-18 we used a Practice Improvement Fund grant from the Department for Education to develop the practice-sharing model that has evolved into our Practice Development Programme. The Practice Programme has become a key element of our service to CVAA members and subscribers.

Between 2016-19 we worked closely with the Department for Education and their delivery partners on the regionalisation programme, which saw LAs come together to form regional adoption agencies (RAAs), keeping the voice of the voluntary sector front and centre throughout the process of regionalisation.

Between 2021-23 we coordinated member views to influence the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care in England to ensure that the interests of adopted children were considered and incorporated. The final report reflected some themes that CVAA has long advocated for, such as the need for better support around maintaining relationships for all care-experienced children.

Since 2021 we have been at the forefront of championing the modernisation of adoption, propelled by concerns about falling numbers of children with a plan for adoption year-on-year. In 2022 we invested in independent analysis looking at the social value of adoption, and campaigned to highlight the substantial value created by adoption to those who are adopted as well as wider society. The analysis found that adopted children are likely to have better outcomes than children in alternative permanent arrangements, while having savings to society of at least £1.3million for every child adopted.

Since 2022 a prime focus area for us has been advocating for greater support around children and young people’s relationships and emerging identities. To this end we launched our vision for ‘My People’, a network and hub dedicated to preserving children’s lifelong connections with their birth families and other key people in their lives, developed in close collaboration with people with lived experience of adoption and practitioners. Aspects of My People, such as the development of a culture change programme and network of culture change champions, have since been taken forward by Adoption England and we continue to seek funding to develop the online hub.

In recent years, our membership events have featured speakers who play key roles in the adoption and permanence landscape, including key Ministers and Shadow Ministers as well as senior civil servants leading on adoption policy from across the UK.