Conference Poster: Scotland’s Adoption Services

The text of this poster reads:

Who Are We?

Scottish Government funded project to support social work practitioners, foster carers and prospective adopters in meeting the needs of children and young people in Scotland. The project has provided a service since 2011, with over 900 children moving to adoptive families as a result of adoption agencies’ engagement with this resource.

Supporting Sibling Connections

SAR is hugely committed to supporting the recruitment of adoptive families for sibling groups, to keep brothers and sisters together where this is safe to do so and ensure the maintenance of lifelong connections. SAR is an active member of Stand Up For Siblings and of the Community of Practice for Siblings. In all support provided by SAR to adoption agencies and prospective adopters SAR provides advice and training on how the workforce can support families to care for brothers and sisters, advocating for adoption support to enable larger sibling groups to remain together.

Supporting The Workforce

• SAR provide bespoke training for all staff working in adoption services.
• Host an online community of practice to allow workers to share best practice, encourages peer support and cross agency working.
• Research Webinars have been part of the support SAR provide to inform practice working towards achieving a good childhood for adopted children.
• SAR’s website has a dedicated practitioners area that we use to share resources, training, relevant publications and cross agency relationship building.
• Our Practitioner’s Newsletter shares data regarding the number of children and families on the register, provides information on training, updates on legislation when appropriate and provides links to online resources.

Whole Family Support

SAR works directly with prospective adopters and in 2020 we held a focus group to understand how we could better support and meet their needs. Since listening to what matters to families we now:

• Share a quarterly Newsletter in which we provide information on training that adopters can attend to support their adoption journey and a timetable of events hosted by SAR. We also use this as a space to discuss specific groups of children: children over age 4; sibling groups; children of multiple ethnicities and children with profound support needs. The aim of this is to educate adopters about the needs of the children who are waiting to be adopted.
• Information sessions about the in person events that can be attended online as a group. This helps the adopters to feel informed, get to know other adopters who will be attending the event before hand and eases anxiety around attending these events.
• SAR also provide group and family specific training around the use of the online register and how to get the best out of the service.
• SAR also have a dedicated space on our website for prospective families so they can easily source relevant resources.