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2024 Annual Adoption Lecture: The Adopters Advocacy Project

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2024 Annual Adoption Lecture: The Adopters Advocacy Project

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The Adopters Advocacy Project

Presenter: Professor Laura Machin, Lancaster University.

Professor Machin – herself both an adopted child and an adoptive parent – sits on the All Party Parliamentary Group on Adoption and Permanence. She launched the Adopters Advocacy project to highlight the voices and needs of prospective adopters and adopters during the adoption process and after a child has been placed, without diminishing the needs of adoptees and their birth families. Her current project focuses on the mental health and support needs of adopters, based on a series of focus groups with adopters.

Mae’r Athro Machin – a gafodd ei mabwysiadu yn blentyn ac sydd nawr yn rhiant sydd wedi mabwysiadu – yn aelod o’r Grŵp Seneddol Hollbleidiol ar Fabwysiadu a Sefydlogrwydd. Lansiodd y prosiect Adopters Advocacy i amlygu lleisiau ac anghenion darpar fabwysiadwyr a mabwysiadwyr yn ystod y broses fabwysiadu ac ar ôl i blentyn gael eu mabwysiadu gan sicrhau ar yr un pryd nad oes llai o sylw yn cael ei roi i anghenion plant sy’n cael eu mabwysiadu a’u teuluoedd biolegol.

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The Adopters Advocacy Project | ExChange Wales, Annual Adoption Lecture 2024

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2022 Annual Adoption Lecture: UK innovations in adoption support and their impact

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2022 Annual Adoption Lecture: UK innovations in adoption support and their impact

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UK innovations in adoption support and their impact

This lecture will explore the UK policy and research context for and recent innovations in adoption support with potential relevance to both adopted and other care experienced children & their parents and carers, including the learning from COVID. It will also identify the ongoing challenges for support, whether provided regionally or locally, by social workers, health professionals or others, and by single agency or multi-agency teams.

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This lecture will explore the UK policy and research context for and recent innovations in adoption support with potential relevance to both adopted and other care experienced children & their parents and carers, including the learning from COVID. It will also identify the ongoing challenges for support, whether provided regionally or locally, by social workers, health professionals or others, and by single agency or multi-agency teams.

Speaker: Katy Burch is an assistant director at the Institute of Public Care at Oxford Brookes University and a leading UK researcher of support for children, young people and families affected by adoption and care. She has recently led 2 major UK studies exploring the impact of the Adoption Support Framework (Wales) and the Adoption Support Fund (England).

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This lecture will explore the UK policy and research context for and recent innovations in adoption support with potential relevance to both adopted and other care experienced children & their parents and carers, including the learning from COVID.

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2021 Annual Adoption Lecture: Respecting children’s identities and relationships in adoption

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2021 Annual Adoption Lecture: Respecting children’s identities and relationships in adoption

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Respecting children’s identities and relationships in adoption

Annual Adoption Lecture 2021: Respecting children’s relationships and identities in adoption, with Professor Beth Neil.

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Annual Adoption Lecture 2021: Respecting children's relationships and identities in adoption, with Professor Beth Neil.

For the large majority of children, adoption confers lifelong relationships and a sense of belonging in the adoptive family. But adoption also involves the legal severance of the child from the birth family and often the loss of key relationships with birth family members and others, including foster carers, who have had important roles in the child's life. With this comes the loss of the child's identity as a member of their birth family community. Each of these losses can have lifelong impact. This presentation explores these losses and ways in which they might be eased, including the role of adoptive parents in providing a secure base from which children can explore their identities and relationships.

The lecture will be based on a chapter in a book that Prof Neil has recently written:

Beek, Mary and Neil, Elsbeth (2020) Respecting children's relationships and identities in adoption. In: The Routledge Handbook of Adoption. Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, Abingdon and New York, pp. 76-89. ISBN 978-1-138-36250-5
Presented by
Professor Beth Neil
School of Social Work
University of East Anglia

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Annual Adoption Lecture 2021: Respecting children's relationships and identities in adoption, with Professor Beth Neil. For the large majority of children, adoption confers lifelong relationships and a sense of belonging in the adoptive family.

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2020 Annual Adoption Lecture: Supporting the Sibling relationships of children in care in Scotland

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2020 Annual Adoption Lecture: Supporting the Sibling relationships of children in care in Scotland

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Annual Adoption Lecture 2019: Birth family contact after adoption, Learning from the Northern Irish experience

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Annual Adoption Lecture 2019: Birth family contact after adoption, Learning from the Northern Irish experience

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2019's annual adoption lecture was courtesy of Dr Mandi MacDonald from Queens University Belfast talking about adoptive parents’ experiences of birth family contact.

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This year's annual adoption lecture was courtesy of Dr Mandi MacDonald from Queens University Belfast talking about adoptive parents' experiences of birth family contact.

Speaker

The lecture focused on Dr MacDonalds own research in Northern Ireland where the adoption landscape differs from that in Wales (and England). In Northern Ireland most of the children adopted last year, were adopted by their Foster Carers, which might go some way to explain why there is also a much greater prevalence for face to face birth family contact. Similar practice in New South Wales in Australia was mentioned, where more formal birth family contact arrangements are made as part of the adoption process.

Annotated Map

Research conducted in partnership with Adoption UK in Norther Ireland, produced statistics on birth family contact rates across the UK. These clearly show that Northern Ireland is leading on face to face contact, with over 70% of families having some face to face contact. Where as in England and Wales this face to face contact arrangement is minimal, with the primary contact being 'letterbox'.

Findings from her study show that broadly speaking adopted parents thought it was much better for the adopted child to have contact with their birth family, although it wasn't easy to arrange or manage. One comment from an adopted parent included, that the most helpful contact is when the children get a realistic view of the birth families, warts and all, to help keep fantasies at bay. Another highlighted that sometime their children wanted to check up on their birth families just to make sure they were okay. A key message from the research was that we need to think about children's experience of adversity and trauma and how that plays out in contact. There needs to be family-focused informed contact with support before, during and after.

Image from lecture

After a thoroughly engaging and interesting lecture there was time for a few questions form the audience before the lecture finished with quotes from young people.

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Annual Adoption Lecture 2019: Birth family contact after adoption, Learning from the Northern Irish experience

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This year's annual adoption lecture was courtesy of Dr Mandi MacDonald from Queens University Belfast talking about adoptive parents' experiences of birth family contact. The lecture focused on Dr MacDonalds own research in Northern Ireland where the adoption landscape differs from that in Wales (and England).

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A home for me?    A comparative review of the value of different forms of permanence for children – Adoption, SGOs and Fostering

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A home for me?    A comparative review of the value of different forms of permanence for children – Adoption, SGOs and Fostering

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Outcomes of Open Adoption from Care

Presents new and vivid findings concerning the extensive vulnerability of this population of children at the point of entry to care

Shows that there is much to learn at an international level from the experiences of those involved in mandatory face-to-face post adoption contact - a uniquely Australian policy

Provides evidence which shows how continuing post-adoption contact was experienced by adoptees and their adoptive parents.

This book is open access, which means that you have free and unlimited access

About this book

This Open Access book presents unique evidence from the first comprehensive study of the outcomes of open adoption from care in Australia. It contributes to the international debate concerning the advantages and disadvantages of face-to-face post adoption contact with birth families.

The chapters assess whether adoption provides a better chance of permanence and more positive outcomes than long-term foster care for abused and neglected children in care who cannot safely return to their birth families. They also explore whether open adoption can avoid some of the detrimental consequences of past policies in which adoption was shrouded in secrecy and children frequently grew up with a conflicted sense of identity. The book will appeal to policy makers, practitioners and students of social policy, social work, the law, psychology and psychiatry. It should also be of interest to adult adoptees and adoptive parents, whose experiences it reflects.

Reviews

"This book helps to fill some gaps in research about the longer-term outcomes of children adopted from out-of-home care. It brings together the findings from a constructive jigsaw of research methods, based on what was possible to obtain for adoptive parents and the children from case file records, an online survey, and interviews with both the adoptees and adoptive parents. Its particular value is in the follow-up, on average 18 years, after the adoption, and the focus on permanence, belonging and the adoptees' contact and relationships with members of their birth family. It provides some important insights about the value and challenges of open adoption."

- Dr Judy Cashmore, Professor of Socio-Legal Research and Policy, University of Sydney, Australia

"Adoption has come to represent the best of what we do in establishing a family for life for a child who may not otherwise have had one. And in some respects, it represents the worst of what we do in severing a child from their family of origin. Adoption creates both a fundamental sense of hope for the future but can also create a profound sense of uncertainty, loss and grief. The reality and detail of these issues as they work out over time is set out in an inspiring and detailed way. We need to explore, reflect and learn from all that it tells us."

- Dr John Simmonds OBE, Director of Policy, Research and Development, CoramBAAF, United Kingdom

"The book is an important read for social work practitioners, therapists, child and family court judiciary and legal professionals, academics and students, specifically those interested or working in the areas of adoption, foster care, identity, child attachment and relationships and resilience, intervention and support following adversity. Although set within the context of the adoption policy in New South Wales it has international relevance. The book will no doubt be of importance for many years - potentially decades - due to the global importance and enduring nature of the topic."

- Julie Young, Research Fellow, University of East Anglia, United Kingdom

Authors and Affiliations

The Rees Centre, Department of Education, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

Harriet Ward, Helen Trivedi

Barnardos Australia, Sydney, Australia

Lynne Moggach, Susan Tregeagle

About the authors

Harriet Ward is an Honorary Research Fellow at the Rees Centre, University of Oxford and Emeritus Professor of Child and Family Research at Loughborough University, UK.

Lynne Moggach was Executive Specialist of Adoption at Barnardos Australia until she retired in 2019.

Susan Tregeagle was Senior Manager of Research and Advocacy at Barnardos Australia and Adjunct Senior Lecturer at the University of Sydney until she retired in 2019.

Helen Trivedi is a Research Assistant at the Rees Centre, University of Oxford, UK.

Bibliographic Information

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Outcomes of Open Adoption from Care Presents new and vivid findings concerning the extensive vulnerability of this population of children at the point of entry to care Shows that there is much to learn at an international level from the experiences of those involved in mandatory face-to-face post adoption contact - a uniquely Australian policy Provides evidence which shows how continuing post-adoption contact was experienced by adoptees and their adoptive parents.

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This includes an evaluation of TESSA by Strathclyde University

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Association for Fostering, Kinship & Adoption Scotland

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Research at AFKA Scotland

AFKA Scotland's research team is involved in a number of research projects across Scotland, and provides regular updates to members about new and emerging Scottish, UK and international research developments. Our researchers also provide specialist input for all our Forums and Consortia. Members who are looking for research to help inform thinking, planning and decision-making in practice or policy-making can contact AFKA Scotland for information and advice.

Our researchers work with a range of universities and academic partners, including recent collaborations with the Universities of Stirling, Strathclyde, Glasgow, Dundee, Edinburgh and Lancaster. They are also part of a range of other research networks, including the CoramBAAF Research Group Advisory Committee.

Explore our Research Projects:
Additional Research Resources:
Additional useful resources, including subscription to Adoption & Fostering journal and online access to the Journal of Social Work and Qualitative Social Work, are also available to AFKA Scotland's corporate members as part of the collaborative agreement with CoramBAAF, via the CoramBAAF website.

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Research : Association for Fostering, Kinship & Adoption Scotland

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Research at AFKA Scotland AFKA Scotland's research team is involved in a number of research projects across Scotland, and provides regular updates to members about new and emerging Scottish, UK and international research developments. Our researchers also provide specialist input for all our Forums and Consortia.