Permanence and Post Adoption Team

The Permanence and Post Adoption Team ensures that all children, without delay, will have a permanent home with a loving family to enable them to reach their full potential. The Permanence Team operates to ensure that children who are currently in the care system are supported in all stages of the process as they move to the security and stability of a permanent adoptive family.

Children and young people come into the care of the Trust for a number of reasons; parental neglect, risk of abuse, or because parents were suffering long term mental illness, to name a few.

Cases are received from the Children and Families (CAF) Teams after adoption is determined as being in the child’s best interests.

These children who are adopted often require additional support throughput their childhood years. Post adoption support is available through the team for any child who has been adopted and lives within the South Eastern Trust area, to enable children to have their holistic needs met in their adoptive families. Narrative work, support with therapeutic parenting and additional training are some of the supports available. This is delivered in conjunction with SET Connects Psychology.

The key aims of the Permanence and Post Adoption team is to:

• Be responsible for the child’s care planning through the court process and onto adoption when rehabilitation home and alternative family options have been ruled out
• Find suitable adoptive families for children who need permanence via adoption
• Ensure that children/young people move without delay from an uncertain care placement to the security of a safe and stable permanent family if they cannot be safely returned to their birth family
• Work with the children helping them understand their past and the reasons why they cannot live with their parents.
• Prepare the children for moving to a new placement
• Maintain healthy links between birth family and adopted child through contact when this is in the child’s best interests