Getting the best results

As a family finding social worker, you will have invested significant care, thought and effort in profiling a child for whom you are family finding. This is to offer advice on how to make the profile work for you by managing enquiries efficiently and securing a family for a child.

Once you have placed a child’s profile in Be My Parent or elsewhere, you need to ensure that you are set up to receive enquiries and to respond to them promptly. It is probably better to over plan than miss an opportunity to respond to a family that might be the family you are looking for.

Here at Be My Parent, we frequently hear direct feedback from families on their experience of responding to profiles of children. Some say that they have not had their expression of interest acknowledged or answered. They are then unsure of what is being looked for in relation to that child and whether they could be considered or not. They might also feel hurt or angry when there is significant national recruitment activity encouraging adopters to come forward. If a child is subsequently re-profiled and an adopter has not had a previous enquiry acknowledged they are likely to feel additionally distressed.

Our aim at Be My Parent is to help you write a profile that shows the unique character and needs for every child. Hopefully, if this is successful, you will then receive a high number of expressions of interest. This could mean that some social workers are overwhelmed by the responses and struggle to reply to everyone. As a strategy to manage this, you might choose to only respond to those that look interesting and ignore the rest! We would strongly advise against this.

We are concerned that this could harm the confidence that people have in the adoption system and gives people the impression that adopters and foster carers are not really in short supply. Sadly, many might not respond to children’s profiles again and could potentially give up on their plans to adopt or foster a child altogether.

We hope these few suggestions might help!

1. Prepare your diary and your team colleagues

Social workers place a child’s profile in a magazine or online and give their name as the key contact. You need to ensure you are available to respond to calls and if possible, make a second named person available.

• Make sure you are available and clear some time in your diary in anticipation of getting some enquiries, even if it is an hour at the end of each day to respond to new enquiries received.
• Make sure that reception /switchboard/duty/team colleagues are aware that you might be getting calls about this child so that they can help anyone ringing in when you are not there. Give them a short written briefing so that they can tell enquirers what will happen next.
• Keep a log of all enquirers and respond to all of them, even if they do not appear to be who you are looking for! You might require this summary at a later date for Panel and/or any future reconsideration of the plan or family that is needed.
• Check your emails regularly if you have given an e mail address for enquirers.
• If you have featured children on the Be My Parent website, log in regularly to your Be My Parent account to view details of enquiries received. We can help you with this if you need any advice.

Additionally you might also wish to undertake the following:

2. Prepare a brief information pack which includes:

• More information about the child/ren than the profile gave, but which still respects confidentiality and the child’s privacy.
• Include a list of criteria for short listing being as flexible as possible so that potential families are ruled in rather than ruled out at this early stage.
• A timeline of how you are going to make your decision about a possible family for the child, for example if any of these dates are already known:
  - closing date for interest
  - date for short listing
  - approximate timescale for visiting those shortlisted/matching meeting.
• A pro-forma which any enquirer can complete and send back to you re-affirming their interest in the child/ren and their wish to still be considered. This ‘Expression of Interest’ form could ask for some basic information of the enquirers that will give you a fuller picture of them.

3. Send this pack out to all enquirers

• This will mean that every enquirer will have their interest acknowledged and be reassured that you know they are interested in the child featured.
• Once they have read more about the child/ren, they may withdraw their interest so you will not need to ‘counsel them out’.
• You will gain time and be able to manage responses at your own pace because they have had their initial interest acknowledged.
• When they return their expression of interest forms, you will have a shorter and more detailed list of enquirers than you started with – who hopefully have a better understanding of the child and their needs.
• Remember to keep enquirers up to date about their suitability.
• This will then feel a lot more manageable and all enquirers will have received a good service from you and your agency!

Louise Hocking - Director of Child Placement Services, BAAF

Last updated: 07 December 11

Back to previous