Your Adoption Journey

3. Your Assessment Once you move into stage two you will start your assessment. This will consist of a series of visits from your social worker to gather information about you and your family. The purpose of this is that they will analyse the information and prepare a Prospective Adopters Report (PAR) to present to an independent panel. This report will include a wide range of information such as your childhood, life growing up with various family members, significant life events, education, employment, health, support network (family and friends), your home, local community, finances, lifestyle, why you want to adopt, expectations & experience of parenting and any other relevant information for the assessment. This will help to determine your suitability to adopt and explore what child, or children, suits you and your family. Your social worker will meet with you to provide information, outline how long it will take and start planning the assessment. The assessment is...

Registering and checks So you have found an agency you like and have registered with them and you adoption journey now begins! Prepare yourself as you will need a lot of patience as you enter the adoption process. Once you register your interest with an agency you will move into what is known as Stage One. The agency will gather some basic information from you about you, your circumstances and you family. They may look at your home, ask about finances, what family life looks like, ask about your support network or ask about your experience with children. We are fortunate that we have a lot of experience with a varied age range of children. If you do not have any contact with children personally or professionally then you could always volunteer somewhere to give you some. This is the stage where the agency will also do some preliminary checks before they can approve you to move on to Stage Two. Be honest at this stage because things that are not disclosed and come out lat...