Cracks?

This week has seen some good and bad from the adoption agency. I think there may be some cracks in their seemingly well organised processes.

We received an email from the ‘Training Team’ about the preparation group we are booked on next week, which detailed where it is and what time to get there, along with a brief outline of what we will be doing. It also told us we needed to have read the corresponding sections of the Adoption Workbook we’ve been given in Stage 1 to gain the full benefit.

Wait. What? Adoption Workbook? What’s that then?

I queried this as, with the exception of the workbook which we had to fill in and hand back as part of Stage 1, we hadn’t been given anything except a few handouts.

Apparently we had been given the BAAF “Preparing to Adopt – Applicant’s Workbook” at the Introduction to Adoption day we went on back in July. Err… No we haven’t, can you send us that then? “Yes we’ll get one sent out today”.

5 Minutes later – “You were definitely given one at the Introduction to Adoption day, we don’t have one to send you. Don’t worry you don’t need it it’ll all be covered in the course”

“Err… no we definitely weren’t, if we don’t need one why did you specifically say we needed to read it, what are we meant to do then? We feel like we’ll be at a disadvantage on the preparation course now” (In the mean time I’d found it on the BAAF website to see if I could get one myself, although they have no indication on delivery time)

“We’ve managed to get one from one of the social workers and we’ll send it to you, it’s been read and has her name on it but it’s otherwise fine”. Great… at least we’ll have it though! (I ordered the one from BAAF anyway).

It arrived two days later and suddenly all became clear. If only we had this when we were filling in the original workbook! It contains a fount of knowledge, reading recommendations and key excerpts from other material (some of which we’d already purchased anyway). This is what they base the training on, I can even see where they got half the stuff they’ve told us at the two training days from, almost word for word.

Neither me nor my partner remember them giving these books out during the Introduction day, the group of people on the course were together for the whole day with the exception of the last few minutes where we had one-to-ones with one of the adoption team. Were we meant to receive it then? Did they forget to give it to everyone, or was it just us?

Anyway, they saved themselves, it would have been really handy to have more time to digest the amount of information in this book, but we’ve got a week for both of us to read it through and take it in. I’m a slow reader but it should be possible, a lot of it we’ve already seen from other sources anyway.

The version they sent us was the 2010 version, the version from BAAF is the 2014 version, updated to fit in with the new 2 stage process. They appear to contain mostly the same information but with a few key differences in places. I think we’ll take both with us next week just in case.

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