Turning The Tables – IRO

If you’re a foster carer you’ll be overly familiar with what an IRO is. If you’re an adopter you may not know. Every child that is in care will usually have an IRO – Independent Reviewing Officer. They are meant to be there, amongst other things, to ensure that the best interests of the child are being represented and that everyone is doing their jobs properly. Every few weeks/months a child in care will have a LAC (Looked After Child) review – which is a meeting that is meant to have all the main people involved with the child there

Where’s the Positivity?

Sometimes we concentrate too much on the negatives, some call this pessimism, others realism. We shout when we want to change something, but stay silent when things are good. It is seen everywhere including with adopters. I am guilty of this. I have written many posts detailing the bad time we had during our matching process, and although I have attempted to keep my posts balanced I’m not sure I have always managed to accomplish this. During our approval process we met only two social workers who we felt didn’t do their jobs to the best of their ability. Who didn’t do what

When Things Go Wrong

In the current adoption climate adopters being linked with a child and then having that link severed is becoming all the more common. I’m going to revisit the worst part of our adoption journey from a less emotional point of view, in the hope that our experiences will help others that may be going through the same: The time when our provisional link fell through and we managed to retrieve it again. During our adoption training we were given the impression that there are 3 fundamental things which will help lead to a more stable adoption: Communication, honesty, and trust. The three things