Adoption
Getting it right for each and every child in Scotland in need of care and protection is at the heart of CELCIS's permanence improvement and trauma informed work.
We recognise that what ‘getting it right’ looks like is unique to each child’s developmental needs and personal family circumstances. You can read more about this by exploring our Permanence and Care Excellence (PACE) resource, which centres on developing practice and improvement around permanence decision making.
For a small number of children permanence means legal adoption, which is a deeply significant lifelong decision. Adoption practice demands sensitive holistic assessment, building relationships of trust and lifelong child development informed support for everyone involved, including the child, their parents, their brothers and sisters, practitioners and prospective adoptive families.
Linda Davidson, Permanence Consultant at CELCIS, is Chair of the national Adoption Task Force, which aims to enable and support the development of best adoptive practice for all concerned. More information on the Task Force is available at the link below.
Read more about the Adoption Task Force
Resources
The latest evaluation and research in to adoption has produced a wide variety of reports, articles and statistics. These include:
Adoption Week Scotland Practitioner Workshop presentations
Watch the presentations from our Practitioner Workshop held during Adoption Week Scotland 2019, including a talk from Richard Rose, Director of Child Trauma Intervention Services, presents on Therapeutic Life Story Work.
Towards modernising adoption in Scotland: A focused mapping review (2024)
Adoption Barometer report
2024
Adoption and permanence planning in Scotland
Mapping adoption support in Scotland - Parts one and two
Latest blog posts
Whose experiences are we relying on to explain what the reality of adoption feels like for adoptees?
In this blog post, Dr Polly Cowan, a Practice Manager at Scottish Adoption and Fostering, explains how the organisation’s Young Ambassadors developed a new…
Developing a new resource to help support adoptive families caring for brothers and sisters
In this blog post, Dr Christine Jones, an adoptive parent and researcher who worked to ensure the rights of care experienced brothers and sisters are protected…
When data tells us the what but not the why
CELCIS’s Data Lead, Micky Anderson, takes a look at the latest social work statistics in Scotland for clues about what is happening in the support for children…
“It’s about…believing our own words”: Bringing together the voices of care experienced people
Rebekah Pierre is a care experienced writer, author, social worker, and editor of a new anthology, ‘Free Loaves on Fridays: The Care System As Told By People…
Other useful resources on adoption
- Recent developments in adoption services give new insights for improving practice in Scotland 2024
- Care Inspectorate Fostering and adoption statistical bulletin 2018–19
- The annual report of Scotland’s Adoption Register 2018-2019
- BBC Radio 4 podcast series - gain insight into all the roles involved in adoption from birth parent to grandparents
- Post-adoption support and interventions for adoptive families: Best practice approaches, Julie Selwyn, an expertise for the German Research Centre on Adoption, published 2017
- Why am I in care? A model for communication with children about entry to care that promotes psychological safety and adjustment - Adoption & Fostering, published 2016
- Literature search on Concurrency, published 2016
- Independent evidence review of post-adoption support interventions - Department for Education research report, published June 2016
- The Contact after adoption study: Stage 3 of a longitudinal study of adoptive and birth families, Centre for Research on Children and Families, University of East Anglia
- Keeping the promise: The case for adoption support and preservation, Susan Livingston Smith, published March 2014
- Corum: Outcomes of Concurrent Planning: Summary of Findings, published October 2013
- The Case for Concurrency Planning, Carol Wassell, CELCIS, published December 2012
- What makes adoptive family life work? Durham University School of Applied Social Sciences, May 2010
- It’s time to re-think mental health services for children in care, and those adopted from care, Michael Tarren-Sweeney, published 2010