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This short guide looks at some of the most common big adoption questions that adopted children ask, and explores the feelings and worries that can lie behind a child’s questions, with useful suggested dialogues.

A later life letter is one written by a social worker to a child who is being adopted, to help the child make sense of their past, but it is intended to be read later in the child’s life - a difficult and delicate task even for experienced workers. This Good Practice Guide focuses on the practicalities of writing a later life letter.

The importance of maintaining sibling relationships is widely recognised, but it is not always easy to find families willing and able to adopt sibling groups. This Good Practice Guide examines how adoption agency staff and children’s social workers handle the adoption process for large sibling groups, with an emphasis on practices and policies which may help or hinder prospective sibling group adopters and the children they wish to adopt.

The English Romanian Adoptees (ERA) study is a remarkable exploration of the experiences of children whose early lives in Romanian institutions were unimaginably poor and who were then adopted into English families with all the material, emotional and social advantages that this brings. This publication summarises the policy and practice implications of this internationally known study.

This study looks at a pioneering scheme - the Community Alternative Placement Scheme (CAPS) - set up by NCH Action for Children in Scotland to offer fostering placements for young people whose behaviour would place them beyond the limits of ‘normal’ foster care and who might otherwise be placed in secure care. The revealing findings are invaluable for foster care practitioners and managers.

The bears is a delightfully simple tool that can help build conversations about feelings in countless ways. The 48 colourful, cartoon bears depicted on the cards have universal appeal. Their facial expressions and body language convey a range of feelings. As there are no words on the cards they are extremely accessible to young children and those with literacy or language difficulties. As a tool The bears cards cross cultural, language, literacy, racial, age and gender barriers.