Training & events programme

OPEN TO ALL
As the UK’s leading membership organisation for professionals working across adoption, fostering and kinship care we want to equip professionals like you with the knowledge, best practices, and resources needed to improve the lives of children and young people. This is why we are launching a breakfast webinar series to help you get started in adoption, fostering and kinship care.

This open course course will enable participants to increase their understanding of the role of permanence in children's lives. By reflecting on best practice, it will help those attending to form permanence plans that are geared to improving the outcomes for children and young people, including their emotional, cognitive and physical development.

The good practice guide, Safeguarding children living with foster carers, Adopters and Special Guardians: Learning from case reviews 2007–2019, is based on a UK wide study of 52 case reviews concerning 98 children who had experienced serious harm while living with foster carers, adopters or special guardians. The study spans 12 years and is the first to focus exclusively on reviews of cases of children in alternative family care. It shines a spotlight on those issues particular to these children – selection and assessment of carers; support for children and carers; and the supervision and management of arrangements.

The Adoption and Special Guardianship Support Fund has been available to children living with special guardians since 2016, and its name was changed in 2023 with the publication of the National Kinship Care Strategy. Although the number of applications made on behalf of children living with special guardians is slowly increasing, the number of applications is still considerably lower than those made for adopted children.

This half day course is aimed at professionals who work with children and families who may benefit from a therapeutic intervention and would like to increase their understanding of different therapeutic approaches. Foster carers, kinship carers and adoptive parents who are considering different options for therapeutic support may also benefit from this training.

The PACE parenting approach was developed by Dr Dan Hughes for parents and carers of children who are adopted or live in foster or kinship care families. PACE stands for Playfullness, Acceptance. Curiosity, and Empathy and is an attitude has proved to be helpful for many professionals working in adoption, fostering or kinship care services.

This course will explore the support needs of special guardianship families, how to carry out assessment of support needs which are sensitive to the needs of kinship care families, and the how these needs may be most effectively met. This course will explore; best practice, regulation and practice guidance, assessments, eligibility criteria and access to therapeutic support services, the impact of early trauma, identity issues, and the benefits and challenges of contact.

This open course will offer a comprehensive approach to undertaking sibling assessments. It will explore who the key contributors to sibling assessments are and how assessors can plan assessments and engage these contributors in the process. Most importantly it will explore how to gain the views of the children, observe sibling interactions and draw conclusions on the quality of sibling relationships as well as focusing on the individual needs of each child and of the sibling group.

The Secure Base Model is a strengths-based framework for therapeutic caregiving informed by developments and research into attachment theory and child placement. It focuses on the interactions between a child and their caregiver that can support a child to experience greater security and build resilience.

This two hour training will provide an overview of the legal and practice issues regarding Convention Adoption for children being placed abroad. There will then be ample time to discuss issues regarding Convention Adoption overseas cases during a case study and group discussion.