Notice to families: Birmingham working towards becoming a Regionalised Adoption Agency (RAA)
If you are currently receiving a service from Birmingham Children’s Trust Adoption Agency, you will not be affected by any of the changes that are taking place.
We want you to hear about what is happening from us first and if you have any questions, you can contact your social worker. We will keep the website updated of our progress as we continue on our regional adoption agency (RAA) journey.
Letter to adopters
The following letter was shared today, 11 January 2021, with Birmingham Children's Trust adopters.
Dear Adopter,
We want you to be the first to know that Birmingham Children’s Trust are looking to move to a Regional Adoption Agency in 2021. Some of you may be aware that all the Local Authority Adoption agencies across the West Midlands have already moved to the regional adoption agency model. The reason for this is that the Government’s Regional Adoption Agency (RAA) programme began in 2015 to help ensure that all children are given the earliest opportunity of finding a family. RAAs place the focus on timely matching and placement of all children including priority children for whom it is harder to find adopters. They also focus on adoption support, recognise a need to move away from piecemeal services with potential gaps in provision, towards consistent, effective and easy to access adoption support services. Regional adoption agencies are expected to deliver all adoption recruitment, matching and support functions.
In order to become a Regional Adoption Agency Birmingham Childrens Trust is looking to partner with another Voluntary Adoption Agency and have sent out a tender pack on the 8 January 2021.
Our aim is to identify a high performing partner organisation who will work with us to design and improve the services available to you in line with the Government’s Regional Adoption Agency programme.
Birmingham Children’s Trust Adoption Agency has been recognised by Ofsted as having a good adoption service and the effectiveness of leadership and management has been rated as outstanding. We are committed to maintaining our high standard of service delivery and want you to know that there will be no disruption to any services that you are receiving. We have an adopter focus group who are working with us as part of the planning and implementation to ensure that our adopter voices are integral to our RAA design.
We will keep you updated as we continue our RAA journey.
Yours Sincerely,
Theresa Kane
Head of Service Adoption.