Adoption East Midlands December newsletter 2024

It’s been a busy couple of weeks for our young people!
Some came along to our 8-12's event and took part in Djembe drumming, along with making biscuits and other arts and crafts, as well as celebrating Diwali. The teenage group had an opportunity to take part in making music, creating lyrics and recording their creations in the studio. They created an amazing track.

Adoption England recently held a young people’s conference, where over 60 professionals and young people from adoption agencies were present. A few of our young people gave a presentation about the Voices of Adoption group and helped to facilitate a workshop. The professionals who attended gave positive feedback about how well they spoke and how helpful hearing their views had been.

We’re excited to have the opportunity to scope out and develop an early intervention model of activity breaks. The project seeks to create enriching and enjoyable activity breaks tailored to the unique needs of adoptive families.

As part of the project we are seeking views from adoptive parents about how family breaks could be beneficial. We would like as many families as possible to complete our short questionnaire.

Visit the link below to share your views by Friday 13 December 2024.

We are excited to announce the 2025 dates for our education training and workshops! Join us for sessions on Transition in Primary and Secondary School, Introduction to SEND, and Building Communication and Relationships in Schools.

These workshops are designed to support you and your child through key educational milestones. Check out the specific dates and registration details using the link below. We look forward to seeing you there!

Making Connections is informed by Theraplay, Dyadic Developmental Psychotherapy (DDP) and therapeutic crisis intervention. It is delivered by our therapeutically trained social workers and aimed to help parents understand parenting challenges and to increase emotional connection and relationship with their child.

This intervention consists of seven group therapeutic sessions (a combination of face-to-face and online meetings) and each are three hours. Throughout the sessions parents are supported to revisit the impact of early abuse and neglect on their children. The sessions focus on early trauma, brain development and child-to-parent violence with a focus on creating and supporting peer connections.

The Adoption and Special Guardianship Support Fund (ASGSF) is currently under a spending review period until Monday 31 March 2025 when funding has been guaranteed until.

At this time the ASGSF will not be approving any new applications with a service start date of 1 April 2025 onwards. We hope to be able to provide a further update once we know the outcome of the spending review.

More information is available on the hub.

To launch National Adoption Week 2024, we attended a recruitment ‘roadshow’ at Victoria Centre in Nottingham. We were lucky to have support from staff and some of our lovely adopters who were able to share their invaluable lived experiences.

A big thank you to all those involved with this event. We are excited looking ahead into the new year at our future recruitment events, including regular pop-ups at Derbion, ASDA, West Bridgford and Nottingham Central Library.