Department for Education-funded initiative will focus on the Midlands A humanitarian charity is to launch the UK’s first dedicated programme to tackle the shortage of Muslim applicants to adopt children. The Penny Appeal, based in Wakefield, West Yorkshire, has won £200,000 funding from the Department for Education to support the 12-month project. Some 2,000 of the 70,000 children in care…
My grandmother liked to gamble. We would go to Atlantic City sometimes and sit together at the blackjack tables while she smoked and patiently explained strategy to me. It was fun to be doing something she enjoyed, fun to go out to dinner and eat the pickled tomatoes that came to the table with the menus, but I didn’t care…
A major new resource, based on extensive research and contributions from social workers and families across the UK, could change the way contact between adopted children and their birth relatives is handled. The Contact after Adoption website, a partnership between the University of East Anglia (UEA) and Research in Practice, follows comments by senior judge Lord Justice McFarlane, who questioned…
“We don’t say the A-word here anymore,” a social worker once told me when I dared to ask why there are hardly any adoptions in Australia. But, with our foster care system in crisis, it’s time to talk about an alternative option for the increasing number of children removed from their home due to abuse or neglect. Adoption is so…
Clause 15 of the children and social work bill is eliciting much comment and criticism from the social care sector. The clause, in the words of the children’s minister, Edward Timpson, seeks to: Allow great social workers to try out new approaches and be freed from limiting bureaucracy, all in the interests of achieving more for children. But, according to…