The Adoption Process

  1. Enquiries: to make an initial enquiry you can ring us to speak to the duty social worker, write to us, email us or visit our website (go to the end of this guide for contact details). We will contact you to arrange a meeting with you and your partner (if you have one) and/or you will be invited to an information meeting to learn more about the adoption process and to get answers to some of your questions.

  2. Initial visit: if we agree to take your enquiry further we will visit you in your home to find out more about you, your personal circumstances and why you want to adopt. Sometimes this may include discussing personal and sensitive information to help us decide whether we can take your enquiry further. We will always try to approach this with sensitivity. This meeting does not commit you or us to continuing with your application but is an opportunity for us to explore if we want to work together. After the meeting we will give you and ourselves time to think about whether adoption is right for you. Often we may ask you to meet with us again as there is so much to think about. We do this to make sure we have all the information we need before we make a decision. Similarly we would want you to let us know if you decide not to go ahead. If we cannot take your application forward, we will talk to you to let you know the reasons and follow this up in writing. You can contact us if you want to talk about our decision in more detail.

  3. Enquiry form & checks: we will ask you to fill in an enquiry form and take up checks and references with the police, the local authority in which you live, your employers and your landlord/mortgage company. You will be required to have a full medical and we will ask you to supply us with the details of three people who can act as personal referees who we will visit at a later stage. One of these should be a family member, the others may be people who have known you personally for three years or more and can tell us about your suitability to adopt. It would be helpful if at least one is a parent and has observed you with children.

  4. Preparation course: if we all agree that you are ready to move to the next stage of the process we will invite you to the preparation course. The course is a series of sessions with other potential adopters designed to provide you with in depth information about adoption, and give us the opportunity to find out more about you, your family, your views and thoughts about adopting a child. All adoption agencies offer such courses and attendance to the preparation course is compulsory as it is part of the assessment.

  5. Accepting an application: when you have completed the preparation course, we will arrange a meeting with you and the course leaders to discuss your enquiry. If everything is in order, we will invite you to make an application to adopt through TACT Adoption.