If we imagine Act 1 as two stories coming to two separate, but equally climatic points – Act 2 takes us back to the vital, but more prosaic foothills of paperwork and meetings.

If the curtain falls on Act 1 as two reports are stamped APPROVED – one identifying us as prospective adopters and one identifying our child as a child to be placed for adoption – Act 2 opens with those reports getting ‘lost’ in two huge and very separate piles of similar reports on two busy, but very separate desks.

But what next? Well as prospective adopters we don’t really appear in Act 2 – at least not in person – but I think I can give you a general feel for who is involved and where the action takes place.

Meet the cast

CSW – The Child’s Social Worker 
Each child for whom we are a potential match will have a social worker. They are the experts on the child and the birth family.

N.B. Children who have been removed from their birth families and placed in Foster Care are referred to as a Child Looked After (CLA) and they will have a Child Permanence Report or CPR.

FF – The Family Finder
The FF is the expert on matching the right child with the right PAs (Prospective Adopters). There are three to cover the north, south and west of the county.

ASW – Adoption Support Workers (from within the Adoption Support Team)
Social workers who work with PAs through the matching process and beyond. They are the experts on the PAs. (N.B. We have previously been under the Assessment Team.)

IRO – The Independent Reviewing Officer
The IRO is the expert in being independent (!) and in the big picture. IROs are able to look at the case as a whole from a slightly different vantage point. The IRO also works for the council, but is in a different team and under different management to the CSW and the ASW. They often have a good grasp of the wider situation of the birth family, contact arrangements between siblings etc.

The Courts
The courts are the experts in the law and the only ones with the power to remove children from their families*. It is the court who will have placed each CLA in foster care in the first place (under an Interim Care Order / Care Order) and who will then decide on whether to rehabilitate them back into their birth family or to issue a placement order either for special guardianship with a family member, or for foster to adopt or adoption.

*The Police do have powers to remove children in emergencies (under a Police Protection Order) – but it is the court who then take the case forward.

See where the action takes place

(PP): Permanency Panel
At which the court decide on the plan for the CLA

TMs: Tracking Meetings
At Tracking Meetings a child’s case is looked at and the various possible outcomes for them are discussed and planned for.

In most cases the CLAs being discussed will already be have a Placement Order (PO) – either for adoption or foster to adopt. There are others who are known as SBPAs – should be placed for adoption – where there is a clear plan for adoption, but the PO has not yet been issued by the courts.

Alternatively – there may still a chance of rehabilitation – the child returning to their birth mother – if so those involved will plan for both scenarios as they wait for the court’s decision – this is called twin tracking. If there is a chance of a family member coming forward or being deemed suitable it becomes triple tracking!

As a child’s case is discussed at a tracking meeting PAs will be mentioned in connection with them where appropriate – their PARs (Prospective Adopters Reports) will be passed on to the CSW to be discussed at a matching meeting.

MM: Matching Meetings
At the first matching meeting – MM 1 – the CSW and the FF will meet and make a decision on whether to proceed with any of the potential matches offered at the tracking meeting. If a good match is felt to have identified they will then contact the relevant ASW and discuss it with them – MM2.

Contacting the PAs (our only appearance on stage in Act 2!)
If the ASW also supports the match they will get in touch with the PA with some initial information about the CLA, which if positively received will be followed by the CPR.

The PAs will be given a chance to read the CPR and then to meet with their ASW. The following stage will be a time for lots of questions and processing of information. Where appropriate PAs may meet with the child’s Foster Carer and other professionals involved in their care – possibly a medical adviser or health visitor… Plans for ongoing contact with siblings will be discussed where relevant, as will any plans for a one off meeting with the birth parents.

Next comes Matching Meeting 3 – MM3
This is a meeting between professionals  to check that every aspect has been covered before the match goes to a matching panel – MP.

Also in the run up to the MP the PAs will prepare an Introductions Book and may have a Chemistry Meeting with the child.

MP – Matching Panel
This is the first official meeting that the PAs attend after their Adoption Panel and is a similar format/setting. As before a recommendation will be made to the ADM (Agency Decision Maker) who will then decide whether or not to support that recommendation.

And then we really are nearly there! Roll on Act 3.

So what is life like once the ‘if’ of adoption is almost totally replaced by the ‘when’?

In one word….

Strange!

Let’s start with the technicalities.

Having been recommended by the Adoption Panel and having had that recommendation accepted by the Agency Decision Maker we are now Approved Prospective Adopters for Cumbria County Council.

The next stage is called the Matching Stage. As approved prospective adopters we are now eligible to be matched with a child aged 0-2 for whom the plan is either adoption or foster to adopt.

And if this sounds exciting – it is! If this sounds as though we are getting pretty close to being able to welcome a child into our family – we are! We’re on the mailing list, we’re welcome at support meetings, we’ve got all sorts of dates in our diaries.. In short -the activity levels are all systems

but….as far as we are concerned – all that GO, all that action is happening behind the scenes.

Or more accurately, it is our family who have come to the point in the script directing us to…

and who are now back in the green room waiting for our call as a different thread of the story plays out under the spotlight.

In my next post I lay out the sorts of things that might be going on out there – but for now I want to linger on life back stage.

Which brings me back to that word STRANGE. In one sense it is life as normal – work, school, home, family, food shopping, plans for half term – there are plenty of threads of our family’s story still going on! And yet there is a readiness and a getting ready for a really amazing, wonderful, big, daunting, exciting. life changing moment that could happen at any moment. COULD happen, but may not for months or even years.

Going through the assessment in Stage 2 was like working through a well thumbed script. This would happen, and then that would happen and than we would be do this. It was all heading in a predictable fashion to a denouement – the final scene of Act 1 – Panel. Tension mounted as we waited to see how that scene was going to play out – we weren’t provided with that part of the script in advance! – and then jubilant celebration as the curtain dropped on our delighted approval.

Now here we are in the green room – no script, no guarantees, no time scale. We are living in the readiness of a “5 minutes to curtain” call, and yet without the 5 minutes to count down and with only a very vague script to prepare for Act 3 with.

And meanwhile the curtain is back up – Act 2 is underway.

But before we move on, I want to linger on one more element of Act 1 – after all it’s not as though Act 2 can’t manage without us for a bit!

You see I have spoken about Act 1 as though ours was the only story being told, as though each and every scene was about us.But for all the drama of our scenes in Act 1, ours was not the only story being told, and certainly not the most heart rending. In fact much of Act 1 went on when we were off stage and out of the picture and told the story of the child who will soon be ours, but is as yet completely unknown to us.

Act 1 was a tale of two stories – heading towards each other – but for now completely distinct and so very different. Everything about the staging will have been different as the two stories unfolded in alternate scenes – the lighting, the music, the scenery, the cast of characters. One day we will read at least a partial script from those Act 1 scenes, but our new daughter or son will have lived them. Right now I have no idea where they are in their story, but just that I am aching to become part of that story.

Roll on Act 3 when our stories will fully intertwine – but of course I’m getting ahead of myself. First those stories need a meet cute (to quote from the Christmas film ‘The Holiday’) –  they need to stumble across each other’s paths – which brings us to Act 2.