Behind the Inspection Rating: Post-adoption support champions

Parents and Children Together (PACT) | Voluntary adoption agency | Inspected January 2014

PACT is on a roll. In November it landed the voluntary adoption service of the year award from the British Association for Adoption and Fostering. And now, Ofsted has deemed it "outstanding".

A key reason for the acclaim is its FACTS service. FACTS is an acronym; but it doesn't really matter what it stands for - what counts is the fact that it provides families with an impressive range of therapeutic support to overcome post-adoption difficulties. Its suite of services takes in clinical psychology, creative play therapy, homeopathy and plenty more besides.

It works, says Ofsted, "exceptionally well".

"We have all sorts of people available: play therapists, didactic family therapists, psychotherapists," says Shirley Elliott, assistant director of adoption at PACT. "It's everything from the creative therapies to more conventional therapies."

But FACTS is just one of PACT's range of initiatives designed to help children and parents through the world of adoption.

The latest addition to the mix is a music group for adoptive children and their families, where they make instruments out of empty crisp packets, plastic bottles and other odds and ends. "It's not specifically therapy but it is therapeutic in nature," says Elliott. "In this instance the children will come with their parents and they will make musical instruments and make music together. It's a way of helping parents and children have fun together because fun helps establish family relationships as much as the day-to-day grind does."

PACT also impressed Ofsted with its success at helping older children with complex needs find placements. Crucial to this work is the agency's dual approval scheme, where parents become foster carers as well as prospective adopters.

"In the scheme families are assessed as both foster carers and adopters so that they are more likely to take slightly older and hard-to-place children because they know there will be ongoing support from the local authority and PACT as well as there being a financial incentive," says Elliott.

"That helps people think about children who may be harder to place. The intention is that by the end of three years we hope to have supported the family to a point where everybody, including the child, is ready to make an adoption order. If at the end of three years we haven't achieved permanent placement then the placement remains as long-term fostering but it always starts from the point of view that this is meant to be a permanent placement. It recognises that sometimes it takes longer for bonds to form."

Being willing to try new things is vital to running a great adoption agency, says Elliott: "It's about not being afraid of trying new initiatives, not being afraid to ask the adopters and carers themselves what they want and being adaptable. I like to think that one of the reasons we are successful is that we can be very adaptable and creative."

The confidence to do new things, she adds, comes from having a motivated team who want to improve children's lives.

"Everybody who works for PACT is very motivated and they are here because they want to make a difference," she says.

Fact File

• Description: Parents and Children Together (PACT) is a registered charity that has been an adoption agency for more than 60 years. Its headquarters is in Reading and has additional offices in London and Oxford. Its work includes recruitment and assessment of adopters and family-finding services for children in local authority care. It also operates a service for inter-country adoptions under contract from many local authorities in England.
• Number of children: 76 children were placed with PACT adopters in the year to 31 March 2013.
• Ofsted inspection reference number: SC049093

Helpful Hints

• Be inclusive. Ofsted noted how prospective adopters who have had unhelpful experiences with other agencies find PACT welcoming. Shirley Elliott, assistant director of adoption at PACT, puts this down to the charity's inclusive approach. "There are no such things as perfect parents, people come from a wide variety of backgrounds. We see people's strengths and work with their strengths. We have picked up people turned down by local authorities and if they've got something to offer we would want to work with them because there are so many children needing families."
• Keep an open mind. "It's important to be creative and flexible so you can follow the opportunities," says Elliott.
• Learn from and do research. Ofsted's report noted how much of PACT's work, from adopter training to placement support, was informed by research. One example of this says Elliott is the information the agency provides to potential adopters. "We researched barriers to adoption to help us understand what people expect and are thinking about when they apply to PACT, which informed how we wrote our information for people," she says.