Maintaining Relationships & Supporting Identity within Permanency Planning

Course Aim:

To enable participants to understand the complex identity that children living outside of their parents’ care have, but how creative and meaningful contact to maintain relationships between adoptive parents/foster carers/kinship carers, children and birth families can support children to develop a healthy identity and maintain the important connections to relevant birth family members.

Course objectives:

• To consider and explore the most recent research in respect of maintaining relationships and how this can shape, develop and inform a child in care/former child in cares sense of self, identity and belonging.
• To explore examples including videos of adopters, adopted young people and birth family members to demonstrate how positive ongoing contact post adoption can maintain positive relationships.
• To consider the benefits and challenges of maintaining relationships and how this may support the formation of a child’s identity.
• To explore the potential contact options that can be considered for children, what the expectations of each option are and identifying what support is needed to facilitate identified contact.
• To be able to use the contact assessment tool to help formulate and evidence decision making and reasoning for why contact decisions are made for children.
• To understand the changing face of ‘openness’ within permanency planning and what this looks like in the modern world, through the use of technology.