X. The Application Process, Page 4

Your Formal Application to an Agency: The Home Study or Assessment

Your formal application to an adoption agency will consist of your Form F and supporting documentation. Form F is the standard form, used by virtually all agencies in the UK. Being standard helps in exchanging information between agencies (that may sound sinister, but it means being able to transmit your details efficiently to another agency if a child is found for you there).

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Filling in Form F1

This gives details about you and your family. Depending on your agency’s practice, it may be filled out substantially by you yourselves or by the social worker with information from her meetings with you (usually the latter). The same form is used for prospective adoptive and foster families. If you already have identified a specific child you want to adopt, a variant of this, form F2, is used, and F3 is used for people applying to adopt overseas. The form is in two parts.

Part I

Based on the 1996 version of the form (due for revision in 2000), this covers:

• Agency and social worker identification,
• The prospective adopter(s): names, sex, birthdates, ethnic origin, home language, religion, hours of work, address (note: income and occupation are not asked for),
• Information about any children in the household already: names, sex, birthdates, their relationship to you, ethnicity, type of school they attend,
• What kind of resource you are offering (adoption, specific type of fostering), and whether an adoption allowance is being asked for,
• The kind of child you are considering (age, number, sex, religion),
• Types of special needs or backgrounds you would consider or have ruled out,
• Special skills or experience you can bring to an adoption,
• Attitudes to contact with the birth family,
• Information about any other children of yours who are dead or living somewhere else: names, sex, birthdates, ethnicity, relationship to you, where they are living or cause of death,
• Information about any other adults (including your own adult children) in your household: names, sex, birthdates, relationship to you, ethnicity,
• Home and neighbourhood: number of rooms in the house and where the child will sleep, etc., what kind of neighbourhood you live in, location of schools and other community resources, what the public transport is like,
• Whether you have a car, how you would get to introduction meetings and how that period would be accommodated by your work commitments,
• What kinds of support you might need from the agency in the future,
• Family profile essay: personalities, interests, experience, etc., with special attention to factors which would help in matching you to a child,
• Legal information: which court will eventually hear the application, citizenship and legal domicile information, whether you will consider a child with a complicated or difficult legal status,
• Your marital status, previous marriages, divorces and custody arrangements,
• Results of Criminal Records Bureau and social services checks on all adults in the household and “significant others”, even if not living with you (i.e., people who are likely to be in close, unsupervised contact with the child),
• Information about the history of your application: date of application, preparation classes, number of times seen by the social worker,
• Health: the name of the doctor doing your medical examination and any significant results, and any medical remarks made by the doctor about any other members of the household,
• Any medical or mental problems in your family (nuclear and extended), with emphasis on their effect on the family’s children; your attitudes to health and medical treatment,
• Personal references and a summary of the results of the social worker’s interviews with them (in England and Wales references must be interviewed in person; in Scotland this is not necessary).

Part II

Part II of Form F is a descriptive account of you and your family, based partly on the information in Part I. By rewriting the material as a sort of essay, special attention can be paid to things which might get buried in the formal questions and the social worker can colour the whole thing to try to give a more accurate, living, picture of you as a family than could be conveyed by simple bald answers to questions or even the more descriptive answers to some of the later questions in Part I. But Part II goes a lot deeper into things. Topics mentioned in the guidelines to social workers include:

• Individual applicants: family background, brothers and sisters, childhood experiences, how significant ethnicity and religion and language were in your upbringing, attitudes to disability and the disabled, how you feel about your own upbringing and family relationships, your education history, work and career history, attitudes to work and unemployment; interests, personality,
• Support networks: extended family and friends, neighbours, organisations,
• Other children in the household: personality, ethnic identity, talents, special needs, attitude to the proposed placement, involvement in the plans, their own fostering or adoption history, special relationships between them and each other or you, how often seen by the social worker on her own,
• Other adults in the household and “significant others”: how closely involved they are in the family, their role and relationship to others in the family, their attitudes to the proposed placement and how important that is, how often they were seen by the social worker,
• Previous relationships: including children from the relationships, contact, and their attitudes to the proposed placement,
• Your own current marriage or partnership: strengths and weaknesses, coping with stress and anger, mutual support, how you see a placement affecting your relationship, decision-making and power in the family,
• Family lifestyle: what things are important to the family, affection displays, roles in the family, masculinity/femininity, food and nutrition, attitudes to education and homework, special occasions, hobbies and leisure activities, racial/ethnic attitudes, coping methods,
• Parenting capacity,
• If not a married couple, who will adopt, and the implications of that fact,
• Parenting and caring experience, knowledge of child development, how your own experiences of childhood will affect you as a parent, how disabled applicants would be able to parent children, how you will deal with and/or prevent sexual abuse in the family, discipline methods and attitudes,
• Infertility experience and attitudes, or why you want to adopt before/after/instead of having birth children,
• Money: attitudes and management style, adoption allowance matters, how child care and work will be dovetailed, extra financial help needed for special needs,
• Matters to do with placement — your feelings about: why children need new families, heredity versus environment, mental illness, naming, “telling”, what kinds of behaviours you would find easy and hard to deal with, developing a positive ethnic identity, sexual abuse, adolescence and developing sexuality, drugs, regression, homosexuality, a child’s need to mourn the loss of the birth parents, HIV and other illnesses and disabilities and how you would cope with them (there is a Part III to Form F which gives considerably more detail about this area), local medical facilities, learning difficulties and how you would deal with them, baby placement from hospital, contact with the birth family,
• Post-adoption problems: support for tracing the birth family, severe problems which can arise, including breakdown in the adoption and its consequences, and your own divorce/widowhood and its consequences,
• What kinds of support the agency can offer,
• The social worker’s own assessment of you as potential adopters: motives, skills, the most appropriate children for you, strengths and weaknesses, disagreements between you and the social worker,
• Any involvement of non-white social workers in the assessment, if you are not both white.

You can see why it takes several visits and long conversations to fill this form out!

© Roger Ridley Fenton