BJSW Advance Access originally published online on October 3, 2005
British Journal of Social Work 2006 36(1):41-55; doi:10.1093/bjsw/bch250
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Putting Programme into Practice: The Introduction of Concurrent Planning into Mainstream Adoption and Fostering Services
Dr Valerie Wigfall, Ph.D., has more than twenty-five years’ experience in social research, before which she worked as an adoption social worker. Her research at the Thomas Coram Research Unit has focused largely on studies of the family, children and young people. It includes an evaluation of a multi-agency childcare network, a study of service provision for families with disabled children, a comparative study of provision for looked after children in the UK and four European countries, and a study of services for young people leaving care.
Dr Elizabeth Monck, Ph.D., has worked as a social science researcher on psychological problems affecting children and adolescents. She has published several papers on depression among teenage girls, and the evaluation of treatment provided for sexually abused children. She worked for fifteen years at the Institute of Child Health, and now holds a post as senior research officer at the Thomas Coram Research Unit, co-directing a randomized controlled trial on post-adoption support.
Jill Reynolds trained as a medical social worker. She worked first in the community and in special schools and was later based in hospitals in London and Manchester. While her early work was largely delivering services to sick children and their families, her more recent work has been with research projects. She is an Assessor for the Family Trust Fund.
Correspondence to Valerie Wigfall, Ph.D., Thomas Coram Research Unit, Institute of Education, University of London, 27–28 Woburn Square, London WC1H 0AA, UK. E-mail: v.wigfall{at}ioe.ac.uk
Originating in Seattle, USA, in the early 1980s, concurrent planning aimed to speed the placement of children into permanent families, either birth or substitute, and to reduce overall the time spent in impermanent care. When the first pilot concurrent planning project was introduced in the UK in 1998, independent evaluation was a requirement of government funding. The evaluation was expanded to include two additional projects when the number of initial referrals failed to meet the projected target. This paper looks beyond the successful outcomes of the pilot projects, focusing instead on the local authority context in order to explore some of the difficulties in setting up such an innovative programme, and to shed light on why concurrent planning appeared slow to take off. Based primarily on interviews conducted with social workers at different levels of responsibility, the researchers encountered a steep learning curve for all the professionals. The research findings indicated positive outcomes for the children placed through concurrent planning, but limited understanding of the concept of concurrent planning, uncertainty in the division of responsibilities, and failure to take up preparation and training opportunities contributed to the initial slow progress in the incorporation of the programme.
Keywords: looked after children, concurrent planning, adoption, fostering, permanence.
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