We have heard quite a few horror stories about bad social workers from various sources, even at the Ealing event last year they themselves openly said that it can happen sometimes a social worker just doesn't click with a prospective couple and it's ok to say so and ask for another. Some friends of ours who had been through the process a year before us had told us how the first social worker they had didn't bother to do any of the written assessment and they had to write their own for panel!
Anyway, we opened the door after another few days of cleaning, buying flowers, grooming the dogs, spraying airfreshener everywhere and stocking up on cake/coffee/snacks (anyone would think we were going on 'Come Dine With Me') to the lady who was to be our social worker. For some reason one feels the need to give a slightly false sense of perfection but I guess it's normal. There as so many factors in the process that you can't control that I think we take the parts we can control and want to make sure we have done everything we can to show the type of home we want to offer a child. God knows why, I'm sure as soon as a child come to live here the place will never look the same again!!
She informed us at the very start of the meeting that she works in 'post adoption care' but because the department is short of social workers at the moment she would be taking our initial home visits and starting the assessment but may not be the one who takes us all the way to panel. We found this a little difficult to digest because the whole point of the assessment and panel presentation is that the social worker spends a long time with you and builds up a picture of you so that they can confidently present you to the panel armed with full knowledge and back-stories to answer any awkward 'off-topic' questions the panel decide to throw at her. understand because. Anyway, there was no need to worry too much as the following week she informed us that she has been given permission to stay with our case and be our social forker for panel and beyond! We have gotten on really well with her so it's great to know that she will be there to share the journey with us.
The next thing to do was schedule the rest of our home visits. The preparation course had managed our expectations to think that this stage, 'the assessment' was going to take about eight months, with bi-monthly visits for the duration. However in reality we were booking weekly meetings, sometimes even two a week. All three of us had our diaries out and pencilled the dates in. She then looks at the next panel dates and checked our availability for theses. We were both a little shock I think at the speed this stage was going to progress at. There was a date mentioned in April, which we would have finished our assessment in time for but may not have allowed enough time to get the CRB check form back for as apparently these can take up to ten weeks to return. We were not able to make the date suggested in May as my partner was going to be away for work so we settled on Monday 6th June... which seemed perfect. Enough time to digest the assessment but still sooner than the expected months where we thought we would be going to panel in October. So there we have it, a date set for panel, the whole things just keep feeling more and more real at each stage. The scary/exciting this is that in theory (and only in theory) we could be matched with a child in the summer?! And then again it could be next summer... or the summer after!
The five home (and work) visits were fine. At first they were really exciting, toward the end we started to feel we were going over the same ground but we are aware that our social worker needs to complete a very long report and has to be sure about all of the details. It did feel strange sometimes talking about yourself for three hours full and not asking the social worker any questions about her?! lol
Visits generally lasted three to four hours and after each one we were left with a bundle of paperwork to complete - which we generally did the same night whilst everything was fresh. The other thing to say is that we were really grateful to our social worker for agreeing to make our visits in the evening and early morning so not to interfere with work. We are well aware of the impact that children will have on our lives/work but whilst we can schedule things to not impact on work we were glad to. Some evenings we didn't finish till after 10pm and 11pm so we can't thanks her enough for giving that kind of time to us.
The visits themselves were very details, I won't go into them here but the BAAF book 'Pink Guide to Adoption' is a great resource for what to expect during assessment and covers all of the kind of questions you will be asked etc. Some visit were together and at the start we did meetings separately too where we covered our early lives, our own childhoods, previous relationships and education/careers etc. Then the bulk of the meetings together were more about our attitudes to parenting and how we would deal with certain situations.
So, five long sessions, loads of paperwork and a lot of coffee later we had finished our assesment and waitind for a couple of weeks whilst our social worker prepared her report. In the meantime she was also talking to the six references we had put forward (a couple of time, for those references with children she actually came to our home on a Sunday and observed us interacting with their children) and applied for our CRB checks, we also had to visit the doctor and complete a full medical which included getting a blood test from the hospital.
The report was finally sent to us to for our review... all 52 pages of it! Apart from a couple of typo's which we corrected we were pretty happy with everything she had written and felt confident that it was a great, comprehensive report to present to panel (assuming they don't fall asleep before page 52!).
