Not testimonials. What the situation was, what was in the way, and what we did about it — including the one where the answer was “you do not need adoption at all”.
Two brothers, six and nine, who between them had been the subject of four “placements under consideration”. Nothing had moved in fourteen months. We got a decision date fixed and the matching panel brought forward.
Their first application was refused because a consent form had been signed in the wrong order. Two years of preparation undone by a technicality. We rebuilt the file and refiled; approved at the first hearing.
They had fostered her since she was eleven months old. At two and a half they were told adoption “probably was not appropriate” for carers of their age. It was. The order was made three weeks before her third birthday.
Two agencies had told him single men were “difficult to place”. That is a preference, not a rule. We found a third agency, prepared him for the assessment properly, and he was matched in seven months.
Three years, two countries, and a change of adoption law in the middle of it that invalidated half their file. The hardest case we have run. Recognition granted in the UK in the spring.
Straightforward except that the birth father had not been seen for six years. We did the searches the court expects — electoral roll, employment, last known address — and consent was dispensed with.
Grandparents raising their grandson after a family bereavement. Adoption was not the right tool — a special guardianship order was faster and left the family relationships intact. We told them so at the first call.
Approved in six months, then eleven months of silence. We escalated twice in writing to the agency’s head of service. Matched five weeks after the second letter.
Three siblings, and a local authority proposing to split them between two placements. The argument was about whether keeping them together outweighed the delay in finding one family. It did.
Every family, name, place and case detail on this page is invented for a demonstration website. Any resemblance to a real case is accidental.
Anyone can list the cases that went smoothly. The reason people arrive here is that theirs has not — they have been refused, or stalled, or told they are the wrong age, wrong status, wrong family shape.
So we publish those. The overturned age objection, the refused application we refiled, the case where we advised against adoption entirely.
A date. Adoption timescales depend on local authority capacity, panel calendars and the availability of a social worker who is not on leave. We can promise to chase, to escalate in writing, and to tell you honestly when something is not moving.
We do not promise outcomes and we are suspicious of firms that do.