It’s All About Me (IAAM)

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Challenge: Thousands of children each year in the UK are awaiting adoption. Around 3,500 children have been waiting 18 months or more. These ‘harder to place’ children are often part of a sibling group or are older children who have been in and out of foster homes, yet desperately need a family environment to enable their positive development. The alternative is growing up in foster care or children’s homes. Research shows that if a child grows up in the care system, they are less likely to succeed at school and less likely to find a job as an adult. Where a child is adopted from care, they can often catch up.

Investable Solution: It’s All About Me (IAAM) is a new nationwide scheme to find families for harder to place children. The IAAM programme is delivered by six Voluntary Adoption Agencies: Action for Children; Adoption Matters NW; After Adoption; Caritas Care; Family Futures and PACT. These charities are experienced at finding, training and supporting families to adopt children, particularly those with complex needs. This SIB was created by the Consortium of Voluntary Adoption Agencies (CVAA) and Jim Clifford of Baker Tilly. It is managed by It’s All About Me Services, a wholly owned subsidiary of the CVAA.

Outcomes: The programme will aim to register approximately 250 children who are looking for adoptive families, and find stable adoptive placements for at least 198 of these. As a result, these children have a greater chance of better long-term outcomes than if they had remained in the care system (to be tracked via a ten-year evaluation), and the commissioning local authorities will save money through reduced fostering fees and social worker costs.