Promoting Good Outcomes for Looked After Children through Adoption CPD

Credits from this 30-credit module can be put towards a Postgraduate Certificate in Childcare Practice or the Postgraduate Diploma in Childcare Practice or the MA in Professional Practice. Applications are open to social workers with at least one year’s post-qualified experience.

The course is aimed at local authority social workers in locality teams, children in care teams, and permanence teams, and practitioners in the voluntary and independent sector who would like a deeper understanding of the issues facing children being adopted through their agencies.

This course is being run in conjunction with Faith in Families, a voluntary adoption agency in the East Midlands.

Overview and Aims

This module will address the current government agenda that more children should be adopted, more quickly. It will investigate children’s needs in this context, and what contributes to successful adoption placements. The module will include:

• Child development - how issues of attachement, trauma and identity affect children in adoptive families.

• Care planning and decision making - what sort of permanence?

• Siblings - together or apart?

• Contact and working with birth families

• Preparation of child and adopters for placement - life appreciation days

• Family finding and matching

• The child in placement - knitting the family together, promoting attachment, therapeutic interventions

• Direct work - life story work, talking to children, telling difficult information, later life letters

Teaching

There will be five days of direct input starting in January 2014. Input will be through lectures, group work, e-learning and experiential activity, and will be delivered by university staff and practitioners at the NTU City campus. There will also be an additional eLearning day.

Teaching dates:

Wednesday 15 January 2014, Wednesday 5 February 2014, Wednesday 12 February 2014, Tuesday 1 April 2014 and Wednesday 2 April 2014.

You will also need to be able to put aside time for study days and eLearning. We recommend that this should amount to a further six days.

Assignment: This module will be assessed through a 5000 word case study assignment, based on your own practice.

Fee rates 2013/2014: Please contact us for details.