Regional Adoption Agency delivery partner

Background:

The Department for Education is inviting bids for a delivery partner to work with us to deliver the regional adoption agency programme.

Recent years have seen significant improvements to the adoption system, with record numbers of children finding permanent loving homes, but there is still more to do. The system remains highly fragmented with around 180 different adoption agencies currently recruiting and matching adopters. The Government does not think such a localised system can deliver the best service to some of our most vulnerable children. That is why we are introducing regional adoption agencies, which will work across local authority boundaries and in partnership with voluntary adoption agencies, to deliver adoption services at greater scale. This is an opportunity to bring about whole system change and improvement across adoption recruitment, matching and support. Our ambition is to achieve significant structural change and spread practice excellence and innovation. This is an opportunity to have a direct impact on the life chances of some of the country’s most vulnerable children.

DfE want to work with and support local authorities and voluntary adoption agencies to deliver this vision, building on relationships and ways of working that already exist. We are looking for a delivery partner to work shoulder-to-shoulder with us and the sector to make this happen. In 2015-16, we are going to provide up to £4.5m of start-up funding to support early adopters of regional adoption agencies to accelerate their development and early implementation.

Our plans for introducing regional adoption agencies were set out in the paper ‘Regionalising Adoption’, which was published in June and can be found here:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/regional-adoption-agencies-programme.

See 'Attachments' for further details.

Additional information: We plan to hold a bidders’ event on 29 July 2015 for organisations interested in submitting a proposal for this work. The event will allow you to ask any questions regarding the ITT and for us to offer further clarity on the approaches we expect to see to achieve the required outcomes. We strongly encourage you to attend if you think you are likely to submit a bid for this work. To register your interest in attending, please email Adoption.REFORM@education.gsi.gov.uk with details of your organisation and the names and contact details of the attendees. If you are unable to attend in person, we can provide dial-in details.