Adoption and fostering

Contemporary childhood

We provide a specialist service for young people who are fostered or adopted and who are experiencing difficulties. Our work is based on a comprehensive and holistic assessment of children and young people’s needs and on understanding children as individuals to personalise assessments and treatments to each family.

Our clinical work
Our Adoption and Fostering team provide a specialist service for children and young people who are fostered or adopted and who experience difficulties in their everyday lives. These may relate to their emotional or behavioural development or to more specific placement issues, including placement difficulties, the degree of contact with siblings or birth family and preparing for long term care.

Our research
We help clinicians find a deeper, more personalised understanding of individual child’s patterns of strengths and difficulties.

Our focuses include in-depth analyses of current support systems and programmes, understanding conditions such as secondary trauma and compassion fatigue in foster carers, and furthering our understanding and treatment options for people with disrupted attachment histories. Our research trials also seek to determine the best service for complex cases such as abused or neglected pre-school children coming into foster care.

Find out more
Read more about our research and key publications here.

Our partnership work
We have a shared network of staff between the National Academy for Parenting Research, the National Adoption and Fostering Clinic, and our clinical and research teams. This unique quality allows us to go from theory to day-to-day practice.

Meet the team

Skip to content