Our CEO, Sue Armstrong Brown sets our strategy and vision for the next 3 years.

Today I’m making public Adoption UK’s vision for the next three years. By 2024 we will have supported thousands more adoptive and kinship care families. We will be growing, more inclusive, better informed by adopted people and making a bigger impact alongside the community we serve.

When I talk to adoptive parents and young people who could not remain with their birth parents, I hear the same things over and over again. We need schools which understand the impacts of early trauma on behaviour and learning. We need a community of peers who know what life is like in an adoptive family. We need medical professionals who can recognize trauma in all its guises. And above all, we need the right expert support at the right time.

I’ve called our new strategy Empowering our Community, because we’re putting the emphasis firmly on enabling adoptive families, carers and individuals to access the connections, support and influence they need and deserve.

Adoptive families increasingly know what they need. There are many superb social workers, teachers and health professionals, but too often our families find themselves in daily battles to get the help they need. Two thirds of adopted children are still being placed with no written support plan. Three quarters of adopters experience struggles as a result of their child’s early experiences. Adopted children are still 20 times more likely to be excluded from schools, twice as likely to be NEET, and almost half are involved with mental health services by the age of 25.

It’s a huge privilege to work alongside these families and I’m incredibly proud to set out our new plan. We have already achieved so much together, but there is more to do. Our new strategy builds on all the brilliant work we’ve done so far and outlines what needs to happen next.

We’re setting ourselves four big goals, to broaden and deepen our community of adoptive and kinship families and individuals; to pioneer and expand our peer-led services; to increase our influence on policy and practice decisions which improve life chances for adoptive and kinship care children, and to build a strong charity to enable us to do all this.

Our goals are ambitious, but the needs of our families are great. We will work tirelessly alongside one another to secure the support they deserve. As adopters, adopted people and carers ourselves, we never lose sight of the children at the heart of adoptive and kinship care families. They are the reason we exist. Children whose early lives have been devastated by abuse, neglect and trauma. Children who are struggling with their health, relationships and education, struggling to keep up with their peers and make sense of life. Together we’re going to change that.

Together we’re family.

Read our full strategy