There are around thirty voluntary adoption agencies across the country working to find, assess and support adoptive families. The Consortium of Voluntary Adoption Agencies (CVAA) approached ThePublicOffice to help them stimulate and support new thinking and practice in the field.

CVAA needed help to introduce innovation into the delivery of a £12.5 million expansion grant programme, designed to deliver significant growth in the number of approved adopters in the system, especially for ‘hard to place’ children, but with a specific focus on creative an efficient, effective system that responds to the needs and desires of both adopters and children waiting for adoption. In the lead up to submissions we  designed and ran two innovation workshops for leaders of the adoption agencies and followed this with coaching conversations to assess the extent to which their submission responded to the expectation that ‘more of the same’ was not an option.