Therapeutic Adoption Support Service

The ARC Adoption team has a great deal of experience of working with children, families and networks brought together through adoption, and our dedicated Therapeutic Adoption Support Service (TASS) is there to support families through the journey of adoption and beyond, proactively anticipating and responding to needs for support.

In order to provide the best possible wraparound support to our families, our TASS team brings together skills and experience from multiple disciplines and professional backgrounds including child and family based social work, early years teaching and development and primary education teaching. In addition, our experienced support team manager and skilled adoption and family support workers, are all supported in their work by our agency counsellor and our clinical psychologist.

We understand that while adoption will bring lots of happiness and joy, it can also bring worries, challenges and bumps along the way, so the support we offer is for life and we are always just a phone call away. See below for more details of the forms of support we offer.

Initial support

If you adopt with the support of ARC, you will be introduced to the TASS team during the matching process. They will work with you when a child is placed to complete a baseline assessment, helping to identify any early support requirements and provide a starting point to measure future development. All children and families are different, and so are requirements for support – some need very little, and some need a little more.

Ongoing support for you and your family

Ongoing, our team is on hand to support children, parents and the wider family with advice, training and any further mediation related to any of the following and more. We know it’s not always easy to reach out, so we try our best to provide a quick response to any requests for help and make things as easy as possible.

• Stress, worries, anxieties
• Managing behaviour
• Dealing with emotions
• Life story work
  • Support in having difficult conversations
  • Access to ARCBOX our innovative and child-centred digital life story tool, providing children with the opportunity to contribute to a personalised, fun to use, lasting digital record of their life, resulting in a truly ‘living’ chronology that can be used as a therapeutic tool
• Attachment and trauma difficulties
• Understanding adoption for the wider family
• Managing life at school
• Therapeutic parenting principles and practise e.g. Level 1 Theraplay

Other professional support

As well as our core TASS team, we work closely with other professionals and organisations to help support our families.

We can offer additional counselling services in conjunction with Creative Minds who specialise in working with children and families dealing with trauma, abuse and complex needs. We also work with a Paediatric Occupational Therapist to help inform the work we do with families.

We can also help our families with accessing the Adoption Support Fund as and when needed. 

Therapeutic Life Story Work

A number of ARC's TASS team members are accredited and trained in the Richard Rose model of Therapeutic Life Story Work, and are able to work directly with children who have suffered trauma. This therapeutic work helps children to explore and understand more about about their past experiences in a safe and supportive environment, to support healing, a positive sense of self and strengthened relationships with their adoptive families. 

“We adopted our first child and then adopted their sibling; our journey was tough at times, but we always had ARC Adoption there supporting us. There are so many positives with adopting through ARC Adoption, most importantly the staff. Every staff member is approachable, warm, friendly, and honest. It didn’t matter what support we needed they were always there and always happy to help. Years after going through the adoption process, we still feel supported to this day. We know we can pick the phone up whenever we need support and attend regular training sessions. ARC adoption changed our lives, and we cannot thank them enough.”

Dan and Simon

Workshops and online learning

As well as being able to pick up the phone and talk to us about something specific, we also host regular workshops to support our families and provide practical advice on a wide range of topics.  These are a great way for our adopters to arm themselves with useful information or brush up on knowledge of training they have experienced earlier in the adoption process.

Take a look at some of our upcoming workshops here.

We also provide all of our adopters with free access to CATCH, an online portal which contains a huge amount of resources for adoptive families. They host regular live webinars on pertinent topics, which can also be viewed on-demand.

Peer and social support

Informal peer and social support is also of great value to our families. Sometimes a fun day out or chatting to someone in a similar situation as yourself can make a real difference, so we organise and facilitate a range of groups and events that encourage parents, children or the whole family to come together with others, as well as an informal opportunity to check in with our team.

Find out more about our different support groups, events and activities available to adopters at ARC Adoption North East here.

Adopters can also be matched with a more experienced Buddy.  Find out more about our Buddy Scheme here.

Support for schools

As well as working with families directly, we can also work with children’s schools to provide advice, guidance and strategies on how best to support adopted children in school, in line with their needs, behaviours, past experiences and traumas.

In addition to our core team, we have an experienced virtual head who is also an adoptive parent consulting for ARC. He provides advice and guidance to the team as well as support directly to parents who are facing difficulties relating to their child and school. 

Learning organisation

At ARC it is important to us that we keep moving forward and understand how we can improve our offering for adoptive families. We undertake regular internal evaluations related to the services and support we provide, and use this to make positive changes. We also invite the opportunity to contribute to wider research. An example of this is a project we recently undertook with The Belay Foundation to understand more about poverty affecting adoptive families, which was presented at a Social Justice Forum at Newcastle University - you can see the findings here. 

If you would like to find out more information about the support available from ARC Adoption North East please call 0191 516 6466 or email [email protected]