Support before, during, and after placement

The support an adopter needs changes as the process moves through its stages. During the assessment, you have access to our team and a structured training programme. During placement — the months between the children moving in and the adoption order being granted — Jigsaw works to a schedule of visits and is available between them when something needs attention. After the adoption order, statutory responsibility for your support sits with the local authority. We remain available to help you find the right organisation when questions come up, but the day-to-day support after the adoption order is theirs to provide.

During the assessment

From the first conversation through to approval, we are there to help you. As you go through Stage 1 and Stage 2, we provide relevant information online and we are regularly in touch to monitor how the assessment is progressing.

Alongside this you have classroom training, written materials, and contact with other prospective adopters in your training cohort. We don't run a formal adopter peer-support programme — we're small enough that the connections people make in their training group tend to do the same job, and a number of our adopters stay in informal touch with each other for years afterwards.

During Stage 2, a social worker prepares your Prospective Adopter's Report, and goes with you to panel. After children have been placed with you, you will continue to work with a social worker and, in cases where additional support is needed, another member of our team.

During placement — before the adoption order

Placement is the period from when the children move in to the day the adoption order is granted. It's typically four to six months, with a statutory minimum of ten weeks before you can apply to the family court. During this period the children are still legally in the care of the placing local authority, and you share parental responsibility with them.

The local authority visits on a statutory schedule
The local authority your child came from is required to visit at least every six weeks, with the first visit within the first week of placement. These visits are part of how the local authority discharges its responsibility while the order is pending.
Jigsaw works to its own schedule alongside
Your social worker — often the same person who took you through assessment — stays in regular contact through placement. We come more often when there's something specific to work on: a child settling unevenly, a question about school, a contact arrangement that needs revisiting. The schedule is the floor, not the ceiling.
Working with the placing local authority, not against
The two roles are different. The local authority is making sure the placement is going well as a matter of statutory duty. We're there as the agency that knows you and the children's match, helping the family settle in and being available as questions come up.

A woman and a young girl with curly hair crouching together by a stream in a wooded area.

"We've had fantastic support from Khalida and the team. They always make themselves available to talk to us, and have been brilliant in giving guidance, advice and helping us to remain patient at times."

Harriet and Simon

Therapeutic support during placement

Several members of our team are qualified to deliver therapeutic support directly. Whether we do depends on the placing local authority. They share parental parental responsibility with you during the placement and decide who provides therapeutic support.

When the local authority commissions us to deliver that support, we do. When they commission someone else, we work alongside that arrangement rather than duplicating it. The point is the child gets the right support quickly; the route to it matters less.

This isn't a service we promise as standard. It happens when it is decided that it is the best fit for the family — sometimes because we already know the children well from the matching process, sometimes because of a specific therapeutic approach a team member is trained in. We mention it because adopters reasonably want to know what's possible.

After the adoption order

Once the adoption order is granted, the legal situation changes. You hold sole parental responsibility for your children. The placing local authority remains responsible for assessing your family's adoption support needs for three years from the date of the adoption order. After three years, that responsibility transfers to the local authority where you live, which may be the same authority or a different one.

This statutory structure means most ongoing support comes through your local authority — not through Jigsaw. When you need an assessment of support needs, you approach the local authority. When therapy is recommended, the local authority applies to the Adoption and Special Guardianship Support Fund on your child's behalf.

We remain available to you. If you have a question and don't know where to start, you can ring us and we'll help you work out who to approach. If you're trying to get traction with a local authority that's slow to respond, we can sometimes help. If you're looking for a specific therapy provider or peer support organisation, we can suggest where to look. What we don't do is pretend to be a long-term therapeutic provider after the adoption order — that's the local authority's role to commission, and a number of organisations across the country deliver it well.

Support for sibling groups

A high proportion of children placed by Jigsaw go into sibling groups. The support patterns for sibling placements are different from single-child placements, and we know this from a decade of working with families who have adopted two or three children together.

Two things change. Settling-in happens at different paces for each child, and the household has to accommodate that — what works for the older sibling may not work for the younger one. School transitions happen in parallel rather than sequentially, which puts more pressure on the family in the first term than a single placement does.

We talk about this honestly during assessment, plan for it during matching, and stay close to families during the first year of placement when most of the pressure shows up. Adopting siblings is the right decision for many families, and it works — but it's not always the same as adopting one child.

100%

Would recommend Jigsaw to others

100%

Of Jigsaw families who applied for an adoption order were granted one

87%

Rated the adopter app 4 or 5 out of 5

How we collect data

If you're working through any of the practical pieces of adoption with us, the following may be useful: the Adoption and Special Guardianship Support Fund page explains how therapeutic funding works after the adoption order; the adoption process page walks through each stage from first contact to the adoption order; and the paperwork page sets out the documents involved at each stage.

Considering adopting with us?

If you're considering adopting with us and want to understand what ongoing support looks like in practice, fill in our interest form and a member of our team will get in touch.

Fill in our interest form