The Jigsaw team

Khalida co-founded Jigsaw and runs the agency day to day. She's an adopter herself, and brings 15 years of experience leading large organisations in the private and public sectors.

She holds an MBA from Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford. The combination of lived adoption experience and operational rigour shapes how Jigsaw works: warm in the room, careful behind the scenes.

Erik co-founded Jigsaw and looks after strategy, finance, and the technology that underpins how the agency runs. He brings over 20 years of experience from investing, IT, consulting, and financial services across the UK and mainland Europe.

He holds an MBA from the Stockholm School of Economics and is a parent of three. His role at Jigsaw is to keep the engine running quietly so that the social work team can focus entirely on adopters and children.

Rabia is Jigsaw's Responsible Individual — the senior post that's accountable to Ofsted for everything the agency does. She's a qualified social worker with over 20 years of experience in child protection assessments, parenting assessments, and Looked After Children, and has initiated court proceedings for several local authorities.

She's been a social work manager since 2011, with multi-systemic teams, social workers, CAMHS practitioners, and family support workers reporting to her over the years. She joined Jigsaw in 2019 and took on the Agency Decision Maker role in 2021.

Marion chairs the Jigsaw Adoption Panel. She is the mother of two adult children. Her professional background is in education — she taught for 34 years across both Inner London and Hertfordshire schools before recently retiring.

She brings both personal adoption experience and an extensive educational background to her role on panel. The combination matters: she sets the tone for how panel meetings feel, and that tone carries through to every adopter who sits on the other side of the table.

Nick is Jigsaw's medical adviser. He has over 30 years of experience as a GP in both NHS and private practice and has worked with looked after children of all ages throughout his career.

He reviews medical information for adopters and for children being considered for matching, and is the person Jigsaw turns to when a question needs a medical eye on it. He holds a degree from the University of London.

Carly is a registered social worker with 15 years of experience. She started in child protection and looked-after teams, where she covered every aspect of the role — writing reports, chairing core group meetings, attending court, and working directly with children and young people.

Before social work, Carly qualified as a nursery nurse in 2001 and worked with families inside family centres. Children from birth to five years old, learning through play, and child development are still her strongest interests — and they shape how she works with adopters at Jigsaw.

Pearl has spent 30 years in health and social care. She's worked in residential children's homes, respite homes for children with profound disabilities, therapeutic children's homes, and across all aspects of domestic abuse. She's also taught at post-16 colleges and worked as a school nurse and counsellor.

Pearl moved into adoption 15 years ago and has built specialist post-adoption support practice in that time. She has a Richard Rose diploma in Therapeutic Life Story work, is Theraplay-trained (Levels 1, 2, and group), and has undertaken Filial play therapy. She's been a respite foster carer for children with disabilities, and adoption sits within her own family too.

Nita has 20 years of experience covering all aspects of adoption work — both in local authorities and in voluntary agencies. That includes assessments, preparation training, placement of children, panel work, post-placement support, and direct work with children themselves.

She's facilitated training in schools on the impact of trauma in early childhood and is a passionate advocate for adopters who go beyond the youngest age groups. Before social work, she had careers in teaching and in rehabilitation nursing.

Janet has a BA Honours degree in Literature and Language and a Master's in Social Work. She's worked across Children's Services in West Berkshire and Buckinghamshire — covering disabilities, child protection, children in care, adoption, fostering, and young asylum seekers.

She's held leadership roles at Family Support Achieving for Children and is a Mental Health Mentor supporting university students. Before becoming a social worker, Janet worked in human resource management. She has three adult children of her own.