Brighton and Hove's Adoption and Permanence team is staffed by experienced senior social workers, skilled practitioners and managers who are committed to providing high quality support and advice to those wanting to adopt and those affected by adoption.

Brighton and Hove's Adoption and Permanence team recruits adopters for children of all ages that are unable to remain with their birth family and for whom adoption has been agreed as the plan. We place the needs of the child at the heart of the adoption process.

We are looking for people who can show an ability to care for children and who have some understanding of the needs of children who cannot live with their birth families. We're particularly interested in people who are open to learning new skills to help children and young people develop in a positive way.

Our team is committed to ensuring that children are placed with families who can meet their needs. When placing a child we take into consideration their ethnic, cultural, religious and language needs. We seek to recruit adopters from different communities and backgrounds to enable us to meet the wide-ranging needs of the children and young people we look after.

 We both agree that we were treated with a great deal of sensitivity and the utmost of respect, courtesy and care." Brighton & Hove adopter 

We especially need to recruit adopters for children over 2 years, sibling groups and black and minority ethnic children.

Children come into care because of their parent's inability to cope (due to their own difficulties), and/or because they are at risk or have experienced significant harm through abuse or neglect. The abuse may have been physical, sexual, emotional, or a combination of these. The children we look after come from backgrounds where they have been severely neglected and their parents have not met their basic needs - physical care, security, affection, stimulation, guidance and control. They are likely to have suffered emotionally because of the problems their parents may be going through such as drug or alcohol abuse, mental health problems or domestic violence.

The children's reactions to these experiences will be expressed in different ways. Adopters need to be sensitive to this so that they can help them to recover and understand what has happened in their lives.