We offer professional and bespoke training for professionals from a range of different services, and directly to parents, carers and pre-adopters.

The team provides training, supervision and accreditation in the evidence based, Randomised Control Trial (RCT) supported Fostering Changes programme, which recently received a very positive rating in the NSPCC commissioned review of evidence-based practice for children in care. The programme has also won the support of the Big Lottery Fund for a £5million programme to roll it out throughout Wales and evaluate it using a state of the art RCT design (click here to learn more).

The team have updated and revised this programme recently to a briefer but more intensive version especially for adoptive families, called Adopting Changes (contact FCTC for more information).

We provide pre-adoption training on the mental health risks and issues for adopted children for prospective adopters for Local Authority and Private and Voluntary adoption agencies, which provides case based discussions of the evidence around the biopsychosocial risk factors that prospective adopters wish to know more about. For example, our team has provides inductions for pre-adopters for every two months with a Local Authority, and ad-hoc sessions as requested with other Local Authorities or organisations. Feedback is always excellent from preadopters and social workers. In these sessions, we try to keep things informal and answer as many questions as possible. We also provide a presentation where we describe heritability of mental health problems, why their child may have certain predisposition for some mental health issues, attachment, and we talk through case studies. We talk about resilience how to promote this in young people, and also about warning signs that should trigger a consultation.

The team also contribute our expertise in adopted and looked after children’s mental health and well-being to the teaching to the Frontline social worker training on attachment theory, attachment disorders and interventions; neurobiological consequences of maltreatment and neglect; mental health diagnosis and formulation; developmental psychopathology.

We are able to offer bespoke training around adoptionissues; mental health; attachment theory and disorders; neurobiology of maltreatment and neglect; trauma assessment and treatment; self-harm management in teenagers and a range of other specialist mental health issues that can affect looked after and adopted children.

The team are heavily involved in the teaching training and supervision of the CYP-IAPT Parenting module, which seeks to bring a collaborative, evidence-based approach to dealing with complex behavioural problems through a blended CAMHS model, covering NHS, Local Authority and Voluntary organisations.