A day of collaboration, learning and challenging thinking about how systems shape children’s journeys through care and permanence.

What will the day explore?

Adoptee and young adult voices

Hearing directly from people with lived experience and creating space for their experiences to inform practice and future change.

Law and rights

Exploring the child, their rights and the systems that surround them, with a focus on what those systems mean in practice for children and families.

Health and Science

Keeping practice connected to contemporary science and research, and exploring what our growing understanding of development, adversity and trauma means for the systems supporting children.

Journey of the Child

Using the Journey of the Child framework to explore the different points along a child’s journey and consider which experiences, interventions and opportunities for support matter most.

From what to how

PATCH will share developments from the systemic review, consultation, survey and wider work, moving the conversation from identifying the problems towards practical change.

Who is the conference for?

The conference is intended for anyone with an interest in improving the experiences and outcomes of children experiencing permanence, including:

Social workers and social care professionals

Education and health professionals

Legal professionals

Researchers and academics

Adoption and permanence services

Residential and therapeutic practitioners

Policy makers and decision-makers

Adoptive parents, carers, and families

Anyone with an interest in creating better systems around children

This is an opportunity to bring different perspectives into the same room — lived experience, professional practice, law, science and systems — and to ask whether we are really seeing the child clearly. Because permanence is not the end of a child’s journey.

Description supplied by the event organiser.