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It may be relevant to ask the type/s of child/ren and age you are interested in adopting?

I don't think anyone's asked us this yet - but we would like to consider 2 siblings up to the age of 5. I think one of them asked if we were thinking one or more, but nothing more specific has been mentioned yet...

Hi Cezanne, Our LA weren't interested in us either, we went with voluntary agency and they were much more keen and positive! There are a lot of approved adopters waiting at the moment who are looking for under 5s so I guess it is possible that your LAs might have too many adopters on their books and not enough young children? LAs in my experience ideally only want to spend money putting adopters through the process if they hope to place children from their LA, where as VA are looking for parents for children from all over the country. A generalisation, but might explain their behaviour.

Hi Cezanne Know this is a bit of an old thread but thought I'd add my thoughts as we have found exactly the same. We've spoken to four LAs so far; one we decided against (they were rubbish administratively), another turned us down after two pre-stage 1 interviews (we are deciding to adopt rather than have birth children and they felt this would make us low priority) and the other two we've spoken to seem pretty indifferent. And this is us wanting to adopt sibling ethnic minority boys with additional needs (not only that profile, but aware that that's what's needed most). The only positive is that we've spoken to a VA who are really keen to speak to us further. At the end of the day, LAs priority is to match their children and it doesn't benefit them if you get matched out of area - they've then spent the money assessing you only for another area to benefit. VAs, however, are typically national so have a much wider pool of children than LAs.

I went through an LA twice but would def go through a VA if I scored again. I work for a VA now and they really have a genuine interest in each individual family.

Not sure about others experience, but from our experience, not all VA's source the children for you nor do they provide you with profiles or have children on their books. Some like ours rely on external sources and What the LAs have on their books but most of the time they did (VA) not come up with any profiles or CPR's for us (even though we were initially told by them that they had many pools of resources UK wide for children) and all in all we had to do pretty much all of the searching and proactive hard work on our own with very little assistance from the VA themselves in the long run, so do ask what their policy regarding all this is before committing to go with a particular VA. Given the current adoption climate especially be prepared to do all the searching yourself, not rely too heavily on your social worker searching or sourcing children's profiles for you once you get to that stage. Focus on being proactive, searching online and attending the various exchange/activity days! Just sharing our experience and being realistic here! Above all look after yourself, stay strong and stay positive! Good luck to all what ever stage they are at on their adoption journey! x