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Hi, I am new to the boards but have been following people progress for about a year and a half and many of your success stories have kept me going (]... Myself and partner were approved in April this year 100% approval from the panel. We have gone through the process with a local authority, and the social worker who went through our home study with us only took us to panel, once we were approved we were appointed a new social worker and on her first visit came with a potential match. We were given some information from our social worker who played down some things such as drinking by the child''s mother during pregnancy, to the point of saying there was no issue. When we had our meeting with the child''s social worker, their manager and our family finding social worker it was a disaster, we were so under prepared for the meeting and her questions, it was horrible, also the drinking in pregnancy was all of a sudden made into a massive issue. It was partly our fault and our social workers, but we did not know what to expect. We have had a feed-back meeting and have taken on board all their comments and are looking at moving forward, they did however ask whether we felt we had been set up, which we felt we had, they said that they will outline on what we need to do to proceed/progress further. This was 7 weeks ago I have tried to get in contact with them on various occasions by email/phone and keep getting fobbed off with ''we are working on a draft proposal of the way forward'' and ''will be in contact shortly''. We have been given a rough idea of what was wrong 1) we need to get to know more Lesbian and Gay parents this is easily done by joining a local group, which we did try and join before we went to panel but were told we could not until we had been matched then at the above feedback meeting we were told we should of joined ages ago. 2) we need to have a better understanding of how our life will change if we adopt a child (this stemmed from a me wanting to return back to work part-time in the second year of having a child placed with us, we need to do this for financial reasons) I can take the first year off no problem. 3) they have said that we need more child care experience with young children (we have spent nearly a year looking after a friend''s little boy every other week at the weekend, also we spent 8 months working with the wildlife trust helping them to get children involved and interested in wildlife) Any other suggestion''s or advice on how we can gain more experience considering we both work full time and can''t take any time off. We were given very little information on the matching process and have subsequently found out that we have not received information that would of helped us prepare for the process.Basically my question is has anybody else experienced this or similar? If so how did it get resolved? Is there an organisation that I can contact and get help or advice.