Welcome to our page dedicated to practitioners and professionals specialising in all aspects of Special Guardianship.

As Special Guardianship practitioners, we hope you will find the information contained on these pages useful and usable. You can download worksheets and use the items in your own agencies. Let us know if you want to know more about our our support groups and we hope you will share your experiences and information with us too. 

Special Guardianship Showcase Event - July 2015

The Consortium held their first Special Guardianship Showcase event, welcoming around 100 practitioners, guardians, senior managers, advocates and researchers. 

We were fortunate to have presentations that demonstrated a number of key achievements and initiatives being considered within and external to the consortium.

North London Adoption and Fostering Consortium (NLAFC) 

NLAFC have been established for over 13 years. We've been sharing information, strategies and best practices for adoption, then fostering and now Special Guardianship. 

Lorna Rook is the new Consortium Manager. 

The North London Adoption and Fostering Consortium (NLAFC) Special Guardianship Support Service Framework

This framework was developed over six months with the help of the Thomas Coram Research Unit, University College London (UCL) and a working group of managers, Special Guardians and practitioners from the consortium. 

The partnership project between the UCL and the NLAFC implemented Dr Emily Munro and Professor Louise Stroll aimed to:

  • establish a research-practice bridging network to support the development of best practice in Special Guardianship Support across the NLAFC 
  • facilitate networking within and between local authority Special Guardianship support stakeholders (SGs, social workers and managers) and 
  • inform and influence the design of Special Guardianship Support packages.

Special Guardians talked about their experience of contact and the positive and negative effects on their children, the birth parents and themselves. 

As part of the UCL project a Consortium-wide survey was introduced to understand the experiences of Special Guardians and how best we can improve the service to them.

View the planning and implementation process by Natalie from Enfield and the survey findings from the UCL Institute of Education.

Not MORE Forms! Boring, bureaucratic but very necessary.

A team of workers joined together to review forms with the aim of improving the service for Special Guardians. 

When Contact is Complicated

Judith from Barnet talked about Contact and it's impact on children, families and carers.

Presentations were also heard from Ethel and Special Guardians from Islington and from Vicky from Hackney on Preparation Groups.