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Dates: June 2022 – July 2023, with additional work planned May – Aug 2024.
Research team: Professor Beth Neil (Principle Investigator), Dr Julia Rimmer, Dr Cassian Rawcliffe, and Ruth Copson (all CRCF at UEA)
Funder: Adoption England
The majority of adopted children have a plan to stay in touch with birth relatives through ‘letterbox’ systems where letters are sent between birth and adoptive families through adoption agencies. Agencies manage large numbers of often quite complex contact plans, with tailored offers to support/review arrangements. When letterbox contact is kept up over time, it can have benefits for adopted young people, birth relatives and adoptive parents, but there are variety of reported difficulties and frustrations with existing systems and now widespread calls for the approach to contact in adoption to be modernised.
Digital platforms which could facilitate letter contact and offer other ways of staying connected (via short messages, photos, audio or video notes) are a growing area of interest. Digital ways of staying in touch can be more immediate, trackable and less formal than other methods, though risks and boundaries need to be managed and issues of digital poverty and competence in using digital devices must be considered. In response to calls for the development of a digital letterbox system Link Maker developed an online platform called Letter Swap. This study evaluated the first pilot of this online platform.
This research was commissioned by Adoption England to support the implementation and evaluation of their commissioned pilot of ‘Letter Swap.’ The pilot began in July 2022 in five English Regional Adoption Agencies (RAAs), with a sixth joining in July 2023. It lasted for 15 months. The Post Adoption Centre – UK (PAC-UK (Post Adoption Centre UK)) were partners in the pilot, tasked with offering additional support to birth relatives wanting to use the platform. The pilot was led by an implementation lead from Adoption England, supported by a steering group. This was a formative evaluation, meaning that we collected data throughout the pilot as opposed to just at the end.