Our History

The CCP Service - end of an era

Our Concurrent Planning Service, run in partnership with Caritas Care, ended in May 2024. Launching in 2014 and growing to be the largest service of its kind in the country, placing 187 children with our carers and welcoming 146 new carers to the service. Due to changes in the adoption landscape, it meant that we needed to adapt and move our concurrent planning staff back into their respective agencies, to bring their early permanence expertise to our adoption teams. The service was innovative, pioneering and adaptable, constantly changing to meet the needs of children waiting. A service which led the way in the Early Permanence arena and our work has helped pave the way for many of the services now embedded across the country helping hundreds more children and families. We are so very proud of that.

We look to grow the Adoption Matters family

Our senior management team witness a crisis in foster care not seen in the UK for many years, which coupled with the cost of living crisis, is only looking to deepen. During the Covid-19 pandemic, thousands of foster families ceased fostering and now too many children are being placed far away from their homes, many in residential placements due to the lack of foster families. We start to look to expand our services into fostering. We recruit Karen Palfreyman, who will lead the new agency.

We adapt our services to meet YOUR needs during Covid-19

As the Covid-19 pandemic evolved in early 2020, we quickly adapted our processes to meet the needs of our families and service users. Adoption Matters has always primarily operated as a home working organisation, so we were able to quickly adapt ensuring that our work was conducted safely, adhering to the latest guidance using a mixture of online technology as well as some face-to-face meetings where it is safe and appropriate to do so. Our organisation remained 100% fully staffed throughout the whole pandemic, our administration staff were all deployed to work at home and we even expanding our support staff base to enable to continue to offer the high level of support needed to during this stressful and worrying time for us all. We remained, here for you.

Centre for Adoption Support

In late 2019, the Centre for Adoption Support ceased to be a partnership service moving back to the main support offering of Adoption Matters. The service continued to operate and develop a comprehensive range of adoption support services to our families and commissioned work with our Regional Adoption Agency and Local Authority colleagues.

2017 our 70th Year

In our 70th year and over 4,000 children placed for adoption. We continue to grow, innovate and offer high quality services to our children and families, operating across 6 regional offices. This year we place 76 children with their new adoptive families, a record for the charity at the time.

Concurrent Planning Service launched

Adoption Matters forms a partnership with Caritas Care to offer a new approach to early permanence through the Concurrent Planning Service throughout the North West. In 2019, the service celebrated its 100th placement and is now the largest service of its kind in the country.

Adoption Matters Northwest

Chester Diocese Adoption Service and Blackburn Diocese Adoption Agency merge to become Adoption Matters Northwest providing a service across the whole of the North West.

Norman Goodwin, CBE joins Adoption Matters

Norman, our former CEO, joined Adoption Matters in 1985, initially as a team leader and then Chief Executive Officer in 1992. Norman was awarded a CBE in the 2015 Queen’s Birthday Honours in ‘recognition of his outstanding contribution and distinguished service to adoption services and the family’. Norman is now Patron of our charity.

St. Bridget's

By the 1960s with society’s changing views on unmarried mothers, St. Bridget’s home in Chester closed for a short period of time and reopened in the early 1970s as a day nursery also offering a flat let scheme for mother and child to stay for a short period of time.

In 1983, St. Bridget’s closed and today no longer stands at Lache Lane in Chester.

First adoption was made

Blackburn Diocesan Adoption Agency made their first adoptive placement, a baby girl.

St. Bridgets Mother & Baby Home

In 1933, the house was run by the Sisters from St Mary the Virgin and became a long stay home for young women who were pregnant and in need of support. In the early fifties, the house was renamed St. Bridget’s Mother & Baby Home.