It's All About Me (IAAM)

Project insights

1. How did Local Authorities access IAAM?

   IAAM was the first provider-led SIB in the UK, developed by a collaboration of 18 Voluntary Adoption Agencies (VAAs) and Baker Tilly. IAAM was designed as a nation-wide service, open to authorities across the country. The Cabinet Office’s Social Outcomes Fund committed to contributing £10,000 in outcomes payments for the first 100 children registered under the SIB. It is worth noting that this was (and remains to date) the only SIB ever launched by the market which did not receive any development grant funding to cover the cost of designing it (all of that cost was charged to the project, and thus borne by the investors and the 18 VAAs who contributed at the outset).

   The signing up process for local authorities was designed to be as simple as possible: local authorities would refer a child to IAAM, which would then alert all VAAs. The VAAs would consider the referral and if they were able to help would contact the Local Authority. The Local Authority would then decide whether to register with a VAA to find a family. This process was called ‘Registration’ and was marked by the exchange of contracts outlining what the VAA will do to find and support a family to placement and beyond for two years. Alternatively, the Local Authority could go direct to a participating VAA, and in this case the VAA informed IAAM and the process continued from this point without other VAAs being asked to consider family finding in the particular case. 

   Further information about the IAAM operational model is available here.

   Once a child was registered with IAAM, local authorities would be required to stop looking for suitable placements elsewhere, but some stakeholders felt that this was unreasonable, and subsequent programmes should consider whether this approach is most effective in securing the best possible outcomes for the children being supported.  

2. Funding model

   Big Society Capital and Bridges Fund Management committed to provide working capital to the IAAM project to fund up to 100 child places per year. This funded the VAAs work in finding and training parents, assessing the needs of the child around which that training was based, and delivering a complex matrix of support to the parents in delivering the therapeutic parenting the child needs. This was drawn down by the providers as required to fund each stage of the intervention for each child participating in the programme, totalling £46,500 per child. This strategy enabled VAAs to get additional resources to recruit adoptive parents for these children, offer additional training to adoptive families, and where appropriate, to their support networks, and tailor the training to the specific needs of the child and the family over and above what would be available through the normal inter-agency fee of £27,000. 

   Funding IAAM through a Social Impact Bond model meant that the funding from investors was available to participating VAAs at the start of the process (the inter-agency fee is only paid by LAs at the point when a child is actually placed, long after the necessary work has been done), with the local authorities repaying the funding over several years as the various set outcomes were being achieved (LAs would save money from reduced cost of looking after the children in care). Where all the four milestone outcomes (tracking placement stability up to two years after the adoption placement - see Outcomes Framework above) were achieved for a child registered with IAAM, the local authorities paid about 50% more per adopted child than through the inter-agency fee, but ~50% less than they would have done during that period of looking after the child in care. 

   Source: Big Society Capital - Adoption Social Impact Bond, 2016.

3. Impact of system-wide changes in  national policy

   The IAAM service was launched in 2013 as a response to the challenges that local authorities were facing in finding adoptive families for so-called ‘harder to place’ children. At that time, the number of children waiting to be adopted exceeded the number of approved adopters, children waited a long time to be adopted, and many adoptive families were struggling without support. Moreover, local authorities were disincentivised to find families through other local authorities or Voluntary Adoption Agencies due to the fees involved. 

   N.B. Under the structure of adoption services at the time, if local authorities placed a child with an adopter they themselves recruited, then no fee applied. If they chose to place the child with a family approved by another local authority, a fee of £13,000 had to be paid to compensate that authority for the investment they had made in assessing the adopters. When a local authority placed a child with an adoptive family recruited from a voluntary agency an 'inter-agency fee' of £27,000 had to be paid. As a result of the financial disincentive inherent in this structure, many local authorities engaged in 'sequential family finding'. They first sought to match amongst their own pool of adopters, then amongst neighbouring authorities and finally looked to voluntary adoption agencies. Pursuing these three options in sequence rather than in parallel built in more delay for the child. 

   Source: House of Lords Select Committee on Adoption Legislation, Second Report, 2014.

   To address these problems, in the years following the launch of IAAM the UK government announced a comprehensive suite of measures and policy plans to improve the adoption system. In 2015 the government introduced a £30 million package to cover the cost of the inter-agency fees to allow local authorities to widen their search for families without shouldering the financial cost. The same year the Adoption Support Fund was introduced across England (£19 million), to provide families with a range of post-adoption therapeutic support services. In 2016 the government published its plan ‘Adoption: A vision for change’ for addressing the challenges in the adoption system over the next 4 years, which includes commitments to  redesign the whole adoption system by delivering new service models through Regional Adoption Agencies (RAAs) that foster closer collaboration between local authorities and voluntary adoption agencies.

   Source: Department for Education - Adoption: A Vision for change, 2016.