Pat Rajan and Liz Lister offer their views on the letterbox scheme which has been operating within Nottinghamshire's Support After Adoption team since June 1994. This confidential service aims to maintain links between adoptive parents and birth families once an adoption order has been granted. Rajan and Lister begin by outlining the background to the service's development, including the collection of information from consumers via national organisations. They describe concerns about confidentiality and recruitment of adopters, and discuss the criteria for selecting birth families most likely to respond to the scheme. By and large careful attention, both to the establishment of the letterbox service and to the selection of families who use it, has led to its success.
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