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Care-experienced and adopted people, information governance practitioners, social workers, records managers and archivists are invited to participate in an online focus group to shape updated and detailed improvements in retaining care-experienced and adopted people’s records in England and Wales. This has been identified as a critical need by many recent reports including IICSA.
We recently published Guidance on the Records of Adopted and Care-Experienced People (Feb 2024) which sets out best practice, to improve consistency across England and Wales. We are a participative and inclusionary project led by members of the Chief Archivists in Local Government Group (CALGG), independent consultants and academics and professionals working in the records management, data protection and access to records fields, in the charitable and local government sectors. Some of our project members are adopted or care-experienced people.
Focus group details and booking information:
Further information
The Guidance is aimed at people responsible for creating, managing, and providing access to care and adoption records. It includes the viewpoints of care-experienced people and adopted people to give practitioners a greater understanding of their experiences, needs and the challenges they face.
The Guidance highlights that all organisations should have an up-to-date policy covering all records relating to children, young people and their families, together with procedures and plans to implement the policy including up-to-date retention schedules. Retention schedules recommend how long to keep different types of records. Each record type should have a retention period based on best practice, legislation, business need or a combination of these. Schedules also include how and when the retention period is triggered, and what should happen at the end of the period: typically either confidential destruction, or being kept permanently.
A retention period of least 125 years from date of birth for case files and preferably 150 years as exemplary practice is recommended in the Guidance. However it also recommends the permanent preservation of these records with an option for people to opt out in the case of their own records.
These recommendations are made because many care-experienced or adopted people reconstruct their personal histories by turning to the records created about them by social workers and care providers. Thousands of requests to view records for this purpose are made each year in England and Wales. The records – a “paper self” -have significant impacts on a care-experienced person throughout their life.
