Adopting is about making a real difference to a child's life. When you adopt, you provide a secure, loving home to a child – for life! Like all parenting, it means sticking with it through good times and bad. It is one of the most challenging, but also one of the most rewarding things you can do.

Adoption is a legal process by which new parents or parent take on all the rights and responsibilities of natural parents. The adopted child usually takes the surname of the family and becomes a permanent part of their family in the same way as if the child had been born to them.

Adoption is a lifelong commitment. It's about providing a permanent family for a child or children in care who cannot, for whatever reason, return home.

Fostering is a way of providing family life for someone else's child, when they are unable to live with their birth family. Fostering can be a temporary arrangement, though sometimes foster care may be the plan until the child grows up. This is long term or permanent fostering. Fostering cannot provide the same legal security though it may be the right plan for some children.

Unlike adoptive families, foster carers share the responsibility for the child with the local authority and the child's birth parents.

People from all walks of life are encouraged to consider adoption. Adopters come from all backgrounds and can be male, female, single, married, in a civil partnership, a heterosexual couple living together or a same-sex couple living together – home-owners or renting. Adopters may be from different cultures, ethnicities and religions.

We're always looking for adoptive families to make a real, positive difference to a child or young person.