How we collect data

We believe the best way to understand the quality of our adoption service is to hear from the families who have been through it.

To avoid adopters feeling pressured to give positive feedback, we distribute our feedback form only once a family has been to adoption panel. By this point, the formal assessment is complete and our role is no longer to decide on approval — it is to support the family through matching and placement. This means there can be no concern that giving honest or critical feedback might affect a family’s approval.

The form is anonymous. It includes numeric ratings on a 1 to 5 scale for 15 categories covering every stage of the adoption process, plus free-text comments where adopters can describe their experience in their own words.

The statistics displayed on this website are aggregated results from these forms, based on adopter feedback collected since 2020. We publish both the percentage of adopters giving top scores (5 out of 5) and the broader percentage giving positive scores (4 or 5 out of 5), so readers can see the full picture rather than just the headline number.

We refresh these numbers periodically as new responses come in.

Where we compare Jigsaw’s performance to national figures, we use data published by the Department for Education and Ofsted. We link to the original government datasets so readers can verify the figures themselves.

Individual testimonial quotes displayed on this website are taken from the free-text comments in the same feedback forms, with names changed to protect adopter and child privacy. See our testimonial disclosure for more detail.

Jigsaw has developed a proprietary adopter app used by every family going through the adoption process with us. The app is the day-to-day tool families use to follow their progress, share documents, and stay in contact with their social worker.

As a by-product of how the app is used, it captures the key dates and milestones in each family’s journey: initial enquiry, Stage 1 progression, Stage 2 progression, adoption panel date, matching activity, placement date, and adoption order date. These are real timestamps from the live process, not retrospective estimates.

We use this data to measure how long each stage of the process actually takes, identify bottlenecks, and publish accurate statistics about Jigsaw’s operation. When you see a number on this site quoted as “Jigsaw analysis”, the underlying data comes from this source.

The process data is internal to Jigsaw and is not shared externally except in aggregated, anonymised form. Individual families are never identified in published statistics.