‘Hugely influential’: Local adoption agency founder awarded MBE in Jubilee honours

Jay Vaughan MBE. Photograph: Family Futures

The founder of an adoption and fostering agency that has worked with more than a thousand children has been awarded an MBE in the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee honours.

Jay Vaughan started helping struggling adoptive families 25 years ago when she realised some children were suffering from attachment issues and trauma from their past.

She paid tribute to the families she has worked with and said the award was for them.

Vaughan, who lives in Stoke Newington, added: “It’s surprising news, it’s for the whole team at Family Futures and what we’ve done over 25 years and for the children and families and the way they keep going.”

She said when she started, families were often not involved in their child’s therapy because of confidentiality, but this could hamper progress.

She also looked at attachment issues and the trauma experienced by children after leaving their birth families.

“Their whole being is impacted,” she said. “It doesn’t just affect their world view but their whole body, the ability to control temperature, to eat and sleep, everything’s impacted.”

The team at Islington-based Family Futures works with around 60 children and their families every year – more than 1,000 over the last quarter of a century.

Vaughan said the work can help prevent children getting into serious trouble or facing problems when they start their own families.

She said that adoptive families sometimes struggle to get support, though some funding is available through the adoption support fund.

Her citation said “her work has been hugely influential within the field of post-adoption support” and she was praised for realising that children’s early experiences of abuse and neglect could lead to the breakdown of their relationships with their adoptive families.

Vaughan would like to see more research carried out into the number of children who go on to have problems if they do not get the help they need as youngsters.

She has researched and helped develop Neuro-Physiological Psychotherapy to support adoptive children.

Vaughan also helped introduce Theraplay to the UK and has trained more than 1,200 people in the UK to use the child and family therapy techniques, “sharing her calm approach, her wisdom and her compassion”, according to her nomination.