Photo: DragonImages/Adobe Stock
Loading …Sector bodies have urged education secretary Bridget Phillipson to reconsider huge cuts to payments for therapy for care experienced children and their families under the Adoption and Special Guardianship Support Fund (ASGSF).
Adoption UK, the Consortium of Voluntary Adoption Agencies (CVAA), Coram and Kinship said the changes risked disrupting placements and causing children to return to the care system, while also undermining the government’s drive to recruit more adopters and encourage kinship placements.
The reductions, revealed this week, mean standard maximum payments under the fund have been cut from £5,000 to £3,000 per year, while the ASGSF will no longer match fund payments up to £30,000 above the threshold.
Furthermore, the separate £2,500 allowance for specialist assessments has been removed, meaning any child or family requiring one would have to fund their therapy from the remainder of the £3,000 limit.
Children facing breaks in and delays to therapy
The changes, designed to cope with high levels of demand for the ASGSF, whose annual budget will remain at £50m, followed the government’s much-criticised delay in confirming that the fund would continue in 2025-26.
This is likely to have led to many children and families experiencing a break in therapy and increased the time others will have to wait to receive it, due to the need for regional adoption agencies (RAAs) and councils to apply annually for resources under the fund.
The delays facing families have increased as a result of this week’s announcement, because councils and RAAs will now need to redo many applications to ensure they meet the new financial limits.
In their letter to Phillipson, the chief executives of the four sector bodies said that the payment cuts would “not solve the financial challenges caused by the foreseeable increased demand”.
Changes ‘risk placement disruption’
Instead, it would increase pressures on other “already-overstretched services”, including the NHS, added Emily Frith (Adoption UK), Carol Homden (Coram), Lucy Peake (Kinship) and Satwinder Sandhu (CVAA).
“It risks significant consequences for individual children who need this vital support, especially children with the most complex needs who experience the greatest barriers to opportunity, and risks increasing the number of families reaching breaking point,” they told Phillipson.
“This decision may lead to placement disruptions and a resultant impact on local authority children’s services if children return to the care system.”
Government policy ‘being undermined’
The organisations also claimed that the changes risked undermining the government’s own policy goals, in relation to recruiting more adopters and supporting more children in kinship placements.
In a recent letter to Adoption England, which oversees the work of RAAs, confirming its funding for 2025-26, children’s minister Janet Daby said a key priority for the organisation should be to boost recruitment to tackle significant and growing shortages of adoptive families.
Separately, the government’s children’s social care reform agenda envisages more children being supported in kinship arrangements, including under special guardianship orders, as an alternative to going into, or remaining in, the care system.
To support this, the DfE plans to test providing allowances to some groups of kinship carers and legislate for councils to publish a local offer of support to kinship families, which should include signposting them to sources of therapeutic support. This, said Frith, Homden, Peake and Sandhu, was now, in effect, being undermined.
Urging Phillipson to reconsider the DfE’s decision to cut ASGSF payment levels, they called on her to “take immediate action to convene organisations like ours to start to work through these challenges together and establish a long-term plan for the future of the ASGSF beyond this year”.
