Thousands of vulnerable children across the UK are at risk of losing access to crucial therapeutic support as the Adoption and Special Guardianship Support Fund (ASGSF) is set to expire at the end of this month.
Despite repeated warnings from experts and campaigners, the Labour Government has failed to confirm funding for the scheme beyond 31 March 2025, leaving families and providers in limbo.
Since its introduction in 2015, the ASGSF has been a lifeline for children who have been adopted from care or placed under special guardianship orders (SGOs), helping them recover from trauma, neglect, and abuse.
The fund covers a range of therapies, including family therapy, psychotherapy, creative therapies, and therapeutic life story work. In 2023-24 alone, 16,970 applications were approved, highlighting the essential role it plays in supporting some of the country’s most vulnerable young people.
‘Too Late’ to Apply for Support
However, with no guarantee of continued funding, no new applications can now be made for therapy services starting after March 2024. According to Adoption UK, it is already too late for families to apply before the deadline, meaning that many children who rely on this support face an abrupt and damaging break in therapy.
In a joint statement last week, six leading therapy providers – Anna Freud (London), Beacon House (West Sussex), Family Futures (London), The Family Place (Midlands and Devon), Gateway Psychology (Staffordshire), and TouchBase (East Sussex) – warned that ending the fund without a clear replacement strategy could have devastating consequences.
Louise Michelle Bombèr, founding director of TouchBase, said:
“Trauma recovery work is all about facilitating safety, security and stability. We are being prevented from providing this with breaks in therapy now expected. The families we work with are committed to their children but gravely concerned about the impact this break will have upon mental health and wellbeing.”
Jay Vaughan, chief executive and co-founder of Family Futures, added:
“Delays in therapy have a direct and detrimental impact on the safety and stability of adoptive and special guardianship placements, placing the children we support at significant risk. The emotional toll of this uncertainty is immense. Our families are experiencing a significant and unnecessary increase in stress and worry, exacerbating their already stressful home lives which will have long-lasting consequences for their wellbeing.”
‘A Lifeline’ Under Threat
According to Community Care, Parents and guardians have also spoken out, warning that the loss of the ASGSF will put families under enormous strain. One family described the scheme as a “lifeline”, saying that their adopted daughter would not have coped without it. They added:
“If the ASGSF was to discontinue, it would have very serious repercussions for our family – and in the end, would cost the government thousands of pounds more when we can no longer look after her at home.”
The intervention by therapy providers and families follows an open letter to Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson from Adoption UK, urging the government to confirm funding “without further delay”.
Emily Frith, Chief Executive of Adoption UK, warned that the government’s failure to act would lead to a surge in family breakdowns, increased pressure on social services, and ultimately, higher costs for taxpayers. She said:
“There is a significant economic imperative in investing in therapeutic support, as well as a moral one. There should be no doubt that the cost to the Treasury will be far greater if the number of adoptive families facing crises continues to rise.”
MPs Demand Answers – But Labour Ministers Stay Silent
The Labour Government’s handling of the issue has come under increasing scrutiny in Parliament, with MPs from all parties demanding clarity on the fund’s future.
Responding to a Parliamentary Question from Labour MP Rachael Maskell on 29 January, Children’s Minister Janet Daby claimed that a decision on the ASGSF would be made “as soon as possible”. She stated:
“The department will shortly be finalising business planning decisions on how its budget will be allocated for the next financial year. All decisions regarding the Adoption and Special Guardianship Support Fund (ASGSF) are being made as part of these discussions. An announcement will be made as soon as possible.”
However, despite repeated follow-up questions from MPs, Daby has continued to repeat the same vague response, refusing to confirm whether the fund will be renewed.
When pressed by MP Cameron Thomas on whether the Department for Education had assessed the impact of the ASGSF, Daby cited a study from 2018-21, which found that parents overwhelmingly rated the fund as “helpful” or “very helpful”. She admitted that the DfE only began collecting data on therapy outcomes at the end of 2023, but again failed to provide any assurance on future funding.
Labour’s Betrayal of Vulnerable Families?
The Labour Government’s inaction has left thousands of families in a state of anxiety and distress, with no certainty over whether their children’s life-changing therapy will continue beyond March. Critics argue that ministers are prioritising other spending at the expense of vulnerable children – and that the financial and emotional cost of their failure to act will be far greater in the long run.
Conservative Councillor Emma Marshall says:
“It is both cruel and financially illiterate for the Government not to continue this funding.
“Therapeutic sessions help to secure permanency for children who have been through an awful experience. Children who are adopted or in special guardianships have often been through trauma. The personal impact to them is immense and this therapy helps them to recover and live a full and happy life with their new adoptive parents or guardians.
“Additionally the cost of placement breakdowns has both a societal and financial implication. Children who have grown up on care are more likely to struggle with mental health, more likely to go to jail and less likely to find gainful employment.
“All of this puts a burden on the state. The average cost of a child in care is £200,000 a year, far more than the cost of this therapy.
“Not continuing this funding is cruel, short sighted and financially illiterate. Please write to your MP to ask them to reinstate the funding for this important therapy.”
As the 31 March deadline looms, families, therapists, and MPs continue to call on Labour to step up and protect these essential services – but whether they will listen remains to be seen.
For more information go to: https://www.communitycare.co.uk/2025/03/10/thousands-of-children-risk-losing-access-to-vital-therapy-warn-support-providers/
Source: Mithran Samuel writing for www.communitycare.co.uk on March 10, 2025.
The Adoption Support Fund, as it was initially called, was very poorly conceived on inception. It was put forward by an ideological conservative government with no real planning or preparation in order to help promote adoption as the gold standard for permanence. It quickly became evident that the government had no idea of the high level of need children with traumatic early histories would come forward to request support for. This potentially traumatic ending was baked in from the beginning with no consideration of how the fund would develop. This was exacerbated when the £5000 per year funding limit was imposed, at best purchasing half a year at a time. This inflicted yearly endings and restarts of broken cycles of therapy on extremely vulnerable children and held back development of relationships and therapeutic momentum for many. The government placed additional financial responsibilities and pressure on impoverished local authorities to either contribute extra funds, or otherwise take the blame for the inevitable disruptions to interventions. At the same time many local authorities’ own adoption support services became deskilled and underutilised. The overwhelming crises of trauma and adversity the same government inflicted on its own people, over more than a decade of austerity and class warfare, increased the complexity of children’s needs and removed essential core services and support. This has resulted in increasing numbers of families in crisis, including many adoptive families. The ASGSF has repeatedly been used as a sticking plaster to manage immediate parental crises and keep adopted children in their family homes, when the limited relationship focused therapies it funds need children to be provided with a good enough level of relational stability and security at home and at school to have any real impact on their developmental recovery. The ASGSF is referred to as a ‘life line’, when in many cases It simply delays the inevitable and masks significant dysfunction in family relationships which are then not unpacked and worked upon. The fund has also falsely hyperinflated a market of private therapy service providers of varying quality. Many of these services are excellent and with access to fairer, more robust funding streams would have huge beneficial impacts on children’s welfare and support the success of permanence placements of all kinds. Many providers are now largely financially dependent upon the fund for survival. It is not surprising that it is these same companies, with a vested interest in the survival of the fund, which are venerating it so highly. The Labour government has inherited this unreasonably exclusive, highly expensive but utterly insufficient funding stream and it has become misplaced and overlooked in its spending review process. It is obvious that the Adoption & Special Guardianship Support Fund needs overhauling and fundamental change, especially within the context of universal mental health services where other children with equal levels of need cannot access any support for their emotional or mental health. However, the Labour government is completely mishandling either the ending or the preferred reform of the fund, which might open up opportunities to children who have equal need but are either in care or living with their birth families. It is leaving children and families in deeper uncertainty, on the cliff edge of crisis, and is only compounding the damage which previous government policy has already caused.