Almost half of applications for therapy approved by the Adoption and Special Guardianship Support Fund (ASGSF) last year exceeded the new £3,000 annual limit per child on funding, government figures have revealed.
The data shows thousands of care experienced children in permanence placements will go without the therapy they need due to the Department for Education’s decision to cut the ceiling for annual payments per child from £5,000 to £3,000 this year, charities warned.
Children’s minister Janet Daby released the figures this week in response to a parliamentary question from fellow Labour MP Melanie Onn, who is also chair of the all-party parliamentary group on kinship care.
Number of ASGSF therapy applications approved in 2024-25
| Placement type | Less than £3,000 | £3,000-£5,000 | % over £3,000 |
| Adoption (domestic and inter-country) | 8,369 | 7,091 | 46% |
| Special guardianship order | 2,179 | 1,895 | 46.5% |
| Child arrangements/residency order | 34 | 27 | 44% |
| Total | 10,562 | 9,013 | 46% |
They showed that 46% of applications for therapy from councils or regional adoption agencies (RAA) within the then ‘fair access limit’ of £5,000 were for services costing more than £3,000.
In her answer, Daby stressed that individual applications could be for multiple recipients across multiple placement types, meaning awards could be for more than one child, each of whom would be eligible for a therapy package worth up to the fair access limit.
‘Thousands set to go without therapy they need’
However, charities said they showed that the reduction in the fair access limit meant thousands of children would go without the therapy they needed this year.
A spokesperson for Adoption UK said: “This suggests that under the new rules for this financial year, thousands of adopted children, children in special guardianship and child arrangement orders would not be getting the therapy they need.
“The DfE has said the new fair access limit will allow adoptive and kinship families to ‘access a significant package of therapeutic support’, but has failed to share any evidence to back up that claim and this data seems to contradict that assumption.”
Cuts ‘risk pushing kinship families to breaking point’
For Kinship, associate director of policy and public affairs Sam Turner said the figures “[illustrated] the level of need amongst kinship families for intensive therapeutic support”, which he said was not going away. Turner warned that reducing the fair access limit “will only push kinship families to other already overstretched NHS and wider services and to breaking point as they struggle to care for their children without any support.”
“Children who enter kinship care have often experienced significant trauma, separation and loss, and the government’s decision to cut the level of funded therapeutic support available to each child will have lasting consequences for families and the state,” he added.
The cut in the fair access limit was only revealed on 14 April 2025, with councils and RAAs having already lodged thousands of applications with the ASGSF under the assumption that the £5,000 limit would hold in 2025-26.
In a parliamentary answer issued last week, Daby revealed that 727 applications were returned to councils or RAAs to be for revised to meet the new £3,000 limit before resubmission.
And while the DfE has allowed councils and RAAs to submit retrospective applications up until mid-June, to enable children and families to start therapy without having to wait for ASGSF approval, providers have warned that they would not be able to deliver the required services under the new limit in many cases.
Children ‘may receive wrong therapy or shortcut services’
The Consortium of Voluntary Adoption Agencies’ (CVAA) chief executive, Satwinder Sandhu, warned: “This means thousands of children being denied the therapies which have been carefully assessed as appropriate to their needs and experiences.
“Some proven therapies simply cannot be fully delivered within the new funding parameters, so the integrity and effectiveness of trauma-based therapies undertaken now will be seriously compromised.”
He added: “We fear that the ASGSF cuts will see children being mismatched with the wrong therapies or shortcut versions, which will ultimately be money poured down the drain. The ASGSF has to be needs-led at its core rather than an illogical blanket approach towards all children, which doesn’t take into account their unique complex histories and identities.”
Removal of separate allowance for specialist assessments
The cut in the fair access limit has been accentuated by the DfE’s parallel decision to remove a separate £2,500 allowance for children and families to receive a specialist assessment of their therapeutic needs.
Councils and RAAs will still be able to make ASGSF applications for assessments, but these will need to be financed from within the overall £3,000 annual limit per child.
In her answer to Onn, Daby revealed that there were 3,069 approved applications and 3,319 funded recipients for specialist assessments in 2024-25. Earlier this month, in response to a separate parliametary question from Labour MP Rachael Maskell, Daby revealed that the average value of applications for assessments last year that were within the then limit was £2,400.
Adoption UK pointed out that, had the new FAL rules applied last year, “thousands of children would only have had £600 available to them for therapeutic support over the course of a year”.
Daby’s answer to Maskell also illustrated the impact of a third policy change: the removal of provisions for the ASGSF to match fund more expensive support packages above the fair access limit up to a maximum of £30,000, with councils funding the rest. Daby revealed there were 375 applications for therapy with match funding in 2024-25, with an average value £4,297.
Councils ‘on the brink financially’
The minister has previously said that councils and RAAs would be able to top-up ASGSF-funded therapy packages costing more than £3,000 from mainstream children’s services budgets.
However, in a parliamentary debate on adoption and kinship this week, Liberal Democrat education spokesperson Munira Wilson warned that “a lot of local authorities [were] on the brink financially, and many children’s services budgets [were] in huge deficit”.
Meanwhile, it has been revealed that the DfE is going to test devolving ASGSF funding to regional adoption agencies – or groups of RAAs. A small chunk of this year’s £50m ASGSF budget will be handed to Adoption England – the national body that supports RAAs – to test this approach.
Testing regional devolution of adoption support
In an interview with Community Care, Adoption England head Sarah Johal said regional agencies/pan-regions would carry out specialist assessments and deliver therapeutic post-adoption support, through RAAs’ multidisciplinary teams, while also commissioning services from therapy providers.
Areas would try out different approaches to funding adoption support, and the pilot’s aims included reducing reliance on specialist therapeutic support, by tailoring provision more to need, and tackling the “bureaucracy” involved for social workers in making applications to the ASGSF, Johal added.
At the same time, the DfE is reviewing the future of the ASGSF from 2026 onwards, with Daby saying last month that the government would make an announcement in due course.
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Applications for multiple recipients which then take the total over £3000 aren’t that common.
What is more common and completely missed here is that local authorities might make multiple applications for one child in a year. There might have been a £2500 application for an assessment, a second £2000 application for sensory therapy and a third £3000 application for DDP informed therapeutic parenting support. That’s three individual applications that are all for less than the new FAL, but add up to far exceed it. Having worked with the ASGSF since its inception, I’d be surprised if that’s not the case for the majority of the applications in this data.
I’m not a fan of the ASGSF. It was ideological, badly conceived, poorly delivered, exceptionally exclusive to one cohort of children at the expense of many others, and a deeply inefficient way to provide therapeutic support. But the government should at least make an effort to know what it’s talking about.
As a recipient of therapy from the Adoption Support Fund.I expect fewer children to be adopted and a lot more expensive adoption breakdowns from the new policy. Penny rich pound foolish comes to mind..
I certainly won’t be recommending adoption to anyone in my non existent network, as no one should put themselves through the crap we have had to endure on our own. At the very least self funded therapy should be tax deductible.
Pity the poor adoptive parent having to deal with a cohort of children that are four times less likely to have an autism diagnosis than others with an EHCP. Why? They’d have to cough up for therapy in the adoption order. Adoptive parents need to stop being fobbed off with inadequate provision for therapy for when it will be needed, by not signing adoption orders.
As an adoptive parent, whose children have massively benefited from the ASGSF. I am equally shocked & saddened at the cuts to the ASGSF. Trauma is extremely complex, severe & is not healed quickly, but takes many years of highly skilled therapeutic parenting along with specialist therapeutic support & often specialist education is also required. Given the fact that adoption saves the government billions of pounds every year. It seems completely illogical not to invest sufficiently in post adoption support. I think it would be a good idea for the senior ministers to spend a day with an adoptive family & see just how punishingly difficult it is parenting severely traumatised children. Then perhaps they would see for themselves just how vital this therapy is.
Furthermore, I would understand if the new adoption centres of excellence around the country were all up & running, providing full post adoption support, such as advocacy, therapy, training etc However, this is not the case at all. Many are still in the process of being set up. Therefore, it seems ludicrous to reduce the ASGSF, without having an alternative in place to fully support adoptive families.
Sadly I fear if this decision is not reversed, there will be many more adoption breakdowns & far fewer people will choose to adopt.
The cut shows a total lack of understanding of trauma and the long-term impact of traumatic experiences upon the child, and consequently upon the parents and other family members.
Therapy should happen immediately that a child is in care, let alone as soon as they adopted, as otherwise unhealthy learned patterns of relating remain entrenched. Unfortunately, families wait until they are at breaking point. Who would want to invite scrutiny and more strangers into their family home, after surviving the adoption process? This is why many struggle on without help. It takes a brave parent to pick up the ‘phone and request social services intervention.
Children and their families need frequent and intensive therapy in order to un-do and re-do parenting, to process trauma, and to learn healthy attachment patterns. This does not happen on a shoe-string budget, it doesn’t happen quickly, and it doesn’t happen in isolation of all the other people involved in the child’s life. 3K is a shoe-string. I can not provide therapy, therapeutic parenting, consultations, attendance at reviews and education meetings for the child on this amount of money. Children, Young People and Families are in crisis – they will be pushed over the edge without adequate support.
This will cost the government, and the country, more money. Even worse: the toll of family breakdown for the children and their parents.