Almost half of Adoption and Special Guardianship Support Fund awards last year exceeded new £3,000 limit

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.

Many of these have since had to be resubmitted to meet the new £3,000 limit.

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.