Therapeutic support for kinship families

What’s happening now?

On 4 Sep 2025, a written ministerial statement confirmed that the adoption and special guardianship support fund (ASGSF) would continue for an additional year in 2026-27, and that public engagement would take place in 2026 “to better understand how well the fund is working, what the evidence tells us or what further evidence is required, and importantly what is working well for families and why”.

No additional changes to scope or eligibility of the Fund are currently in progress. The government’s Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill includes no further provisions for improving therapeutic support for children in kinship care.

Figures on ASGSF applications, published in September 2024, show that applications from kinship families were increasing but remained considerably lower than for adoptive families. Special guardianship applications represented 17% of all applications in 2023-24 despite more children leaving care to special guardianship than adoption each year since 2019. Just 46 applications from eligible families with child arrangements orders were made in the previous 2 years. However, correspondence from the then Minister suggests that applications for kinship children are “rising much faster than thos for adoptive children and by the end of February 2025 had risen to 20% of all applications for funding”. 

What’s happened previously?

On 1 April 2025, the then Minister for Children and Families confirmed £50 million investment to renew the adoption and special guardianship support fund (ASGSF) for 2025-26 in response to an urgent question in Parliament. This announcement came the day after the Fund had expired and despite substantial parliamentary and sector pressure for clarity in the preceeding months,

Subsequently, on 14 April 2025, the government announced a set of changes to the ASGSF for 2025-26, including:

• a reduction in the fair access limit for therapy from £5,000 to £3,000 per child per year.
• removal of the separate £2,500 limit per child per year for specialist assessments.
• removal of additional match-funded support for exceptional cases.

In response, Kinship wrote to the Secretary of State in April to urge the government to reconsider these changes alongside other leading charities supporting adoptive and kinship families, and we wrote again in July to request an urgent review of the impact of the changes and for confirmation of the ASGSF’s future beyond 2025-26.

Previously, following publication of the National Kinship Care Strategy In December 2023, the government renamed the then adoption support fund (ASF) to the adoption and special guardianship support fund (ASGSF) with the stated intention to increase applications from eligible kinship families. The National Kinship Care Strategy also included a commitment to commission new research to explore applications and therapies provided as part of the ASGSF to see how it is used (or not) by kinship families, with a view to informing further development. The status of this is unknown.

Our verdict

Confirmation of renewed funding for 2026-27, as well as a commitment to public consultation and engagement, is welcome. We look forward to seeing further details and supporting kinship families to share their views and experiences.

However, we remain deeply disappointed with the government’s exceptionally poor handling of the ASGSF’s renewal and the changes made to the fund for 2025-26 and 2026-27. This has had – and continues to have – a detrimental impact on the lives of eligible kinship families in England. Therapeutic support is of the utmost importance for kinship families and helps to deliver greater stability for children.

The decision to reduce the amount available to each child is immensely frustrating and comes at the exact moment when local authorities are being encouraged by the Department for Education to review the therapeutic support available to kinship carers and their children. The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill suggests kinship local offers should include signposting to “services relating to health and wellbeing” and information about the ASGSF is the only specific content included in the therapeutic support section of statutory guidance covering the kinship local offer requirement. The very support which local authorities are expected to signpost to is now being eroded.

Furthermore, it’s clear that the welcome steps taken by the government to boost awareness of the ASGSF and increase applications from eligible kinship families are not being supported by commensurate funding to provide the level of therapeutic support needed. This confused and ill-considered approach to the sequencing of kinship care reform risks pushing more families to breaking point. Indeed, difficulties managing children’s social, emotional and mental health difficulties was the most common concern highlighted by kinship carers who were worried about their ability to continue in our 2024 and 2025 annual surveys.

The renaming of the ASGSF in 2023 was a step in the right direction, but this oddly continued to omit families where a previously looked after child is being cared for under a child arrangements order, despite this group having also been eligible since April 2022. The renaming also in isolation represented a misdiagnosis of why eligible kinship families were not applying to or accessing therapeutic support.

Our 2024 research found that only 1 in 7 eligible kinship carers had accessed support via the ASGSF, with many highlighting the challenges securing necessary professional support to submit an application and difficulties sourcing providers with the requisite knowledge and understanding of kinship care to deliver effective therapeutic intervention. Ultimately, the ASGSF was designed with adoptive families in mind, and a rebranding exercise alone risks setting up more kinship families to fail if they find their local authority unaware, unwilling or unable to help secure appropriate therapeutic support.

What should happen next?

It is vital the government continues to work at pace to review the impact of the changes to the fund for ASGSF for 2025-26 and 2026-27, and mitigate against any negative implications of the funding delay and reduction in the level of support. Further details of the public engageemnt process in 2026 should be outlined soon with input from the wider sector; the government must listen to kinship families when making decisions about the future of the ASGSF and work with them to design a new system which ensures all kinship families get access to the therapeutic support they desperately need.

We have previously suggested the government explores the development of bespoke services designed for kinship families, acknowledging the different approaches they need to adoptive families. This should be available to all kinship families regardless of the type of kinship arrangement or the child’s journey into kinship care, take a ‘whole family’ approach which recognises entire family units (including biological and step children in the kinship household), and include funding for non-therapeutic support where this would be of significant benefit to children and their kinship carers.

This approach would acknowledge findings from the evaluation of the adoption support fund which found that both awareness levels and the extent to which the Fund was seen to have positively helped carers and their children were lower amongst special guardians than for adoptive parents. The Review of the Adoption Support Fund COVID-19 Scheme also suggested that “SGO families may need a different approach, particularly to marketing support for them”.

In the interim, research into the therapeutic support offered by the ASGSF to kinship families should proceed at pace to inform future delivery and development. In addition, local authorities should ensure professionals working with kinship families have sufficient knowledge and capacity to support effective applications for eligible kinship families, and should ensure any delivery providers understand the specific needs and experiences of kinship families and how they differ to adoptive families. Specific attention should also be paid by local authorities in how to best to support identity, family relationships and contact; although enduring family relationships can be one of the most positive aspects of kinship care, contact with parents can also be experienced as challenging, uncertain and potentially damaging for kinship children.