Therapeutic support for kinship families

What’s happening now?

As of 1 April, the Adoption and Special Guardianship Support Fund (ASGSF) has expired and its future in the short or long term is still unknown.

Despite substantial parliamentary and sector pressure, the Department for Education has continued only to confirm that they will “shortly be finalising business planning decisions on how we will allocate our budget for the next financial year. All decisions regarding the future of the Adoption and Special Guardianship Support Fund (ASGSF) are being considered as part of these discussions. An announcement will be made as soon as possible.” The Minister for Children and Families, Janet Daby MP, acknowledged she was “aware of the uncertainty and the insecurity that that is causing” during an Education Committee evidence session on Tuesday 18 March.

The government had previously confirmed that “ASGSF applications are generally permitted to extend up to 12 months, allowing children and families to receive continuing therapy across financial years. Where applications are agreed, therapy which starts before March 2025 may therefore continue into the next financial year, under previously agreed transitional funding arrangements.”

As such, no known changes to scope or eligibility of the Fund are currently in progress; the Minister has confirmed that any future changes to the Fund would be “considered as part of the next spending review”. The government’s Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill includes no further provisions for improving therapeutic support for children in kinship care.

What’s happened previously?

Following publication of the National Kinship Care Strategy In December 2023, the government renamed the Adoption Support Fund to the Adoption and Special Guardianship Support Fund with the stated intention to increase applications from eligible kinship families (i.e. those where the child was previously looked after and is cared for under a special guardianship or child arrangements order).

The most recent figures on ASGSF applications, published in September 2024, show that applications from kinship families are increasing but remain 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 two years. Other recent correspondence from the Minister for Children and Families does suggest that applications for kinship children are “rising much faster than those for adoptive children and by the end of February 2025 had risen to 20% of all applications for funding”. 

The National Kinship Care Strategy also included a commitment by the Department for Education to commission new research to explore applications and therapies provided as part of the Fund 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

The government’s failure to provide any information about the future of the ASGSF prior to its expiry is deeply concerning. It is also immensely frustrating at a time when local authorities are being encouraged by the Department to review the therapeutic support available to kinship carers and their children given the new legal duty to publish a kinship local offer within the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill; legislation suggests this 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 information on the kinship local offer within kinship care statutory guidance.

The lack of clarity about the future of the Fund is leading to intense stress and worry amongst many eligible kinship families who are losing or are at risk of losing access to therapeutic support. It is vital that the government urgently confirms the future of the Fund, particularly given that difficulties managing children’s social, emotional and mental health difficulties was the most common concern highlighted by kinship carers in our 2024 annual survey who were worried about their ability to continue. Regardless of the government’s ultimate decision, this period of uncertainty will have negative lasting repercussions for children and their families, local authorities, and therapeutic providers.

The renaming of the now Adoption and Special Guardianship Support Fund 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.

Renaming of the Fund in isolation also represents a misdiagnosis of why eligible kinship families are not applying to or accessing therapeutic support through the Fund. We have found that only 1 in 7 eligible kinship carers have accessed support via the ASGSF, with many highlighting that social workers themselves aren’t confident in nor have the time to submit an application, and that even when an assessment is carried out and some support offered, agreed providers often don’t have the knowledge and understanding of kinship care to deliver support tailored to the unique needs and circumstances of kinship families. As such, we welcome further research into applications and use of the Fund by kinship families.

Ultimately, the Adoption and Special Guardianship Support Fund was designed with adoptive families in mind, and a rebranding exercise alone risks setting up more kinship families to fail if they learn about the Fund, but soon find their local authority unaware, unwilling or unable to help secure appropriate therapeutic support.

What should happen next?

The government must urgently secure investment in the Adoption and Special Guardianship Support Fund for the coming financial year and confirm the future status of the Fund. This should take into account the significant repercussions of the delay on kinship families, local authorities and therapeutic providers, and take steps to ameliorate resultant challenges in applying for and securing assessments and support in the coming months,

Beyond this, the government and local authorities should ultimately ensure all kinship families can access appropriate long-term emotional and therapeutic support tailored to their unique needs and experiences. The Department for Education should seek to secure funding though the forthcoming Spending Review to develop bespoke services modelled on a version of the ASGSF 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 recent 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, to most effectively utilise the existing Adoption and Special Guardianship Support Fund, recording practices should ensure local authorities and Regional Adoption Agencies (RAAs) record the split of awarded funding between SGO/CAO and adoptive families. Research into the therapeutic support offered by the Fund 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.

Kinship children and their elevated prevalence of mental health difficulties should also be recognised within the government’s plans to deliver specialist mental health professionals in every school and Young Futures Hubs for drop-in mental health support in communities across England.