Therapeutic support for kinship families

Current action

The Adoption Support Fund has been renamed as the Adoption and Special Guardianship Support Fund with the stated intention to increase applications from eligible kinship families (those with special guardianship or child arrangements orders where the child was previously looked after). This is because, despite more children leaving care to special guardianship than adoption each year since 2019, successful applications for special guardianship families reflect only 13% of those across the entire Fund.

The National Kinship Care Strategy also included a commitment to commissioning 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.

Our verdict

The renaming of the Adoption Support Fund is a step in the right direction, but also neglects to include those with child arrangements orders where the child was previously looked after who are also eligible. This solution in isolation also  represents a misdiagnosis of the problem which sees eligible kinship families not accessing therapeutic support through the Fund. Our advice and support work with kinship carers reveals the more significant challenges many have in ensuring their local authority or Regional Adoption Agency completes an application. Too many find social workers themselves aren’t confident in nor have the time to submit an application, and 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. Further research into applications and use of the Fund by kinship carers is therefore welcome.

Ultimately, the Adoption Support Fund is designed with adoptive families in mind – a rebranding exercise 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.

Recent evaluation of the Adoption Support Fund 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”.

What should happen next

The UK Government and local authorities should ensure all kinship families can access appropriate long-term emotional and therapeutic support tailored to their unique needs and experiences. This is vital given the urgent need to improve the support offered to kinship families to manage children’s social, emotional and behavioural difficulties; our Breaking Point report found that 12% of kinship carers worried about their ability to continue caring for their children, and 4 in 10 of those highlighted a lack of support for behavioural and mental health challenges as a reason for this concern.

This could include developing bespoke services modelled on a version of the Adoption and Special Guardianship Support Fund 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.

In the interim, to most effectively utilise the existing Adoption and Special Guardianship Support Fund in England, recording practices should ensure local authorities and Regional Adoption Agencies (RAAs) record the split of awarded funding between SGO/CAO and adoptive families. Forthcoming Department for Education research into the therapeutic support offered by the Fund to kinship families, committed to within the National Kinship Care Strategy, should proceed at pace to inform future delivery and development. 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.

Children looked after, including in kinship foster care, are entitled to receive an initial health assessment on entry into local authority care; local authorities should ensure this is completed prior to any movement to a different kinship arrangement supported outside of the care system, and appropriate assessments or support should not be jeopardised by the loss of the child’s ‘looked after’ status

Specific attention should also be paid by local authorities in how to best to support contact; although enduring family relationships can be one of the best things about kinship care, contact with parents can also be experienced as challenging, uncertain and potentially damaging for children and young people growing up in kinship care.

Kinship children and their elevated prevalence of mental health difficulties should be recognised within the new UK Government’s plans to introduce a Children’s Wellbeing Bill and to deliver specialist mental health professionals in every school and Young Futures Hubs for drop-in mental health support in communities across England.

A full set of recommendations around emotional and therapeutic support for children in kinship care can be found in our Forgotten report.