Changes to the Adoption and Special Guardianship Support Fund
The Government have announced this week that there will be changes to the Adoption and Special Guardianship Support Fund. Whilst the commitment to sustain the fund for 2025-26 announced earlier this month (Adoption and Special Guardianship Support Fund - Hansard - UK Parliament) was welcome, it is disappointing to see that as more children are coming forward, their access is being further limited. We are concerned about the impact on the children and families affected but we also worry about the effect this will have on services that are already struggling to meet the existing demand.
The Government have said that in order to maximise the number of children who are able to access the fund they are undertaking a number of changes to the fund. These include:
- Setting the overall Fair Access Limit (FAL) to £3,000 (previously £5,000)
- No longer having a separate FAL for specialist assessments. Specialist assessments up to £2,500 will be considered for funding, but only within the overall FAL of £3,000. So, for example, you could only apply for £500 worth of therapy, if the child received a specialist assessment costing £2,500.
- No longer being able to offer match funding applications for therapy which costs more than the £3,000 FAL, or for specialist assessments which cost more than £2,500.
Future funding will also be subject to Spending Review decisions. Therefore, for the time being, the fund will only be able to consider applications where the therapy or specialist assessment will be fully completed before the end of March 2026.
We are working with partner organisations to make the case for longer term funding for the ASGSF and children’s services more widely. We are reviewing the new information published and will be providing updates for members about this as further details are provided.