The Adoption and Special Guardianship Support Fund (ASGSF) will continue in 2025-26, with £50m available to fund therapies and specialist assessments for children formerly in the care system.

Children’s minister Janet Daby made the announcement today after being called to the House of Commons to confirm whether the ASGSF had a future, one day after it expired.

The announcement ends months of speculation about the ASGSF’s future, during which Daby – and on one occasion, Keir Starmer – have repeatedly failed to confirm whether the fund had a future beyond 31 March 2025.

Significant uncertainty for children and families

The situation had created significant uncertainty for thousands of children and families, led to some having their therapy brought to an abrupt end and delayed applications for support for those whose needs had been newly assessed by councils or regional adoption agencies (RAA).

Campaigners and therapy providers warned that this had exacerbated the trauma experienced by the children concerned, all of whom were formerly in care and, in most cases, were now in adoptive or special guardianship placements.

When funding ended yesterday, the Department for Education maintained the line ministers had kept to for two months – that it would set out details on the ASGSF “as soon as possible”.

Liberal Democrat spokesperson for education, children and families Munira Wilson then tabled an urgent question in Parliament today asking the government to confirm whether the ASGSF had a future.

Surprise announcement of £50m for 2025-26

To her surprise, Daby responded by saying: “I’m very happy to confirm today that £50m has been allocated for the Adoption and Special Guardianship Support Fund for this year. I’ll be sharing further details with the House in the next few days and opening applications.”

The funding is broadly in line with levels over the past three years, during which £144m was allocated to the ASGSF.

Funding beyond 2026 is subject to the government’s spending review, which will report this summer.

However, Daby said that ministers had “no plans” to end the ASGSF in March 2026, pointing to councils’ duties under the Adoption and Children Act 2002 to assess needs for adoption support and then decide whether to provide services.

Minister ‘appreciates’ impact of delay on children and families

Daby added: “I very much appreciate that the delay conforming continuation has bene a very difficult time for many. I’m especially concerned for children and families as many of those who the ASGSF supports are in great need of continued help.”

She said she also recognised the impact on therapy providers, some of whom have had to seek other sources of work, prompting warnings from adoption leaders of reduced capacity for ASGSF-funded services.

In response, Wilson said: “I welcome the announcement we’ve just heard form the minister, which none of us were accepting as many of us on all sides of the chamber have spent the last few months asking question after question and being batted away and told that an answer was forthcoming.”

Children ‘left in limbo’

She said the fund was for children who had suffered the “deepest trauma”, but they had been “left hanging and in limbo”.

Wilson and several other MPs shared stories of the anxiety experienced by constituents because of the delay in confirming the fund’s future.

Concerns were also raised about the significant backlog of ASGSF cases that will need to be considered by consultancy Mott MacDonald – which administers the fund on behalf of the DfE – when applications reopen.

Conservative MP Julia Lopez asked if there would be resource put into clearing the backlog, but Daby did not answer the point.

No commitment to putting funding on longer-term basis

Though Daby suggested funding would continue beyond 2026, MPs also asked for it to be placed on a longer-term basis.

Currently, funding for therapy is only provided for 12 months – or until £5,000 has been exhausted – meaning councils and RAAs must reapply on behalf of children and families who need longer-term support. However, Daby did not respond to this point.

At one point during the debate, Daby appeared to imply that the fund would be extended to those kinship families who are currently not covered by it, but she later said its remit would not be expanded.

‘What has happened has been really unforgivable’

Sector bodies welcomed the continuation of the fund but heavily criticised the delay in making the announcement.

For Adoption UK, chief executive Emily Frith said: “The fund has transformed the lives of tens of thousands of children and it’s a huge relief to have this commitment for a further year of specialist support.

“Unfortunately the delay has caused great distress for families and has risked further harm to children. There will now be a backlog of applications, and further waits for people in desperate need of support. What has happened has been really unforgivable. The government must open applications immediately, and then announce a permanent Fund so they avoid ever causing such distress again.”

Families face ‘dangerous gap in therapy’

Consortium of Voluntary Adoption Agencies (CVAA) chief executive, Satwinder Sandhu said it was “enormously relieved and pleased that the funding has been confirmed”.

However, he warned: “We now have to redirect our concerns to the thousands of families facing a dangerous gap in therapy, of unknown length, while the fund is flooded with applications (once they re-open the application portal that is).

“It’s a dire situation which needs an emergency strategy from the DfE to identify and fast-track families in most need. There also needs to be consideration of emergency funding to plug the gap or at least reimburse services which have to use their reserves to keep children safe these next few months.”

He added: “What’s clear is that in recent months we have witnessed a shortsighted approach from government towards adoptive families. They recognise the urgent need for more prospective adopters, yet they undermine this by failing to provide adopters with assurances of support which is essential for all children being placed.”

Kinship, which advocates for kinship families, issued a similarly qualified message.

Delay ‘has led to immense worry and stress’

“This news will come as welcome relief to all of those kinship families who were deeply concerned about their children losing access to vital therapeutic support,” said its director of policy and communications, Rhiannon Clapperton.

“However, we remain deeply frustrated that this clarity has only come after the fund had expired and after a lengthy period of unnecessary uncertainty.

“The absence of any information about the future of the fund has led to immense worry and stress amongst the kinship families we support and campaign alongside.”

She added: “It is vital the government now works at pace to mitigate against the negative impacts of the delay and ensure that applications for therapeutic assessments and support can proceed as quickly as possible.”

Call to extend fund to more kinship families

Family Rights Group’s chief executive, Cathy Ashley, said the government had “extended a vital lifeline for families to access therapeutic support for adopted children and some in kinship care arrangements”, but urged ministers to extend the ASGSF’s remit.

“Family Rights Group has long urged the government to remove the requirement for kinship children to have been in the care system to be eligible, and to include those in informal arrangements.

“Longer-term funding security and improving the application process would be a boost to families too.”

Parliament’s All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Kinship Care made a similar point in response to the news, saying: “The minister was unclear on whether further children in kinship care could become eligible for this support. Our group, alongside families and the sector, has been calling for this to ensure all children in kinship care who need this are able to access it.

“We are encouraged by the extension but will scrutinise the details including any expansion when they are available.”

The children’s minister has said she is doing everything possible to “push forward” a decision on the future of the Adoption and Special Guardianship Support Fund (ASGSF), which expires at the end of this month.

Janet Daby told MPs that she understood the “uncertainty and insecurity” created by the government’s delay in confirming the future of the ASGSF, which largely funds therapeutic support for adopted children and those who left care under a special guardianship order (SGO), along with their families.

The delay has meant that councils and regional adoption agencies (RAAs) cannot make applications for therapeutic support for newly assessed children and families, nor to continue therapy for those currently in receipt of it. ASGSF awards last up to 12 months or up to the point when a £5,000 limit has been reached, meaning RAAs and councils must reapply to the fund to ensure continuity of support.

‘Thousands of children at risk of losing therapy’

As a result, therapy providers say thousands of children face a break in their therapy, even if the Department for Education eventually does confirm the renewal of the ASGSF, which is currently worth just under £50m a year.

Providers and adoption bodies have warned that this will be very damaging for children for whom the therapy is designed to support recovery from trauma.

Daby was quizzed on the issue by Liberal Democrat MP Manuela Pereteghella, in an appearance this week before the education select committee as part of its inquiry into children’s social care reform.

Perteghalla said the uncertainty around the future of the ASGSF was causing “a lot of distress” to families and asked the minister if she could provide reassurance to them that the fund would continue.

Minister ‘doing everything to push forward’ decision

In response, Daby, a former fostering social worker and manager, said: “I am aware of the uncertainty and the insecurity that that is causing because, obviously, the announcement has not been made. The announcement will be made very soon about the adoption and special guardianship funding, and as soon as that information is available, then it will be made known.

“But I absolutely understand, and I hear and I do get it. I am hearing from organisations as well around this, and I am doing everything I can to push this forward.”

The charity Kinship, which supports and campaigns on behalf of kinship families, voiced its concerns about the ongoing uncertainty around the fund and “the detrimental impact this is having on kinship families who desperately need therapeutic support”.

Risk of ‘catastrophe of more children going into care’

Chief executive Lucy Peake said the fund was a “vital lifeline for many kinship families, often helping children in kinship care to navigate complex challenges with their mental health, identity and family relationships”.

She added that, in its 2024 annual survey, 13% of carers said they were worried about whether they could continue caring for their children, with nearly three-quarters of this group saying this was due to difficulties managing the children’s social, emotional and mental health needs.

“If we are to avoid the catastrophe of children being placed back into an already overstretched care system, it is essential that additional funding for the ASGSF is confirmed as soon as possible,” Peake added.

Kinship has long campaigned for the fund to be extended to kinship families other than those where a child had left care under an SGO.

Earlier in her evidence session before the select committee, Daby hinted that not only would the fund continue, but that the DfE was exploring extending its scope to children in other kinship care arrangements.

Potential extension of fund to kinship families

In response to a question from Labour MP Amanda Martin about support to kinship carers, Daby said: “We are looking at other ways and other areas in which we can support kinship carers. And we are looking at the adoption and special guardianship funding to enable kinship children to benefit from that.”

Martin had earlier asked Daby about when further detail would be announced on the government’s plan to test the payment of allowances to kinship carers in 10 local authorities, announced in last year’s Budget.

Daby said the DfE would be seeking expressions of interest from councils to take part, adding: “We will be looking to roll this out towards the autumn, and as soon as we have more information and more detail, we will make that known.”

In response, Peake said Kinship was pushing the government to use its forthcoming spending review, which will set public expenditure plans for 2026-29, to “accelerate its plans to trial a kinship allowance and invest in delivering a national offer of financial allowances for kinship carers”.

“At minimum, the Department for Education must work at pace to confirm plans for the trial so that kinship carers across England can understand how it might impact them and how it will build the case for a wider rollout in the future,” she added.

By Ann Horne, kinship care consultant, CoramBAAF

There are an estimated 132,800 children living in kinship care in England (Kinship and Centre for Care, 2025).

In many such cases, family members step in to care for a child without the involvement of social workers.

However, a growing proportion of children in care – 16% in 2024, up from 13% in 2018 – are living with kinship foster carers and almost 4,000 children left care on special guardianship orders in each of the past six years, more than the numbers adopted.

When the local authority takes a child into care, it has a duty to consider whether a relative, friend or connected person can look after the child and then assess their suitability, before considering a placement in unrelated foster care (section 22C, Children Act 1989).

CoramBAAF believes children should be supported to live within their family network when it is safe to do so, and receive the support needed to thrive.

A new kinship care assessment

We have recently completed a two-year project to comprehensively review and update our assessment form for prospective kinship carers.

Previously called Form C (assessment of connected persons and family and friends), the name change to Form K was simple to do but reflects the complex policy and reform agenda and current language used.

Published in 2025, the new Kinship Care Assessment (Form K) enables robust and comprehensive assessment to inform decision making about a child’s future.

Reflecting the unique context of kinship care

We consulted with kinship carers to inform the design and development of Form K, and kinship carers were part of the project working party.

We know kinship carers often experience the assessment process as intrusive, and in our focus groups they told us they felt misunderstood and mistrusted. Some also told us though how they valued their relationship with their social worker, who had supported them through the bewildering process of becoming a kinship carer, often with little planning and preparation, as the child needed care at a time of family crisis.

Unlike foster carers or adopters, who often have months or years to make the life-changing decision to care for or adopt a child, many kinship carers are propelled into a system of fostering regulations and statutory guidance not designed for them, at a time of uncertainty, stress and anxiety.

The updated assessment form reflects the unique context of a kinship care assessment and we hope this will support practitioners to improve the assessment experience for kinship carers.

Amplifying the voice of the child

We know kinship care is a positive experience for many children as they often already know, love and trust their prospective carer.

It is essential therefore that the child’s voice is amplified and their wishes and feelings are central to the assessment of their prospective carer. Form K puts the voice of the child at the very start of the assessment, and requires the social worker to articulate the meaning of their relationship with their prospective kinship carer, to ensure this is a golden thread that runs throughout the assessment.

How is Form K different?

Form K encourages analysis of strengths and vulnerabilities, but crucially also asks what support might be needed for the child and prospective kinship carer to mitigate any assessed risks and vulnerabilities and includes an integral support plan.

It encourages relevant and proportionate assessment, and focuses on the analysis that will inform decision making.

Tested in practice and improved

From June to October 2024, we piloted Form K in ten local authorities, and sought feedback from social workers, managers, agency decision-makers, panel members as well as kinship carers themselves.

The practitioners and managers from the pilot local authorities met with us monthly and their questions and comments were invaluable in shaping the final version.

One agency decision maker described Form K as “succinct, clear, jargon-free and well-organised”. The local authorities told us Cafcass children’s guardians were positive about Form K assessments they had read, saying they were helpful and comprehensive.

A kinship family, who were assessed using Form K after a negative initial assessment that they challenged in court, stated: “We appreciate the time and effort our social worker has taken to get to know our family, and learn and understand our culture and traditions …..this is a big part of us that belongs in the assessment report.”

Form K – a lever for change

The 2023 national kinship care strategy states that assessment should be “reasonable, proportionate and treat family members with trust while prioritising the safety of the child”. Of course, an assessment form is only as good as the social worker completing it, and therefore the form can only be one of the levers needed to influence social work practice with kinship families.

We hope that Form K will enable a relationship-based and reflective assessment process that will support kinship carers at the start of their journey to feel supported and understood, and to receive the support needed for themselves and their child, so that the whole kinship family can thrive.

To find out more about Form K and the work of CoramBAAF please go to the CoramBAAF website.

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Legislation to reform children’s social care has cleared its first parliamentary hurdle.

MPs approved the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill in principle yesterday (8 January 2024), following a debate in the House of Commons that saw a Conservative amendment that would have blocked the bill overwhelmingly defeated.

The bill will now be considered in detail, and likely amended, by a committee of MPs, before returning to the Commons to be further considered and voted upon, prior to consideration by the House of Lords.

With Labour’s huge majority in the Commons and the Lords unlikely to hold up the legislation, the bill is likely to become law in the spring, though some measures will not be implemented until future years.

‘Biggest reform in a generation’

Introducing the bill, education secretary Bridget Phillipson said it was part of “the biggest reform of children’s social care in a generation”, though one inherited in significant part from its Conservative predecessor. As well as the measures in the bill, this includes:

• The England-wide rollout of the family help model in 2025-26. Family help involves merging targeted early help and child in need services into multidisciplinary teams, designed to provide families in need with better, less stigmatising support, with a view to keeping families together.
• The trialling of financial allowances for some kinship carers in order to improve their ability to care for children.
• Rolling out regional fostering hubs to improve recruitment of foster carers and tackle existing shortages.

Prioritising keeping children with families

Phillipson said that the reforms were designed to help more children stay with their families, while improving the care system for those who could not, including by tackling provider profit levels.

“Our first priority is to keep children with their family wherever it is safe to do so, so the bill mandates all local authorities to offer family group decision making,” Phillipson told MPs. “With the guidance of skilled professionals, families with children at risk of falling into care will be supported to build a plan that works for them. We are strengthening support for kinship care, so that vulnerable children can live with the people they know and trust, wherever that is possible.

“However, despite the best efforts of all involved, some children will inevitably need to enter care, so we must reform the system so that it works for them. I know that members right across this House share my outrage at the excessive and exploitative profit making that we have seen from some private providers. It is shameful, it is unacceptable, and it will end.”

Conservative opposition

Shadow education secretary Laura Trott said the Conservatives was broadly supportive of the children’s social care measures in the bill, though was opposed to its proposals to place academy schools under similar requirements to local authority schools.

Its defeated amendment also sought to require the establishment of a national public inquiry into child sexual exploitation (CSE) by grooming gangs, an issue that has triggered a huge political row because of repeated attacks on the government over the issue by X owner Elon Musk.

Pledge to introduce mandatory reporting

While the government has not ruled out such an inquiry, it has instead announced the implementation of measures proposed by the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA), which issued its final report in 2022. These comprise:

• Introducing mandatory reporting of child sexual abuse by those in positions of trust over children, with criminal, as well as professional, sanctions for a failure to do so.
• Creating a performance framework, with data collection requirements, for the police concerning CSA and CSE. This responds to IICSA’s recommendation to introduce a core data set for the issue, to tackle what it found was a lack of reliable data, particularly in relation to CSE. The inquiry said the data set should include information on the characteristics of victims and alleged perpetrators of CSA/CSE, including age, sex and ethnicity, the factors that make children more vulnerable to abuse or exploitation and the settings in which abuse or exploitation occur.
• Legislating to make grooming an aggravating factor in the sentencing of child sexual offences, a recommendation from IICSA’s 2022 report on CSE by organised networks.

Further delay to the reform of children’s social care will prolong the “crisis” the sector is in and increase costs, charities have warned in response to the Budget.

The Children’s Charities Coalition issued the message after the government indicated that “fundamental reform” of the sector would be implemented from April 2026 at the earliest, in its Budget document, published yesterday.

In the meantime, ministers have allocated over £250m for 2025-26 to “test innovative measures to support children and reduce costs for local authorities”, including allowances for kinship carers and the rollout of regional hubs to support foster care recruitment.

Testing ideas for reform

This is in addition to the £200m that was allocated by the previous Conservative government from 2023-25 to test measures from last year’s Stable Homes, Built on Love strategy, including the regional commissioning of care placements, setting up specialist child protection teams and establishing family help services.

The latter involve the merger of existing child in need and targeted early help teams and are designed to provide struggling families with earlier, less stigmatising support to help them resolve problems and keep their children.

They were the centrepiece of the 2022 final report of now Labour MP Josh MacAlister’s Independent Review of Children’s Social Care, which proposed investing £2bn in family help over four years, part of a £2.6bn package for the sector as a whole.

Care review lead Josh MacAlister

Investing in earlier help to reduce care population

MacAlister’s thesis was that investment in family help, alongside other reforms, would reverse “a trajectory of rising costs, with more children being looked after and continually poor outcomes for too many children and families”.

As a result, 30,000 fewer children would be in care by 2032-33 than would have been the case without reform, he said.

However, this was dependent on the reforms being implemented from 2023-24. Instead, the previous government responded by testing the measures proposed by MacAlister from 2023-25, leading him to warn that the sector was a “burning platform” and needed more urgent transformation.

‘Social care is in crisis today’

Meanwhile, a report for the Children’s Charities Coalition, which comprises Action for Children, Barnardo’s, the National Children’s Bureau, NSPCC and The Children’s Society, found that the government’s approach would cost the social care system an extra £200m a year over the long run.

The testing phase will now continue for a further year, with the government saying it would set out “plans for fundamental reform of the children’s social care system in phase 2 of the spending review”. This will report next spring, setting public spending plans for 2026 onwards.

“The government has also confirmed its commitment to further reforms to children’s social care in future spending reviews, but children’s social care is in crisis today,” the Children’s Charities Coalition said. “Further delays will see [costs] escalate.”

‘Promoting early intervention and fixing care market’

The government said its reform plan would include “promoting early intervention to help children stay with their families where possible and fixing the broken care market”. Some of its component parts will be included in the forthcoming Children’s Wellbeing Bill, which ministers have said will include measures to tighten regulation of care placements.

The Department for Education is yet to set out details of how the more than £250m for 2025-26 will be spent, beyond allocating £44m to testing financial allowances for kinship carers in up to 10 areas and extending regional fostering recruitment hubs to all council areas.

The latter provide a single point of contact for people interested in fostering and support them through the process from initial enquiry to application, and are designed to boost recruitment.

Further testing of family help and regional commissioning 

The remainder of the more than £250m is likely to include further funding for the families first for children programme, which comprises the family help model and specialist child protection teams and is being tested in 10 areas.

It may also resource the further testing of regional care co-operatives (RCCs), which are trialling the regional commissioning and delivery of care placements in the South East and Greater Manchester.

RCCs are designed to give councils – collectively – greater clout to shape services across their regions and ensure sufficient high-quality placements for children in care, in the context of widespread concern about current provision.

Families need support ‘when challenges are emerging’

Family Rights Group (FRG) chief executive Cathy Ashley welcomed the increased investment in kinship and foster care.

She added: “The spending review and the upcoming Children’s Wellbeing Bill must now prioritise the wider reforms the child welfare system urgently needs.”

“Children and parents need support when challenges are emerging. Family and friends should be given the opportunity to find solutions with a right to a family group conference safely averting children going into care.

“Kinship care needs to be defined in law alongside the practical, emotional and financial support kinship families need. And no child in care or care leaver should be left isolated and alone, with the offer of Lifelong Links [an FRG programme] to build those loving relationships we all need.”

DfE ‘must work at pace on kinship allowances’

The charity Kinship said: “We urge the Department for Education to work at pace to confirm plans for the kinship allowance trial so that kinship carers across England can understand how it might impact them.

“Although the trial will ensure more kinship families get the financial support they need to help children thrive, it must not paralyse progress towards a wider rollout of financial allowances for kinship carers across the country.”

Alongside the reform funding, the Budget also pledged an extra £1.3bn in grant funding for local authorities for 2025-26, at least £600m would be allocated to social care.

Concerns pay and tax rises will swallow up social care funding boost

In total, the government said local authority “spending power” – the maximum resource that councils have available to them – would rise by an estimated 3.2% next year. However, the £600m for social care falls far short of the £3.4bn in additional pressures that the Local Government Association (LGA) has calculated councils will face in adults’ and children’s services in 2025-26, compared with 2024-25.

Also, adult social care leaders have warned that extra funding risks being swallowed up by the costs to providers of rises in the national living wage and employer national insurance contributions.

For the Association of Directors of Children’s Services (ADCS), president Andy Smith said the funding for councils, while welcome, was a “short-term” measure.

“In order to ensure the stability of many vital and valued services, long-term, sustainable funding for local government and children’s services is the only solution,” he added.

Smith urged ministers to set out “sufficient multi-year settlements for local authorities so they can effectively plan for the future”.

The government is committed to introducing multi-year funding settlements, alongside reforms to how resources for councils are allocated, from 2026-27 onwards.

The government has provided £44m for kinship and foster care in its Autumn Budget, part of a package of over £250m to support children’s social care reform.

The funding, for 2025-26, will enable up to 10 areas to test providing kinship carers with allowances to cover some of the costs of care, encouraging more family members or friends to come forward.

It will also lead to the extension of regional fostering recruitment hubs to all council areas, to help them recruit more carers.

Proposal ‘to generate hundreds of placements’

The Department for Education (DfE) said this would “generate hundreds of new foster placements, reduce local authorities’ reliance on the expensive residential care market and offer children a stable environment to grow up in”.

In the Budget, delivered on 30 October 2024, the Treasury said the £44m was part of an investment of over £250m in testing new ways of working in children’s social care next year.

Both policies show clear continuity with the approach taken by the Conservatives.

Testing allowances for kinship carers

In its kinship strategy, published in December 2023, the Tories pledged to pilot providing special guardians of former looked-after children with allowances equivalent to those received by foster carers in eight areas from 2024-28, backed by £16m in 2024-25.

Currently, only family and friends foster carers, among kinship carers, are entitled to an allowance, with special guardians or carers with a child arrangements order generally paid less, or nothing, by local authorities to look after children formerly in care.

The policy was not introduced before July’s general election and, since being elected, Labour has made no statement on it until now.

In response to the Budget announcement, the chief executive of the charity Kinship, Lucy Peake, said: “We are pleased that the government has made a commitment to trialling a new kinship allowance so that more children can be raised in well-supported kinship care with family and friends who love them, delivering better outcomes for children and for the public purse than the care system.”

Allowances ‘help promote stability and durability’ of kinship care arrangements

The Family Rights Group also welcomed the news, while social care evidence body Foundations pointed to evidence about the effectiveness of financial subsidies to kinship carers in promoting permanence.

A review of the evidence around kinship care, commissioned by Foundations, found a small but statistically significant impact on permanence from providing financial subsidies to kinship carers who take on guardianship for children, based on five papers across three US studies.

Its chief executive, Jo Casebourne, said: “Foundations welcomes the government’s support for the trialling of kinship care allowances in pilot local authorities. Our research shows that financial allowances for kinship carers increase the stability and durability of kinship arrangements.

“They make it more likely that families stay together safely, which could help children here avoid residential care and promote better outcomes for them.”

Promoting foster care recruitment

Regional fostering recruitment hubs were introduced as part of the Conservatives’ 2023 Stable Homes, Built on Love strategy, to provide a single point of contact for people interested in fostering and support them through the process from initial enquiry to application.

The Tories provided £36m from 2023-25 to fund these and other initiatives in order to recruit 9,000 more foster carers and redress a 6% drop in the number of mainstream fostering households from 2021-23.

As of September this year, the hubs covered 64% of the country, and the DfE said they would now be extended to all local authority areas.

Over £250m for children’s social care reform

The government has not stipulated how the remainder of the more than £250m for children’s social care reform, announced in the Budget, will be spent.

However, it is likely to include the continuation of some of the initiatives currently being tested as part of the previous government’s Stable Homes agenda. These include:

• The families first for children pathfinder, which is testing, in 10 local areas, the development of family help services, merging child in need and targeted early help provision, and specialist child protection teams.
• The regional care co-operatives pathfinder, which is trialling, in two regions, central regional bodies commissioning and providing care placements for looked-after children on behalf of their constituent local authorities.
• The family network pilot, which is testing providing extended families with funding to help children stay within the family network rather than go into care.

The government will announce further reforms to children’s social care when it delivers its spending review next spring. The review will set detailed plans for public spending from 2026 to 2030.

Councils have been handed a guide to what works in supporting kinship families, according to the current evidence base.

They have been urged to offer carers specialist support in navigating services and financial allowances, to help support permanency and reduce placement disruption, along with providing parenting programmes to support the wellbeing of carers and children.

The practice guide, from what works body Foundations, is the first in a series of Department for Education-commissioned publications designed to provide councils with evidence-informed guidance on meeting the outcomes in the DfE’s children’s social care national framework (see box).

The kinship carer guide was based on a systematic review of the evidence of what works in improving outcomes for kinship carers and children in the UK and similar countries, and of what UK carers value in the support they receive.

‘Limited but growing evidence base’

The Centre for Evidence and Implementation (CEI), which conducted the review, found that the evidence base around how best to support kinship carers was “limited but continuing to grow”.

Photo: Fotolia/aquarious83men

The research was strongest in relation to so-called kinship navigator programmes, which provide carers with specialist practitioners and information to help them access the support to which they and the children they care for are entitled. These are widespread in the US but have not been formally introduced in the UK, though the Kinship Connected programme, run by the charity Kinship, is similar, said the CEI.

The US studies analysed suggested that navigator programmes had small but significant impacts on the likelihood of children being placed in kinship care where a decision was made to remove them from the family home, and also on reducing the likelihood of placement disruption thereafter.

There was also some evidence, from two studies, of navigator programmes helping children to move into permanency, whether through reunification with their parents, adoption or guardianship.

Evidence for navigator programmes improving child safety and carers’ wellbeing, parenting skills and knowledge of services was more limited.

Navigator programmes ‘should be rolled out in UK’

The CEI concluded that the navigator programmes approach “holds promise” and should be rolled out and evaluated in the UK.

Based on this, Foundations’ practice guide says councils should “offer kinship carers specialist support to learn about, navigate and access the support that they are entitled to”, on the basis there was “good evidence” that this worked.

The CEI also found a small but statistically significant impact on permanence from providing financial subsidies to kinship carers who take on guardianship for children, based on five papers across three US studies.

However, it said the small number of studies meant this finding should be interpreted with caution, stressed the different context for permanence in the UK, compared with the US, and argued that more evidence was needed to examine stability and child wellbeing outcomes, along with legal permanency.

Call for councils to offer financial allowances

Based on this, the practice guide says there is “promising evidence” for councils to offer a financial allowance to kinship carers “to increase placement permanency, reduce the likelihood of placement disruption and improve the likelihood of permanent guardianship”.

Photo: Gourmet Photography/Fotolia

Currently, in England, the only kinship carers entitled to a financial allowance are family and friends foster carers. Those caring for a child under a special guardianship order (SGO) or child arrangements order (CAO) may receive a means-tested payment, though this is discretionary, while no specific provision from children’s services exists for informal kinship carers.

In its kinship care strategy, published in December 2023, the previous Conservative government announced it would pilot providing special guardians of former looked-after children with allowances equivalent to those received by foster carers, in eight areas from 2024-28, backed by £16m in 2024-25. The Labour government is yet to confirm whether it will take this forward.

Impact of parenting programmes

The systematic review also found positive impacts from parenting programmes for kinship carers on their wellbeing and that of the children they were caring for, along with on the children’s behaviour. However, the CEI urged caution based on the fact these findings were based on small sample sizes, while it found no evidence of impact on carers’ parenting and their relationships with children.

The CEI called for more “rigorous evaluations to be able to understand the efficacy of these programmes and other approaches for kinship carers and the children in their care, especially within the UK”.

In the light of this, Foundations recommends that councils offer parenting support to kinship carers when a child or young person is demonstrating behaviours that challenge their carer on a frequent basis, based on “promising evidence”.

Providing CBT, peer support groups and self-care training

The practice guide makes three further recommendations for authorities, also based on promising evidence.

Picture posed by models: Photo: Nullplus/Fotolia

It says authorities should make cognitive behavioural therapy available to kinship carers assessed as in need of therapeutic support due to, for example, the child displaying behaviours that challenge the carer, in order to reduce these behaviours.

This was based on a single study, which found a positive impact of CBT for carers on children’s behaviours. While this had a “fairly large” sample and low risk of bias, the CEI said further research was needed to replicate the finding.

The practice guide also calls for councils to provide cares with access to peer support in order to improve their wellbeing. The two relevant papers in the systematic review suggested a positive impact on carer wellbeing, but one had some concerns for risk of bias and used a fairly small sample and the other did not report effect sizes, said the CEI.

The practice guide also recommends offering kinship carers training in self-care to support their emotional health and wellbeing. This was based on three papers, for which the CEI found “some evidence of
promise”. However, it did not report high confidence in the findings because the strength and significance of the results varied significantly across the studies.

What kinship carers want in their support

The systematic review also looked at UK carers’ perspectives on the support they needed. While it said there was a limited research base for this in the UK, it found the messages for practice were clear and distilled  them into 10 statements, five of which it had “high confidence” in:

1. An intervention’s distinction from statutory services is perceived to facilitate engagement, favourable experiences and positive outcomes. The CEI found kinship carers felt more positively about support from non-statutory services due to prior negative experiences with statutory provision, including “a closed-door approach” and “sporadic and unreliable” from social workers.
2. Providing carers with access to a network of peers enhances an intervention’s acceptability and usefulness. Carers reported finding solace, understanding and practical support within these groups.
3. Carers value specialised support due to their unmet needs and the gaps in statutory services. Carers reported that social care and other services frequently underestimated the severity of their needs, lacked appropriate services to address them, or imposed eligibility criteria that families found challenging to meet. They expressed a strong preference for interventions tailored specifically to address the unique challenges faced by kinship families.
4. Carers value recipient-centred programmes. The studies found that carers appreciated support that was collaboratively designed, tailored and flexible.
5. Targeted interventions for kinship families were perceived as beneficial by both carers and practitioners. They reported that this benefited carers’ wellbeing and parenting skills.

Good practice principles

Based on the statements, Foundations’ practice guide sets out three key principles for working with kinship families:

• Support for kinship carers should take into account the specific needs and strengths of kinship carers.
• One-to-one relationships and high-quality casework should be at the heart of support for kinship families.
• Kinship families need to be made aware of the support they are entitled to, and local authorities should actively work to address barriers to accessing support.

Implementing the guidance

Alongside the practice guide, Foundations published a reflective tool, to help local authorities implement it. This advises councils to assess their current level of provision for kinship families, identify gaps and support and make plans to fill these, act on these plans and then review the impact.

In a blog post, the DfE’s chief social worker for children and families, Isabelle Trowler, said that Foundations would be working with a small number of local authorities to embed the guide’s recommendations and generate learning that can be shared more widely.

The guide also follows last week’s publication by the DfE of statutory guidance for councils on kinship care, which is an update of 2011 guidance on family and friends care.

The statutory guidance calls on councils to provide kinship families with a “local offer”, which “should be based on evidence of what works”, drawing on the practice guide.

Financial offer to carers

The local offer should set out the eligibility criteria for financial carers, the process for applying for this and circumstances in which means-testing will apply, while councils should draw up written agreements setting out the level and duration of any support given.

In response to this, Association of Directors of Children’s Services president Andy Smith said: “The guidance provides for each local area to design its own financial support offer. ADCS has advocated for these payments to be made via the benefits system to reduce our involvement in family life where there are no ongoing concerns or needs.”

National ambassador role

The publication of the practice guide and updated statutory guidance also follows the appointment of adultification bias expert Jahnine Davis as England’s first national kinship care ambassador.

National kinship care ambassador Jahnine Davis

One of her roles is to support and challenge councils to improve practice, which Trowler highlighted in her blog post about the new practice guide.

An expert on adultification bias against black children and young people has been appointed as the first national kinship care ambassador by the Department for Education (DfE).

Jahnine Davis’s role will involve supporting and challenging councils to improve practice, amplifying children’s voices and those of under-represented groups and championing kinship care within government policymaking.

Davis, who was in a kinship care arrangement as a child, has over 20 years’ experience in children’s services, academia, training and consultancy, with a particular focus on the safeguarding of black children and young people, in which she has a PhD.

Adultification bias

She is renowned for her work on adultification bias: the idea that black children, in particular, are seen as more adult and less vulnerable than other children, due to racist stereotyping.

Davis is also a member of the Child Safeguarding Review Panel, which oversees learning from serious cases of child harm, and has been the independent chair of various local child safeguarding practice reviews.

The ambassador role was announced in the previous government’s national kinship care strategy, published last year. This said the postholder would “support individual local authorities to refine their services to improve the outcomes and experiences of kinship carers” and “bring the voice of kinship carers into national policymaking”.

Announcing Davis’s appointment, children’s minister Janet Daby said: “Having experience of kinship care herself, her number one priority will be to advocate for children and carers to make sure that kinship care is properly recognised across government and local social services.”

‘My priorities will reflect the needs of kinship families’

Davis himself said: “I am honoured to be appointed as the first national kinship care ambassador in this country. My mission is to ensure that the experiences of carers and children remain a central focus across local authorities and government.

“In my role, I will work across government departments to facilitate learning, bring scrutiny, and challenge, and collaborate with ministers to highlight the experiences of kinship care in relevant areas. Over the next year, I will collaborate with local authorities to ensure that kinship children and carers receive the support they need and are aware of the resources available to them through local offers.

“My priorities will reflect the needs of kinship families, and I will work with the Department for Education and other departments to provide the best possible support, enabling children to thrive and carers to continue their invaluable care. As someone who was in a kinship arrangement as child, I know first-hand the warmth kinship care provides.”

Appointment welcomed by charities

Her appointment was strongly welcomed by the Family Rights Group (FRG) and fellow charity Kinship, which said Davis brought “a wealth of professional and lived experience to the role”.

FRG chief executive Cathy Ashley said the charity looked forward to working with Davis, saying it was “confident she will be the experienced, determined champion kinship children and carers need”.

“Moreover, her research specialism in safeguarding Black children will bring important understanding and insight to tackle the racial disparities which pervade kinship care,” she added.

Local offer for kinship families pledged

In an article for the Mirror setting out the Labour government’s stall on kinship care, Daby also pledged new guidance for councils designed to make sure “every authority sets out the support it will provide locally to kinship carers”.

DfE minister Janet Daby meeting a group of kinship carers (photo supplied by Kinship)

“We’re planning for it to emphasise what is already clear from case law: that a child’s best interest should always be at the forefront of council’s decision-making when it comes to whether a child should be placed with extended family or moved into foster care or a care home.”

The FRG, which has campaigned for such a local offer, hailed the move as an opportunity to tackle a lack of state support for kinship carers and children.

However, it called for the government to go further by enshrining the local offer in legislation, alongside adequate investment, “to enable all children to thrive”.

Ongoing financial hardship for carers

The news came as Kinship released its annual survey of carers, which found they were continuing to struggle with financial hardship, a theme of last year’s report.

For example, kinship carers (17%) were more than four times as likely as all adults (4%, based on Office for National Statistics data) to have had a bill they weren’t able to pay in the past month.

With the exception of family and friends foster carers – who represented 16% of the charity’s more than 1,300 respondents – kinship carers are not entitled to financial support from local authorities.

A recent report from Kinship found that children were staying longer in the care system because of inequalities in payments to kinship carers.

Call to tackle ‘unjust’ level of support for kinship carers

Welcoming the government’s focus on the group, Kinship chief executive Lucy Peake said: “This is a pivotal moment for the new government to show its commitment to children in poverty by tackling the existing, unjust system and ensuring every kinship carer is given what they need to raise the children in their care.

“The government must urgently share an ambitious and comprehensive vision for a new kinship care system, fit for the future, that includes financial allowances for all kinship families, on a par with foster carer payments, and a new, statutory right to paid kinship care leave from the workplace when they take on the care of a child.”

In its kinship care strategy, the previous Conservative government announced it would pilot providing special guardians of former looked-after children with allowances equivalent to those received by foster carers, in eight areas from 2024-28, backed by £16m in 2024-25.

No further announcement was made before the July 2024 election, and the Labour administration is yet to comment on whether it is taking forward the so-called financial allowances pathfinder.

It is likely that this will be confirmed at the Budget on 30 October 2024.

Children are staying longer in the care system due to inequalities in payments to kinship carers, a report has found.

While increasing numbers of children are in family and friends foster care in England, there has not been a similar increase in numbers leaving care to find permanence with their kinship carers, according to analysis of government data by the charity Kinship.

Based on separate research with kinship carers, the charity said a key cause of this was the loss of financial support for carers that came from moving from a foster placement to a special guardianship order (SGO) or child arrangements order (CAO) providing them with parental responsibility for the child.

In its report, Kinship said this demonstrated the need for carers with SGOs or CAOs to receive allowances at least on a par with those received by foster parents.

Children spending longer in kinship foster care

The number of children in kinship foster care rose by 24% in England from 2019-23, from 10,450 to 12,920, with their share of the care population rising from 19% to 23% over this time, according to Department for Education data.

However, there was a far smaller rise in the number of children leaving kinship foster care for an SGO over this time, with this figure rising by 10%, from 2,270 to 2,500 over this time.

And while the number of children leaving care on a CAO remained stable from 2018-19 (1,130) to 2022-23 (1,110), the percentage leaving from kinship foster care fell from 37% to 26%.

In addition, DfE data obtained by Kinship through a Freedom of Information request revealed that the average length of a child’s final placement in kinship foster care rose by 4.3 months from 2018-19 to 2022-23, to just over one year and ten months (676 days).

While this was shorter than the average duration of all final placements for children leaving care in 2022-23 (880 days), the latter figure had grown only by 2.4 months (73 days) over this time.

Loss of financial support

Drawing on result from its 2023 survey of carers, Kinship said that, while they desired permanence for the children in care, this was being stymied by the prospect of losing financial support as a result.

While kinship foster carers are entitled to an allowance of at least the national minimum set by the DfE, the charity found that 76% of kinship carers looking after at least one child under an SGO special received an allowance from their local authority, with the same being true of just 28% of carers caring for a child under a CAO.

Of those who received an allowance, special guardians were given £148 per week and carers with a CAO £133 per week at a time when the minimum fostering allowance outside London ranged from £175 to £199 per week.

About half (49%) of children in kinship foster care arrangements were expected to move to a different arrangement – nearly all (97%) to special guardianship – found the charity’s 2023 survey. However, 38% of these children expected to stay in the care system.

Regarding the latter group, the majority of comments left by kinship foster carers justifying this decision noted the likely loss of support from moving away from their existing arrangement.

Kinship described this as a “perverse incentive in the current system for the child to remain looked after in local authority”, even where carers perceive it to be in the best interests of the child to have the stability and secure parental responsibility provided by an SGO or CAO.

Kinship carers ‘feel pushed into SGOs’ by children’s services

Among those kinship foster carers who expected to move to an SGO, some reported that they felt pushed to do so by children’s services.

“Rather than this being a free and informed decision, many kinship foster carers felt they had no choice in the matter and resented the constant pressure they felt from social workers to agree to
a new arrangement where support was likely to cease or reduce,” said the report.

Some of those who had already become special guardians reported being pushed into it against their wishes, including by the suggestion that the child might otherwise be placed with unrelated foster carers or adoptive parents.

Piloting equalised allowances

In its kinship care strategy, published in December 2023, the previous Conservative government announced it would pilot providing special guardians of former looked-after children with allowances equivalent to those received by foster carers, in eight areas from 2024-28, backed by £16m in 2024-25.

No further announcement was made before the July 2024 election, and the incoming Labour administration is yet to comment on whether it is taking forward the kinship strategy in general and the so-called financial allowances pathfinder in particular.

In the recommendations from its report, which also covered Wales, Kinship called for governments in both countries to provide a non-means tested financial allowance to kinship
carers at least equal to the national minimum fostering allowance.

In relation to England, it said the new UK government should “accelerate the financial allowances pathfinder” and ensure that it “does not paralyse progress towards a wider rollout of allowances”.

Kinship also called for carers – and those considering the role – to be offered free and independent advice, including legal guidance, on the different care arrangements and their implications for financial and other forms of support.

Kinship families ‘a priority’ – minister

In response to the report, minister for children and families Janet Daby, a former fostering social worker, said: “For too long, kinship carers have not been recognised for the vital role that they play or the challenges they can often face – whether financial or emotional.

“We will drive change right across the children’s social care system, prioritising reform to support kinship families.”

The Association of Directors of Children’s Services highlighted the importance of councils’ funding levels in tackling the issues raised by the report.

Policy on kinship ‘needs sufficient funding’, say directors

“The varying way in which kinship arrangements have been developed in local authorities so far will be linked to levels of funding, amongst other things,” said Nigel Minns, chair of the ADCS’s health, care and additional needs policy committee.

“Above all else, it is important that the needs and best interests of each individual child always remains at the heart of decision making. The kinship care strategy offers a blueprint to change the way we work with and support a significant number of children for the better.

“We await new government guidance on kinship care for local authorities, however, this will need to be backed by sufficient government funding to ensure all children and families get the same access to the financial and practical support they need to thrive.”

By Sorcha Morgan, head of service, CFAB

Recently, I closed Baby Leo’s case. His mother had been unable to care for him due to her substance misuse and consideration was given to him being cared for by his maternal grandmother in Italy, who had been identified as a potential carer earlier in proceedings.

The local authority had initially sought an assessment through the Central Authority for the Hague Convention 1996 (see box) but the standard of reporting and analysis was too brief and so the local authority approached Children and Families Across Borders (CFAB) to assist.

With our partner agency in Italy, we carried out a comprehensive and robust assessment and provided recommendations that met the UK requirements for a special guardianship assessment.

Our partner also spoke with children’s services in Italy, who gave assurances about the support they would provide for Leo if he were to be placed in Italy.

Based on our assessments, the court approved the local authority’s care plan for Leo to be placed with his grandmother. CFAB were then asked to work with the local authority to help prepare Leo’s transition to Italy and, subsequently, to provide post-placement reports.

A third of children likely to have potential carers abroad

Leo’s situation isn’t unusual. CFAB works on numerous cross-border cases each year, in which we are asked to assess family members overseas as part of both pre-proceedings and care proceedings for children in the UK.

Indeed, with one in three children in England and Wales having a foreign-born parent, we estimate that approximately a third of looked-after children (over 30,000) are likely to have family members who could and should be explored as potential long-term carers.

Yet the findings from recent research we carried out demonstrate that this isn’t happening in practice. In 2023, we sent a Freedom of Information (FOI) request to 216 local authorities across the UK to better understand the extent to which international family connections are considered for looked-after children.

Overseas placement numbers rising but remain low

Though our findings indicated a 71% increase in the number of children in care placed with family abroad between January 2020 to December 2022 compared to the three years prior, there were only 196 children placed with family overseas during the latter time period.

While this confirms that overseas placements are a viable option for looked-after children, this remains less than 1% of the estimated 105,000 children currently in care in the UK.

Furthermore, our results demonstrated that fewer local authorities were considering family members overseas as potential carers than was previously the case.

How few councils place children with family abroad

Of the local authorities that responded, only 26 across the UK placed children overseas. With an increasingly diverse society, this seems to contradict the ‘family-first’ approach of prioritising kinship care when a child cannot remain with their parents, set out by the Department for Education in last year’s Stable Homes, Built on Love strategy.

While it may not always be appropriate to place a child with extended family, we hope that family members, both locally and internationally, are always considered during the permanency planning process, without bias or discrimination.

This is how we can best promote optimal long-term outcomes for looked-after children and ensure they can be raised with a strong sense of identity, belonging, heritage and culture.

Lack of data on overseas placements

CFAB’s FOI report also demonstrated the considerable lack of data surrounding overseas placements for children.

Only 25% of local authorities could provide a response to CFAB about the number of children who had family members overseas explored as an option for their care and 47% were able to provide a response on the number of children actually placed with family abroad.

Our previous FOI reports (in 2018 and 2021) confirm this is not a new issue and that little progress has been made. The lack of progress in data collection continues to impede the successful monitoring of international placements and potentially places children at risk.

Support for local authorities

CFAB works with 80% of the local authorities in the UK and we fully appreciate the challenges and barriers many social workers are facing.

But we are here to help and assist. Through our advice line, we offer guidance on international child protection and international kinship care.

Through our casework, we offer a range of services from record checks and child protection alerts to full assessments and post-placement visits.

We have partners in over 130 countries, and we will be able to provide you with full details of timescales and what you can expect on an individual case basis.

Beyond this, we also run free Lunch & Learn sessions for social workers who want to understand better how to assess family members overseas and place children abroad and have several free factsheets on our website. We also run training sessions for social workers and child protection professionals.