The Future of Trauma Support Is at Risk: YOUTHOOD’s Full Response to the ASGSF Cuts
Image Reading: The Future of Trauma Support Is at Risk: Our Statement on the ASGSF
YOUTHOOD welcomes the continuation of the Adoption and Special Guardianship Support Fund (ASGSF) into the 2025–26 financial year. Since 2015, the ASGSF has served as a critical pillar of support for children who have experienced early adversity and are now placed in adoptive, kinship, or special guardianship arrangements.
However, the reforms announced by the Department for Education (DfE) for the 2025–26 cycle represent a significant departure from the fund’s original purpose. These changes risk undermining the government’s commitments to trauma-informed care, equitable access to support, and post-permanence stability.
What Is The ASGSF?
The Adoption and Special Guardianship Support Fund (ASGSF) is a government-funded programme established in 2015 to provide therapeutic support to children who have left care through adoption, special guardianship orders (SGOs), or kinship care arrangements.
Children in these circumstances have often develop complex emotional and psychological needs stemming from early experiences of trauma, neglect, or instability. Many face long-term impacts on their emotional regulation, attachment, relationships, and education.
The ASGSF enables local authorities to apply for funded access to specialist therapeutic services, including but not limited to:
Trauma-focused counselling and psychotherapy
Therapeutic parenting programmes
Life story work
Dyadic developmental psychotherapy (DDP)
Occupational therapy and sensory integration support
Attachment-focused assessments
Since its introduction:
Over 50,000 children have accessed ASGSF-funded support
In 2023–24 alone, over 10,000 children received therapy through the fund
Families report that the ASGSF has been a critical lifeline, helping stabilise placements, improve behaviour, and repair relationships damaged by early adversity
This is not a general welfare benefit. It is a targeted, trauma-informed intervention mechanism that allows children to recover, grow, and thrive in stable, permanent homes.
Key Policy Changes to the ASGSF for 2025-26
In January, concerns began to grow across the adoption, kinship, and therapeutic sectors as the Department for Education delayed confirmation of the ASGSF’s renewal for the next financial year. Many families and providers were left in limbo — uncertain whether vital therapy would continue.
Although the fund’s continuation was confirmed just as previous funding closed, it was accompanied by a series of significant reductions in access, flexibility, and funding scope.
From April 2025, the following changes have been introduced:
Reduction of the Fair Access Limit from £5,000 to £3,000 per child, per year.
Elimination of the separate £2,500 allocation for specialist assessments.
Withdrawal of match-funding for high-need or complex cases.
A requirement that all funded support concludes by March 2026, regardless of therapeutic progress.
Presented as a cost-efficiency measure, these changes represent a 40% cut in standard support and eliminate flexibility for the children who need it most.
The Children Behind the Numbers
Children eligible for ASGSF support — those adopted or raised under special guardianship or kinship care arrangements — have often experienced deep and early trauma. Many will have faced abuse, neglect, parental loss, domestic violence, or repeated instability before stability can be provided.
These experiences are not simply emotional scars — they shape a child’s developmental, behavioural, and relational worlds. Without sustained therapeutic intervention, the effects often cascade into adolescence and adulthood.
National statistics show:
70% of adopted children experienced abuse or neglect before placement.
80% of adoptive families report their child has mental health or emotional difficulties (Adoption UK, 2022).
Children adopted from care are 20x more likely to face serious mental health challenges (PAC-UK).
They are 4x more likely to be excluded and 10x more likely to attend a special school (DfE, 2023).
Effective therapy for such children requires specialist, often long-term interventions such as trauma-informed CBT, dyadic developmental psychotherapy (DDP), and therapeutic life story work. Under the new funding limits, a single assessment could consume nearly the entire allowance — leaving just £500 or less for therapy.
This undermines continuity of care, prevents families from planning long-term, and risks regression or breakdown in cases where children were progressing well.
A recent study (NCSR/ADRUK, 2025) found:
33% of care-experienced children received a caution or conviction by age 17.
They had 4x more cautions or convictions than their peers.
Trauma that is not addressed early resurfaces later. These children are not failing services – services are failing them.
Stretching Systems, Straining Families: The Broader Impact of ASGSF Cuts
The impacts of the ASGSF cuts go far beyond numbers. While they may appear to achieve short-term budgetary control, they in fact trigger a redistribution of cost and responsibility — from targeted, trauma-informed therapeutic services onto families and public systems that are already under immense strain.
We break these implications down across two key domains: the cost to public services and the burden placed on families.
1. The Cost to Systems and Services
The decision to reduce core support, eliminate assessment funding, and remove match-funding may save line-item costs — but the wider system absorbs the consequences:
Placement breakdowns become more likely, costing local authorities £40,000–£200,000+ per year per child in foster or residential care.
CAMHS, already operating with high thresholds and long waiting lists, will see an increase in referrals from families unable to access early, specialist support.
Schools — many of which lack trauma-informed training — will face the impact of emotional dysregulation and unmet SEN needs, reflected in higher exclusion rates, breakdowns in learning, and further referrals to social services.
The NHS is left to pick up the long-term consequences through increased demand for adolescent mental health services, crisis intervention, and emergency placements.
What’s presented as “budget efficiency” is actually a cost shift onto overstretched systems — a model of crisis-reactivity, not preventative care.
2. The Emotional and Financial Cost to Families
While public services bear structural impact, the deepest toll is carried by families themselves — emotionally, psychologically, and financially.
Parents and carers face heightened stress, anxiety, and burnout, especially when they’re left to navigate complex behaviours without professional support.
Trust between families and services is damaged when therapy is delayed, cut short, or denied entirely.
Many families are forced to go private, paying out of pocket for care that should be accessible through statutory support — or worse, they go without.
The cumulative pressures often result in missed work, isolation, fractured home environments, and, in some cases, placement instability or breakdown.
This isn’t simply a welfare concern — it is a public health and social care challenge that affects family sustainability, community wellbeing, and long-term youth development outcomes.
Placement Decisions and Recruitment at Risk
The implications of the ASGSF cuts are not limited to families already caring for adopted or special guardianship children. They also risk weakening the entire infrastructure around family-based permanence — particularly the recruitment and matching of adoptive parents, special guardians, and kinship carers.
For many prospective adopters, being reassured that support — including therapeutic, emotional, and developmental services — will be available post-placement is a key factor in their decision to proceed. Local authorities and adoption agencies regularly use the existence of the ASGSF as a guarantee that children’s often complex needs can and will be met.
Now, with reduced funding, removal of assessment allowances, and the absence of match-funding for higher needs, agencies can no longer offer that same certainty.
This poses two serious risks:
Reduced confidence in adopting children with additional needs
Prospective adopters may be less willing to adopt children with more complex or high-level trauma, learning difficulties, or developmental needs — not due to lack of willingness, but because they fear being left unsupported. This could lead to children with greater needs waiting longer for placement, or not being placed at all.A decline in overall adopter and carer recruitment
If families see support systems under pressure — as is projected— they may decide that adoption or special guardianship is no longer viable for them. This particularly affects SGO and kinship carers, many of whom already report inadequate support from local authorities and often take on caring roles with limited time to prepare, limited resources, or ongoing assistance.
With fewer adopters and carers available — and greater uncertainty around the resources available to them — more children will remain in long-term care placements. For children with complex needs, this increases the risk of multiple placement moves, instability, and lifelong disengagement from education, services, and relationships.
Without a stable and adequately funded post-permanence system, we risk not only failing the families who have stepped forward, but also discouraging those who might otherwise do so.
Wider Impacts: What Risks Being Lost in the Detail
While the immediate effects of the ASGSF cuts are evident in family hardship and service strain, there are also broader structural and long-term consequences that risk being overlooked. These hidden impacts could significantly reshape the post-permanence support landscape for years to come.
1. Provider Sustainability
Many trauma-informed providers, particularly smaller practices and voluntary organisations, rely heavily on ASGSF commissioning to operate. With referrals likely to decrease, these services face:
Contract insecurity and possible closure due to reduced income
A diminished network of specialist therapeutic support, especially in rural or under-served regions
A loss of racially and culturally competent services, particularly for children in transracial or culturally diverse placements
The erosion of this therapeutic ecosystem will not only reduce access and choice for families, but may also force them into generic services lacking the necessary specialism to treat complex developmental trauma.
2. Disrupted Education and Multi-Agency Planning
ASGSF-funded assessments often play a key role in strengthening Education, Health and Care Plan (EHCP) applications, informing SEN support strategies, and guiding school-based interventions. With fewer funded assessments available, we are likely to see:
Weak or delayed EHCP applications, especially for children whose behavioural challenges stem from trauma
An increase in exclusions or managed moves due to unmet needs being misunderstood as defiance
Weakened coordination between social care, schools, and CAMHS, resulting in fragmented service delivery
These impacts will disproportionately affect children already at risk of marginalisation, leading to greater disengagement and poorer educational outcomes.
Importantly, the process for obtaining an EHCP in the UK is already under immense pressure. While the statutory timeframe is 20 weeks, recent data shows that only around 50% of EHCPs are issued within this period. In some local authorities, families are waiting up to two years for assessments and plans to be completed. This means that therapeutic input from the ASGSF often provides critical evidence to prevent such delays or bridge the gap while formal education support is still pending.
Without this bridge, children are more likely to fall through the cracks—missing not just therapeutic care, but also the educational stability they require to thrive.
3. Identity and Cultural Needs Overlooked
For many children, especially those in transracial adoption, kinship care across generations, or from minoritised backgrounds, the ASGSF has helped fund essential identity-based therapeutic work. Life story work, attachment narrative development, and cultural healing practices are often among the first areas cut when budgets tighten.
Losing these services means:
Fewer opportunities for children to explore and affirm their racial, cultural, or familial identities
Greater emotional disconnection from their personal histories
Increased risk of adolescent identity crisis, self-esteem issues, and social isolation
Without sustained support, children may struggle to form healthy personal identities, affecting their long-term wellbeing.
These are not side effects – they are fundamental consequences of defunding a service that has quietly held complex support systems together.
Why This Matters to Us
YOUTHOOD is a youth development charity, our work focussing on youth-facing systems as a whole. However, our mission focuses on strengthening multi-agency systems that support young people’s development, identity formation, and transitions to adulthood — particularly for those most marginalised.
We are concerned that the erosion of early therapeutic support creates compounding challenges during adolescence, when care-experienced young people face:
Identity difficulties and complex attachment patterns
Poorer mental health and educational outcomes
Barriers to participating in youth services, career pathways, and opportunities
In this light, trauma-informed support is not a specialist add-on. It is a foundation for equity, inclusion, and meaningful youth engagement.
Our Recommendations to Government
The current changes to the ASGSF reflect a narrow, cost-containment approach that fails to align with the evidence base on trauma, therapeutic recovery, and family support. We urge the Department for Education to commit to a more sustainable, trauma-informed model of intervention and accountability.
1. End Year-by-Year Funding Renewals
The ASGSF must move beyond discretionary, year-to-year funding decisions.
Why it matters: The annual renewal process creates significant uncertainty for providers, families, and local authorities. In early 2025, late confirmation of the fund caused therapy delays and mid-session terminations, damaging therapeutic relationships and leaving vulnerable children without continuity of care.
Recommendations:
Introduce multi-year statutory funding agreements for the ASGSF, similar to other core family support initiatives.
Set national renewal and decision timelines (e.g. three-year review cycles) to enable long-term planning.
Ensure annual reporting includes impact and equity analysis to inform scaling rather than retrenchment.
2. Restore or Increase the Fair Access Limit
The reduction from £5,000 to £3,000 per child represents a cut of 40%, with no adjustment for rising therapeutic costs.
Why it matters: Therapy for trauma is rarely short-term or generalised. Many children need 12–18 months of regular intervention to begin to recover, particularly those with complex developmental trauma or are neurodivergent.
Recommendations:
Restore the Fair Access Limit to at least £5,000 per child to reflect pre-cut levels.
Introduce automatic annual indexation of the limit in line with inflation and service demand.
Review regional pricing benchmarks to ensure therapeutic market rates are aligned with actual commissioning needs.
3. Mandate Trauma-Informed Training Across Education
Education is one of the most common environments in which trauma-related behaviours emerge — yet most teachers report receiving no training on how to identify or respond to them.
Why it matters: Care-experienced children are 4x more likely to be excluded and 10x more likely to attend special schools. Trauma-related behaviours are often misunderstood as defiance, leading to exclusionary discipline, disengagement, and educational breakdown.
Recommendations:
Introduce mandatory trauma-informed training for all school staff, with continuous professional development updates.
Embed trauma-awareness as a core requirement in PGCE programmes and ITT, co-designed with lived experience and clinical experts.
Create a national CPD offer for Designated Teachers and SENDCos, focused on relational and restorative approaches.
4. Reinstate Flexible and Tiered Funding Mechanisms
The removal of separate assessment funding and match-funding for high-need cases disproportionately affects children with complex or multiple diagnoses.
Why it matters: Without access to in-depth assessment, therapy becomes generic and potentially ineffective. High-needs children — including those with severe trauma histories, neurodivergence, and attachment disorders — are the most expensive to support and the most likely to fall through the gaps.
Recommendations:
Reinstate a ring-fenced allowance for clinical or specialist assessment, distinct from therapy budgets.
Reintroduce a match-funding mechanism (or tiered funding scale) for children with complex, multi-agency needs.
Create an expedited pathway for urgent or crisis cases to bypass lengthy standard processing when safeguarding risks are identified.
5. Establish a National Post-Permanence Support Strategy
England currently lacks a coherent national strategy for supporting children and young people after adoption or entry into special guardianship or kinship care. The absence of clear pathways, accountability structures, and investment plans results in a postcode lottery.
Why it matters: Families are routinely left to navigate fragmented and inconsistent services, often unaware of their entitlements. The absence of proactive outreach or standardised signposting causes avoidable stress, delays, and escalation to crisis.
Recommendations:
Develop a cross-departmental strategy encompassing education, health, social care, and the voluntary sector.
Include a statutory duty to signpost support services across all local authorities and regional commissioning bodies.
Establish a National Advisory Board including care-experienced individuals, carers, practitioners, and academics to monitor the strategy’s implementation.
6. Extend Therapeutic Timelines Beyond a Single Financial Year
Requiring all therapy to be completed by March 2026 introduces unnecessary deadlines into therapeutic practice that should be child-led, not administratively dictated.
Why it matters: Therapeutic progress is often non-linear. Sessions may be paused, slowed, or reoriented depending on school pressures, family dynamics, or the young person’s capacity to engage. Strict end-of-year deadlines risk prioritising completion over quality.
Recommendations:
Allow approved therapeutic plans to span multiple financial years where clinically appropriate.
Introduce a rolling model or phased delivery options, particularly for long-term trauma and identity work.
Ensure that late-year approvals (e.g. from Q4) do not disadvantage families due to time-limited delivery constraints.
Our Closing Message
“We must not mistake continuity of funding for continuity of care.”
While the ASGSF has been extended for another year, the reality for many families is a loss of access, stability, and adequate support. Continuity of care means more than the existence of a fund — it means services that are uninterrupted, needs-led, and clinically appropriate over time. Cuts to funding levels, removal of flexible allowances, and rigid deadlines disrupt care just as significantly as complete withdrawal.
Therapeutic support for trauma is not an optional extra. For children who have experienced profound adversity, it is a foundation — one that shapes their ability to engage in school, trust adults, build identity, and thrive into adolescence and beyond.
The 2025–26 ASGSF reforms risk undermining years of progress. We urge the UK Government to re-evaluate these changes and co-design a reformed approach — one that is stable, trauma-informed, and fit for the realities of post-permanence life.
YOUTHOOD remains committed to advocating for children and young people who have experienced care. We will continue to push for policy that values lived experience, centres healing, and places care, not cost-efficiency, at the heart of support systems.
