As we resume campaigning after the Christmas break, we have an opportunity to improve how our campaign aims are currently understood, both by those who support our work and by those who are still forming a view.
A common and entirely understandable misconception about our campaign is that it exists simply to roll back the Adoption and Special Guardianship Support Fund to its pre April 2025 funding levels, and to freeze the system exactly as it was. While our stated aims do call for the April 2025 changes to be overturned and for a permanent fund to be established, this does not reflect the full scope of what we are arguing for. Far from it.
Campaigning requires clarity. Clarity often means simplifying complex realities. As a result, it is reasonable that some people following our work may not yet have the full picture. Our core demands, as set out in our petition, are deliberately short term:
- That the UK Government immediately reverses the changes made to the Adoption and Special Guardianship Support Fund announced on 14 April 2025 for the 2025 to 2026 financial year.
- That a genuine and independent, sector-wide consultation is held within twelve months to consider how timely, high quality therapeutic support for care experienced children should be delivered.
- That any further changes to the ASGSF are paused until appropriate planning, preparation, and safeguards are in place to prevent harm to children, families, and the systems that support them.
These demands are necessary, but they are not the whole story. There is a bigger picture, and it requires a longer view.
The limits of the pre April 2025 system
We are clear-eyed about the fact that the fund, as it existed before April last year, was far from perfect. Many families experienced delays, inconsistencies, and unnecessary stress. Reform was needed. But reform rarely emerges from arbitrary cuts. Improvement does not grow in scorched earth.
Our demand that the April 2025 changes are reversed is not a call to freeze the system in time. It is a demand to restore a stronger starting point, so that progress can be driven from a position of relative stability rather than from one of damage and loss. Sustainable reform is possible only when capacity, expertise, and trust are intact.
At the heart of this campaign is a simple belief: children who have experienced early life trauma, particularly trauma so severe that they were removed from their first families, have a right to specialist therapeutic support, at the right level and at the right time. Trauma does not dissolve when a permanence order is made. Serious harm is done when adoption, kinship care, or special guardianship are treated as fairy tale endings rather than a step on a long and complex journey.
Expertise and trust
We are also driven by a determination to preserve the expertise that has grown around the fund. Many families describe therapists funded through the ASGSF as the first professionals they encountered who truly understood their children had the expertise and skills to help them. These practitioners offer validation, belief, and the ability to build trust with children and young people whose early experiences have taught them that adults are not safe. That trust is not easily won, and once lost, is difficult to regain.
Providers and independence
From the outset of this campaign, we have been conscious of the risk that we might be portrayed as shills for the provider sector that has developed around the fund. We are not. We are advocates for our children.
This is an independent campaign, led by parents of children who have benefitted from therapy accessed through the ASGSF. While we are deeply grateful for the support of providers, we are not tied to them, and we are not necessarily committed to the current model of delivery. Our focus is, and always has been, on children’s needs, understood and addressed within the limits of the best available evidence.
Our campaign is not influenced by, nor financially supported by, therapy providers.
Cost, value, and not-for-profit delivery
We have previously stated our view that where independent services are commissioned, these should be not for profit. There are legitimate concerns about conflicts of interest within fully commercial delivery models. At the same time, the professionals delivering this work are highly specialist, and it is reasonable that they expect remuneration comparable to their peers in the public sector.
What may appear to some as inflated costs often reflects very ordinary overheads to anyone familiar with running small organisations or not-for-profits. The idea that providers are routinely inflating costs is, in our view, misguided. It is based on limited historic examples and does not fully reflect the realities of service delivery. Our engagement with providers of all sizes shows a consistent pattern of costs being reduced to fit within fair access limits, and of charitable funding being sought and additional work offered at no cost to plug gaps.
The absence of a ready alternative
It has been stated that the ASGSF was only ever intended to be a temporary measure, a stop gap while adoption agencies developed their own in house therapeutic services. We cannot speak to why this did not happen. What we can say is that slashing the fair access limit does nothing to bring such a system into being. What it does do is place existing providers under extreme pressure, leading in some cases to redundancies and market exit. Capacity is being lost, not built, at precisely the time when more and more families need it.
Evidence
It is true that robust evidence does not yet exist for all interventions historically funded through the ASGSF. We believe it is essential that gaps in evidence and understanding are addressed if future provision is to be safe, effective, and sustainable. Ineffective therapy risks further harm to already vulnerable children and wastes scarce resources.
But absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Interventions should not be dismissed simply because the research base is incomplete. Instead, sustained investment is needed to build a solid and credible evidence base for therapeutic work with traumatised children and young adults, whose needs and presentations are often poorly understood and provided for under other clinical models.
Why this campaign exists
This campaign began with one mum, sitting on her sofa, confronted with the devastating news that support which had transformed her children’s lives was about to be withdrawn. Withdrawn without consultation, without evidence, and without a plan. She understood immediately how the loss of that therapy would affect her children and thousands of others now, and how it could impact their futures.
Those of us organising this campaign have lived experience of the fund making a meaningful difference to our children and families. Of course that shapes our perspective. But we also acknowledge that our experiences are not the only ones, and we respect that others will hold different views. Indeed, we seek them out.
What we cannot accept is the idea that meaningful service improvement begins with deep, arbitrary funding cuts, or that children’s needs can be assessed using a Treasury calculator.
It is entirely understandable that, when focusing on the ASGSF’s problems, delays, complexity, and inconsistency, the fund can appear unfit for purpose. That does not mean the therapy it has enabled should be sacrificed. The elements that made that support effective are rare and vital. They must be protected, developed, and strengthened.
If there is bath water to be thrown out, it must be done with care. There are vulnerable children and young adults still in it.
Our principles, in short
- This campaign exists to protect children, not systems.
- Children who have experienced early life trauma have a right to timely, specialist therapeutic support. That need does not end when a permanence order is made, and it cannot be met by generic or under resourced services.
- Reform is necessary, but reform must be planned, evidence-informed, and safe. Arbitrary funding cuts do not create better services. They create harm.
- Where the therapy enabled by the Adoption and Special Guardianship Support Fund has been successful in positively impacting children and young adults, it has worked because it recognised complexity, allowed specialist expertise to develop, and created space for trust to form between children and the professionals supporting them.
- We believe future provision must be grounded in the best available evidence, while also recognising that evidence gaps require investment.
- We are not defending a particular funding mechanism or delivery model. We are defending children’s access to effective support. Where models change, that change must protect what works, address what does not, and avoid destabilising already vulnerable families.
- This is an independent, parent-led campaign. We are advocates for our children. We are not aligned to providers, and we are not driven by institutional interests.
- Children’s needs cannot be reduced to a budget line. Decisions about their support must be shaped by need, lived experience, professional expertise, and evidence, not by short term financial targets.
- If systems are to be reformed, they must be reformed with care. The cost of getting this wrong is paid by children, and the impact is life-long.