Why Action Against ASGSF Changes has become atSTAKE
When we started this campaign in April 2025, the problem was clear. The government had cut the Adoption and Special Guardianship Support Fund. They lowered the Fair Access Limit, removed separate funding for specialist assessments, and ended match funding for the children with the highest level of need.
For hundreds of families, that was brutal. The ASGSF was often the only realistic route to specialist therapeutic support. Local services could not provide it. Private treatment was unaffordable. Mainstream services were already stretched, and too often unable to work with the complexity our children live with every day.
One mum decided to push back.
That decision mattered because she was not alone. Other parents started speaking up. Carers. Adoptees. Special guardians. Professionals. Organisations. They all understood what was being taken away, and it was never abstract. It was about children and young people whose needs sit across early trauma, loss, neurodevelopmental difference, school experience, identity, family safety, mental health and relationships.
These are rarely single-issue needs. Support has to be capable of holding the whole picture, rather than responding only to whichever behaviour or crisis is most visible at the point of referral.
Then, in February 2026, the Department for Education launched its consultation, Adoption support that works for all. It set out proposals for a reformed adoption and kinship support system, including the future operation of the ASGSF.
The fund is only guaranteed until March 2028. After that, it looks increasingly likely that the ASGSF will be abolished in its current form. That changes the nature of our campaign.
The question now is not only whether the April 2025 cuts should be reversed, although we still believe access to specialist assessment and therapeutic support must be restored. The bigger question is whether any future system will protect the kind of support families actually need: specialist, relational, trauma-informed and neurodevelopmentally informed help, sustained over time, delivered by people who understand adoption, kinship care, developmental trauma, FASD, neurodevelopmental difference, attachment disruption and loss.
Or will specialist provision be watered down, devolved into already stretched local systems, restricted by narrow evidence rules, or replaced with cheaper, lower-intensity support that cannot meet complex need?
That is why we have renamed the campaign.
One year on: A year of campaigning to reverse the cuts to the ASGSF
We are now atSTAKE: Specialist Therapy, Adoption and Kinship Emergency.
The name says what we are fighting for. Specialist therapy is at stake. Family stability is at stake. Children’s safety and recovery are at stake. The future of meaningful adoption and kinship support is at stake.
We support reform where it genuinely improves provision. Families have experienced delay, bureaucracy, inconsistency and postcode variation under the current system. Those problems need fixing. But reform must start from the reality of children’s needs, not from the services that are cheapest or easiest to commission.
Parenting support, peer support, community provision and earlier help all have value. But they cannot substitute for specialist assessment, therapeutic intervention, clinical expertise, education advocacy, family safety work and support that continues when need continues. Treating lower-level support as a replacement for specialist provision would leave the children at the most acute end of need falling through the gap.
Evidence matters. So do safety, quality, practitioner competence and accountability. But evidence standards must be able to recognise complexity. They must not privilege only the interventions that are easiest to measure, while excluding relational, adaptive and long-term work that can help children and families stay safer and more stable.
The campaign is still parent-led, independent and rooted in lived experience. We will keep challenging government, engaging with the sector, gathering evidence, raising awareness, and making sure families are heard in policy decisions that too often happen without them.
We started by fighting the cuts to the ASGSF.
Now we are fighting for specialist therapeutic support itself.
It is the same campaign, but the threat has changed. We are still fighting for the same children and families, and for the specialist support they cannot afford to lose.