Further reform Adoption Support Fund to benefit kinship families, charity urges
Nina Jacobs
Tuesday, October 26, 2021
A charity is backing calls for reforms to the Adoption Support Fund (ASF) that would better meet the needs of kinship families after its survey found a majority did not feel supported enough during the pandemic.
The latest findings from Kinship’s annual survey show despite an expansion of the ASF specifically in response to the Covid-19 crisis, 70 per of kinship carers felt they did not receive the support they needed from their local authority in the past year.
The fund’s Covid-19 scheme, which operated between April and June 2020, was set up to provide emergency funding to councils and regional adoption agencies (RAAs).
It was intended to support children who had left care either through adoption or with a special guardianship order (SGO) and their families to meet needs arising from the pandemic.
A Department for Education review showed how some children and families that benefited from the Covid-19 scheme had already received or were receiving support through the core ASF, but others were new to adoption or SGO-specific support.
With up to £8m allocated for the scheme from the core ASF, around 450 applications from 47 RAAs and local authorities totalling just over £6.5m were approved, a report published last week to outline the review’s findings states.
This equated to more than 23,000 families receiving support, of which 63 per cent involved adopted children and 37 per cent those under special guardianship orders.
The charity said it was encouraged that more than a third of the total number of families supported by the scheme were those raising children under a SGO, a proportion considerably higher than those usually accessing the core ASF.
“But the majority of kinship carers are still not eligible to access the support they so desperately need.
“Therefore, we welcome the report’s findings that show there could be benefit in making reforms to the core ASF that would better meet the needs of kinship families.
“In particular, we agree that support needs to be marketed and offered in a way that is accessible, relevant and from a provider they trust,” said Dr Lucy Peake, the charity’s chief executive officer.
The charity has set out a number of reforms to the ASF that include a recommendation for funding to be made accessible to all special guardians and other kinship families based on their individual needs.
It is also calling for the fund to be renamed to better reflect those entitled to support and for it to be more widely promoted.
The DfE review examined the impact of the scheme which provided funding for support that would be outside the scope of the core ASF.
This included initiatives such as virtual support through a helpline, virtual peer-to-peer support or paying for access to membership support services from voluntary sector organisations.
The report concludes the most common reflection about the scheme was that it enabled “very swift, flexible and often innovative support for adoptive and SGO families,” which was greatly valued by them.
It acknowledges the impact of Kinship’s services, in particular its one-to-one and peer support for special guardians, stating that they “benefited from memberships during Covid as they have felt isolated and now there is an additional organisation who can provide advice and support them through this difficult period”.
Peake said the broadening of the scope of the ASF during the pandemic to include advice, information and peer support for special guardians was a “positive development”.
“Support provided relatively quickly and without fuss can be of great benefit to parents, carers and families,” she said.