Open letter: Adoption Support that Works for All consultation and the future of the Adoption and Special Guardianship Support Fund

By Euan Preston, Chair, The POTATO Group

16 February 2026

As chair of The POTATO Group, I have written an open letter to the Minister for Children and Families regarding the Adoption Support that Works for All consultation and the future of the Adoption and Special Guardianship Support Fund. The full text is published below.

POTATO Group–Consultation Open Letter–16 Feb 2026.pdf

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Josh MacAlister MP

Minister for Children and Families

Department for Education

16th February 2026

Open letter: Adoption Support that Works for All consultation and the future of the

Adoption and Special Guardianship Support Fund

Dear Minister,

I am writing in response to your recent Written Statement to Parliament and the launch of the consultation, Adoption Support that Works for All. I am an adoptive parent and chair of The POTATO Group (Parents of Traumatised Adopted Teens Organisation), a UK-wide peer support community for families parenting traumatised adopted teenagers, young adults and adults. Through that role, I am in daily contact with adoptive families navigating complex needs.

I appreciated the opportunity to meet with your colleagues Gladys Mugugu, Head of Adoption, and Emma Davies, Deputy Director, via Microsoft Teams on the afternoon prior to the announcement. That engagement was welcome.

Continuation of the Adoption and Special Guardianship Support Fund

We welcome confirmation that the Adoption and Special Guardianship Support Fund (ASGSF) will continue until March 2028. For many families, the Fund has been a vital route to specialist therapeutic support. Its continuation provides a degree of short-term stability in what has otherwise been a period of uncertainty.

However, our position remains that the Fair Access Limit should be restored to its pre-April 2025 level. The reduction to £3,000, alongside removal of matched funding and separate funding for specialist assessments, has already had measurable consequences for families and providers. A survey conducted by Action Against ASGSF Changes, with responses from several hundred parents and carers following the April 2025 changes, documented sudden interruptions to therapy, reduced hours of therapy, and interventions previously considered clinically foundational becoming unsafe or ineffective due to shortened duration, alongside negative impacts on children’s emotional wellbeing and family stability.

Extending the Fund while retaining those reductions does not address the underlying problems the changes have created. It risks preserving the appearance of continuity while materially reducing access to specialist intervention.

Formal Consultation on the Future of Post-adoption and Kinship Support

We also welcome the decision to undertake a formal consultation on the future of post-adoption and kinship support. Reform in this area is both necessary and overdue, and a careful, evidence-led process is essential to ensuring that future provision is aligned with the needs of adopted and kinship children and their families. The severity and complexity of need within this population make it particularly important that reform is grounded in a clear understanding of both the evidence base and lived experience. The decisions taken through this consultation will shape the future availability and nature of specialist therapeutic support. The implications for child safety, family stability and long-term outcomes are therefore substantial.

Concerns Regarding the Adoption Support that Works for All Consultation

Having now reviewed the consultation document and associated surveys, I am writing to share concerns regarding both the underlying assumptions within the proposals and the robustness of the consultation process. Given the scale of reform, including likely discontinuation of the ASGSF, it is essential that assumptions are rigorously tested against the evidence base and lived experience. The concerns set out in this letter reflect lived experience reported across hundreds of families within our community, and are supported by both Department-commissioned and independent research. It is on this basis that I set out the following observations.

Scale and Nature of Need

The consultation document is framed on the basis that most adopted and kinship children’s needs can be met through universal or non-clinical services, with specialist therapeutic intervention required in a narrower range of cases than is currently the case. It suggests that young people’s needs have, in some instances, been “medicalised”, and places significant emphasis on parenting support and training, peer support networks and earlier help as the primary forms of provision.

The available evidence presents a more complex picture of scale and severity. The Department for Education-commissioned Family Routes study found that 76% of adoptive parents reported their young person had experienced four or more adverse childhood experiences prior to joining the family. The same study identified substantial barriers to accessing mental health support: nearly half of adoptive parents reported a need for Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) in the previous year, yet fewer than a quarter had received support. Families described repeated referral attempts, high thresholds and only being able to access support once difficulties had reached crisis point. This is not evidence of low-level need being over-medicalised. It is evidence of persistent and frequently unmet clinical complexity.

Our group’s own research, Far, Far Beyond the Adoption Order: Lessons From Lives Impacted by Trauma (The POTATO Group, 2025), drawing on data from over 700 children and young people, reported that 85% were diagnosed with or suspected to have developmental trauma, and 63% had a diagnosis of Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (C-PTSD). Nearly all were reported by parents to experience anxiety (93%), with self-harm reported in 59%, suicidal ideation in 42% and one in four having attempted suicide. Neurodevelopmental conditions were widespread: Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and inattentive Attention Deficit Disorder (ADHD-I) were reported in up to 65% including suspected cases, impaired executive functioning in 53%, and Foetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD) diagnosed or suspected in nearly two-fifths of young people. These findings describe a population in which serious and persistent difficulties are common.

Beyond the Adoption Order (Selwyn, Wijedasa and Meakings, 2014), also commissioned by the Department for Education, concluded that post-adoption support must be central to permanence planning, highlighting disruption risk, adolescent crisis and the need for specialist, multidisciplinary intervention.

In that context, proposals that move away from specialist therapeutic intervention towards parenting support, peer provision and locally commissioned services require careful examination, particularly where this shift is justified on grounds of efficiency or cost. Early and peer support have an important role, but they cannot replace specialist, trauma-informed therapeutic intervention when children need it. The data from government-commissioned and independent research suggests that clinically complex need is widespread within this cohort.

Evidence Standards

The consultation places welcome emphasis on evidence standards. However, clarity is needed on how “evidence” will be defined in practice. If funding eligibility becomes tightly aligned with narrow hierarchies of clinical evidence, there is a risk that relational, trauma-informed and multi-modal interventions commonly used with adopted and kinship children may be excluded, despite practice-based and longitudinal evidence of benefit.

Misalignment Between Proposals and Reality

Before structural reform is pursued, there must be clarity on how the proposed model will meet the documented prevalence and complexity of developmental trauma, diagnosed Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, severe mental health presentations, neurodevelopmental difference and crisis-level risk described across the evidence base. Reform that shifts emphasis away from access to specialist provision risks misalignment with the government’s own research findings.

A specific example illustrates the risk of misalignment between proposal and reality.

Proposal 3 refers to providing proactive support at key life stages, including transition to secondary school. Transition is indeed a high-risk period for many adopted and kinship young people. Discussions with your officials indicate that the proposed support model for this stage may consist of six two-hour online therapeutic parenting sessions.

If that is correct, it raises important concerns.

First, the model again places primary emphasis on parenting. While parenting support can be valuable, framing transition support principally as therapeutic parenting risks reinforcing the assumption that difficulties at this stage are fundamentally located within parenting practice rather than in the interaction between trauma, neurodevelopment and systemic change.

Second, transition to secondary school involves a complex convergence of factors: puberty; change of environment; increased behavioural and academic expectations; new peer group dynamics; reduced pastoral staff contact; identity formation and, for many young people affected by early trauma, elevated threat perception and hypervigilance. Difficulties at this stage are typically multi-dimensional, not confined to the parent-child relationship.

Third, the challenges associated with this period are not necessarily transient. For young people with developmental trauma or diagnosed Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, adolescence can represent an escalation of previously managed difficulties rather than a short-term adjustment phase. Beyond the Adoption Order (Selwyn, Wijedasa and Meakings, 2014), identified adolescence as a period of heightened instability, and emphasised the need for specialist, multidisciplinary intervention at this stage. The evidence base does not characterise adolescent transition as a brief parenting skills issue; it characterises it as a period requiring sustained, specialist support.

Questions regarding proposed structural reform

These issues raise important questions about how the proposed reforms align with the Department’s own research.

• Given the available prevalence data, including the Department’s own commissioned research, on what evidential basis has the Department concluded that a shift in emphasis away from specialist trauma-informed therapeutic intervention towards universal or non-clinical provision will adequately meet the documented scale and severity of need?

• How will the Department ensure that evidence frameworks reflect the complexity of developmental trauma rather than privileging interventions most amenable to traditional trial design?

• What modelling has been undertaken to assess the impact of devolved commissioning on access, consistency and specialist capacity? Will any future funding remain ring-fenced, and how will a postcode lottery be prevented from increasing?

  
  

The Survey

On reading the consultation survey, it is reassuringly wide in scope. It invites perspectives on current support arrangements as well as responses to eight substantial reform proposals, including early help, peer support, life-stage transitions, assessment processes, evidence standards, local control and funding efficiency. This reflects the scale of the changes under consideration.

That said, breadth is not the same as depth. The proposals being consulted on represent significant structural reform, including the potential dismantling of a fund on which many families rely and which is widely considered positively impactful. Yet the survey format compresses these complex policy shifts into agreement scales with limited context. Respondents are asked to judge proposals framed in broad, sometimes aspirational language, without a detailed framework for gathering meaningful lived experience. This risks limiting the depth and reliability of feedback.

For reform of this magnitude, the consultation is relatively limited in its ability to capture lived experience in detail. While open text boxes are available, there is no structured way to capture the complexity of lived experience, such as the cumulative impact of early trauma over time, the interaction between education, mental health, repeated attempts to access support, experiences of threshold decisions, or the long-term consequences of unmet need. As a result, the survey may under-represent the layered and compounding nature of need documented in research and lived experience.

The circumstances under which families access post-adoption support, particularly specialist therapeutic provision, are often highly traumatic. Many families come to support following acute mental health crises, severe anxiety and distress, self-harm, child-to-parent harm, or other destabilising events. These experiences are not peripheral; they are central to understanding why specialist intervention is sought and the difference it makes.

Such experiences are difficult to disclose even within confidential therapeutic settings. An online survey format, particularly one without explicit trauma-informed scaffolding or detailed reassurance about how sensitive disclosures will be handled, is unlikely to feel psychologically safe for many respondents. While open text boxes are provided, the survey does not offer sufficient support for families to share the depth of experience that underpins their reliance on specialist services. As a result, the consultation may under-capture the intensity and complexity of the circumstances that drive demand for therapeutic support.

In summary, the consultation is thorough in topic coverage, but less robust in its ability to facilitate informative responses, and may not fully capture the depth of experience or the implications of policy change that respondents are being asked to endorse.

Children and Young People’s Survey 

Adopted and kinship young people are disproportionately affected by developmental trauma, neurodevelopmental differences and associated cognitive and emotional regulation challenges. As discussed above, high rates of ADHD, autism, FASD, impaired executive functioning, anxiety and trauma-related hypervigilance are well documented among our children. These conditions directly affect attention, working memory, abstract reasoning, emotional regulation and the ability to sustain cognitive effort over time. Consultation processes that rely heavily on abstract reasoning, sustained attention and comparative judgement must therefore be carefully designed to ensure they are accessible to the full range of young people whose lives will be affected by the consultation outcome.

The children and young people’s survey is written in age-appropriate, accessible language, which is welcome. However, consultation on experiences of support requires young people to reflect on emotionally significant and, in many cases, distressing experiences. For adopted and kinship young people affected by developmental trauma, experiences of support are often closely intertwined with distress, crisis, threat perception, and interactions with multiple systems. Reflecting on these experiences may itself be emotionally challenging, particularly where young people lack trust in systems.

Although the wording of the survey is simplified, the cognitive demands also remain relatively high. Young people are being asked to agree or disagree with broad reform “ideas” that require abstract thinking about systems, funding, fairness and future consequences. This involves hypothetical reasoning and weighing potential future impacts. For a cohort known to include elevated rates of developmental trauma and neurodevelopmental difference, including ADHD, autism and FASD, this level of abstraction increases cognitive load. The use of Likert-style scales assumes comfort with nuance and comparative judgement, which may not be equally accessible to all respondents.

The survey’s length and structure also raise issues around executive functioning and attention. Sustained engagement across multiple similarly formatted questions can be demanding for young people with working memory difficulties, impulsivity or attention regulation challenges. The format relies heavily on Likert-style responses and extended written boxes without significant variation in layout or visual cues. There is limited chunking or scaffolding to help manage fatigue. For young people who experience executive function difficulties, even if they are able to understand each individual question, maintaining focus and motivation across the whole survey may be difficult, potentially affecting the reliability or depth of responses. In addition, some young people with significant trauma histories may struggle to engage with this type of consultation at all. That in itself introduces participation bias, as the responses gathered may over-represent those who are more verbally confident, less affected by executive functioning difficulties, or more emotionally regulated.

The framing of the proposals also warrants careful consideration. Many of the ideas are expressed in inherently positive terms, such as giving families a “strong start” or ensuring money is “used wisely”, which makes them difficult to disagree with at face value. This framing may make it harder for respondents to engage critically with the proposals themselves. Research by Gilbert et al., Immediate and repeat interrogative suggestibility in a sample of adolescents with Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (2023), found significantly greater vulnerability to leading questions and structured questioning contexts among adolescents with FASD. While this does not invalidate young people’s views, it highlights the importance of neutral framing and careful question design when consulting a neurodiverse population, particularly where a subgroup may be more susceptible to positively framed or leading questions.

The Equality Impact Assessment published alongside the consultation recognises that adopted and kinship children are disproportionately likely to have special educational needs, Education, Health and Care plans, and neurodevelopmental differences, and commits to inclusive design and reasonable adjustments. The Public Sector Equality Duty requires due regard to advancing equality of opportunity and avoiding indirect disadvantage. If some groups of adopted and kinship young people, particularly those with executive functioning difficulties, FASD, autism or trauma-related disengagement, are less likely to complete or meaningfully engage with the survey, that introduces systematic participation bias. Under-representation of the most complex or vulnerable young people could shape policy in ways that inadvertently disadvantage them.

Finally, the survey does not appear to include strong trauma-specific scaffolding. There is limited explicit reassurance about confidentiality, how responses will be used, or the safety of expressing critical or negative views about services. For a population with high rates of trauma exposure, emotional dysregulation and, in some cases, mistrust of systems, the absence of these features is notable.

In summary, the survey is linguistically accessible and clearly laid out, but it is not fully trauma-informed or neurodiversity-aware in its design, and it cannot be assumed that all adopted and kinship young people will be able to participate on equal terms. This raises questions about whether young respondents are being meaningfully consulted on decisions that will materially affect the availability of specialist therapeutic support.

I would be grateful if you could clarify the following:

• Given the recognised prevalence of neurodevelopmental difference and trauma within this cohort, what steps have been taken to ensure that the consultation format does not unintentionally exclude those least able to engage with surveys of this kind?

• How will the Department account for participation bias, particularly if young people with executive functioning difficulties, neurodevelopmental difference or trauma-related disengagement are under-represented in the response data?

  
  

Transparency

The consultation document states that survey responses will “inform” future reform and that a government response will be published. Beyond that, it provides no clear detail about the decision-making framework. It does not state what weight consultation findings will carry relative to fiscal constraints, pre-existing policy direction or pilot outcomes. It does not clarify whether the proposed trajectory, including the potential ending or restructuring of the ASGSF, is genuinely open to change.

The document also provides no transparency about how responses will be analysed. There is no description of the analytical methodology, no commitment to publishing full quantitative data, no explanation of how qualitative evidence will be synthesised, and no assurance that minority or dissenting views will be reported, rather than lost within overall summaries.

Crucially, it does not identify who will conduct this analysis. There is no indication that those responsible will have demonstrable expertise in developmental trauma, neurodevelopmental conditions, adoption or kinship care. There is no commitment to independent oversight, and no clarity about whether individuals with current lived experience will be involved in interpreting the findings.

Finally, the document refers to prior engagement and pilot activity but does not transparently set out which organisations, practitioners, therapy providers, charities, or young people were involved in shaping the policy proposals before public consultation. In the context of significant reform, including potential changes to a national funding mechanism, this lack of transparency raises important questions.

In the absence of clarity about how responses will influence final decisions, there is a risk that stakeholders may perceive the consultation as validating a predetermined direction rather than genuinely shaping policy.

In light of the above, I would be grateful if you could clarify the following:

• What weight will survey responses carry in determining final policy, and how will that be balanced against other factors such as financial considerations, pre-existing policy direction and pilot outcomes?

• How will qualitative evidence be analysed and reported, and will full quantitative data be published?

• Who will conduct the analysis, what expertise will inform interpretation, and will individuals with current lived experience be involved in analysing or scrutinising the conclusions?

  
  

These questions go to the heart of whether the reform programme is aligned with the government’s own research and with the lived realities of the families affected.

Constructive Engagement

The POTATO Group represents a large UK-wide community of adoptive parents and is deeply committed to improving the lives of adopted and kinship children and the families who care for them. We recognise the importance of sustainable, well-designed systems of support, and we share the objective of ensuring that children receive the right help at the right time. 

We are grateful that the Department is undertaking a formal consultation and inviting the adoption and kinship community to contribute to the future design of post-adoption and kinship support. The stakes, however, are high. Decisions taken now will shape the availability and nature of therapeutic support for some of the most vulnerable children in the country. Given the scale of reform under consideration, clarity on these issues is essential to ensuring that future policy aligns with both evidence and the lived realities of adopted and kinship children. It is for that reason that I have set out these concerns in detail.

We look forward to continuing constructive engagement with you and your department to ensure that reform is evidence-led, transparent and responsive to the scale and nature of need within our community. 

Yours sincerely,

Euan Preston

Chair

The POTATO Group (Parents of Traumatised Adopted Teens Organisation)

References

Action Against ASGSF Changes (2025). Parent & Carer Survey following April 2025 ASGSF changes. https://asgsfprotest.com/pcsurveyapril2025/

Family Routes Study (2025–2026). Exploring needs, experiences and outcomes among young people in adoption and special guardianship families. Commissioned by the Department for Education.

The POTATO Group (2025). Far, Far Beyond the Adoption Order: Lessons from Lives Impacted by Trauma.

Selwyn, J., Wijedasa, D. & Meakings, S. (2014). Beyond the Adoption Order: Challenges, Interventions and Adoption Disruption. Commissioned by the Department for Education.

Gilbert, E. et al. (2023). Immediate and repeat interrogative suggestibility in a sample of adolescents with Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder.