As you may be aware, on Monday 14 April 2025 the Adoption and Special Guardianship Support Fund (ASGSF) announced changes to the Fair Access Limit (FAL) with a reduction of funding to £3,000 and the discontinuation of the separate Fair Access Limit for specialist assessments or additional match funding for therapeutic input in excess of the previous FAL.
They have also currently set the rule that all therapy applications within the 2025/26 financial year must be for therapy that will end by Monday 31 March 2025. Therefore, we cannot seek funding for therapy that will span to financial years.
What does this mean?
All therapeutic support and specialist assessments linked to your child will come out of the total £3,000 FAL with no separate additional funding available for specialist assessments. In addition, previously if an application exceeded the fair access limit and an assessment evidenced the need for additional funding, Adopt South West were able to request match funding in order to cover any additional costs. This option has also been removed by the ASGSF so will no longer be an option for future applications.
We appreciate these changes may raise concerns for families and the implications on the therapeutic support that they are currently receiving or hoped to in the future.
You will have seen in the announcement that the demand for support through the ASGF continues to grow significantly and the decision has been made by the ASGSF to maximise the number of children who are able to access the fund.
We are continuing to work with therapeutic providers to support families in the region. We currently have a significant number of requests for funding that are now outside of the fair access limit and would not be in scope of the Adoption and Special Guardianship Fund.
We currently have a significant amount of requests for funding that are now outside of the fair access limit and would not be in scope of the Adoption and Special Guardianship Fund. We are unable to submit these applications and are working with providers to seek new costings and adaptions to their offers to ensure therapy is within the new £3000 fair access limit.
While we have endeavoured to work proactively to process applications prior to the decision announcements and changes from the ASGSF to reduce waiting times and breaks in therapy, unfortunately given the new criteria put into place from Monday 14 April, we are now experiencing backlogs as we amend previous applications as well as work with our providers to continue to address new requests.
Impact
Unfortunately, we recognise that there will be breaks in therapy for some children, we apologise for this, but it is now unavoidable due to the changes made by the ASGSF. We are working hard within Adopt South West to prioritise applications for families to avoid or minimise breaks in therapy as much as is possible and for new applications for those who are experiencing crisis. We will inform individual families of timeframes relative to their applications as we are working with them to process these. Given the scenario and the need to prioritise this, we apologise that there may be delays in other elements of Adopt South West’s work while we address the above and will endeavour to absorb these as quickly as we can.
Thank you, Adopt South West – Adoption Support