Asked by: Tom Gordon (Liberal Democrat - Harrogate and Knaresborough)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, pursuant to the Answer of 15 October 2025 to Question 78154 on Adoption and Special Guardianship Support Fund, what assessment her Department has been made of the potential economic impact of funding additional therapies beyond the fair access limit on local authorities; and if her Department holds data on how many families require therapy beyond the fair access limit.
Answered by Josh MacAlister - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Education)
The department continues to monitor and assess the impact of the changes to the Adoption and Special Guardianship Support Fund (ASGSF) and is engaging with stakeholders. Decisions to fund additional therapy beyond the fair access limit rest with individual local authorities.
This financial year, we have invested £50 million in the ASGSF, giving adopted and kinship children access to therapeutic services that stabilise placements and address complex needs.
The government has introduced the Families First Partnership programme, with an extra £547 million, bringing total funding to £2.4 billion over the next three years. We are also investing nearly £1.5 billion to improve family services and early years education, including £500 million for Best Start Family Hubs between 2026 and 2029. Local authorities should decide how best to use these resources to support adoptive and kinship families.
The department does not collect data on how many families require therapy beyond the fair access limit.
Asked by: Tom Gordon (Liberal Democrat - Harrogate and Knaresborough)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what assessment her Department has made of local authorities' ability to deal with increased levels of demand for therapy above the Adoption Support and Special Guardianship Support Fund fair access limit.
Answered by Josh MacAlister - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Education)
The department continues to monitor and assess the impact of the changes to the adoption and special guardianship support fund (ASGSF) and is engaging with stakeholders.
In the current financial year, the department has invested £50 million in the ASGSF, ensuring that adopted and kinship children may have access to therapeutic services designed to stabilise placements and address complex needs.
The government has launched the Families First Partnership programme, providing an additional £547 million, and bringing total funding to £2.4 billion over the next three years. We are also investing nearly £1.5 billion to strengthen family services and early years education, including £500 million for Best Start Family Hubs between 2026 and 2029.
Local authorities are responsible for determining how best to deploy these resources to meet increased demand for therapeutic support beyond the fair access limit.
Asked by: Tom Gordon (Liberal Democrat - Harrogate and Knaresborough)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, on what date she decided to reduce the Adoption and Special Guardianship Support Fund fair access limit to £3,000 in 2025-26.
Answered by Josh MacAlister - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Education)
The decision to set the adoption and special guardianship support fund (ASGSF) fair access limit at £3,000 for 2025/26 was taken as part of departmental business planning decisions in the spring, following the announcement to Parliament on 1 April that the ASGSF would be continuing into 2025/26.
Asked by: Tom Gordon (Liberal Democrat - Harrogate and Knaresborough)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, if she will introduce a statutory duty on all educational settings to record and report each incident of physical restraint to parents and relevant authorities.
Answered by Stephen Morgan - Government Whip, Lord Commissioner of HM Treasury
The government recognises that the misuse of reasonable force and restrictive interventions can have a significant and long-lasting effect on pupils, staff members and parents.
The department is currently consulting on revisions to the ‘Use of reasonable force’ guidance, published in 2013. The consultation is available here: https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/use-of-reasonable-force-and-other-restrictive-interventions-guidance-proposed-amendments. The revised guidance will provide advice for schools on creating environments that minimise the use of reasonable force and restrictive interventions, and, where necessary, support staff to use reasonable force and restrictive interventions safely, appropriately and within the law.
The revised draft guidance defines reasonable force and other restrictive interventions, and outlines the general risks associated with their use. This approach ensures that the guidance can be applied regardless of specific terminology that a school may use and allows school staff to confidently apply the advice in order to minimise the use of restrictive practices.
The department recognises the importance of recording and reporting the use of force. This is why we will be enacting Section 93a of the Education and Inspections Act 2006, making recording and reporting incidents of reasonable force to parents a legal duty. This will be enacted to coincide with the publication of the updated ‘Use of reasonable force’ guidance, to ensure that schools have adequate advice on how they should be recording and reporting any incidents where reasonable force, including restrictive interventions, is used.
Asked by: Tom Gordon (Liberal Democrat - Harrogate and Knaresborough)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, if she will introduce a statutory definition of restraint in the context of education.
Answered by Stephen Morgan - Government Whip, Lord Commissioner of HM Treasury
The government recognises that the misuse of reasonable force and restrictive interventions can have a significant and long-lasting effect on pupils, staff members and parents.
The department is currently consulting on revisions to the ‘Use of reasonable force’ guidance, published in 2013. The consultation is available here: https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/use-of-reasonable-force-and-other-restrictive-interventions-guidance-proposed-amendments. The revised guidance will provide advice for schools on creating environments that minimise the use of reasonable force and restrictive interventions, and, where necessary, support staff to use reasonable force and restrictive interventions safely, appropriately and within the law.
The revised draft guidance defines reasonable force and other restrictive interventions, and outlines the general risks associated with their use. This approach ensures that the guidance can be applied regardless of specific terminology that a school may use and allows school staff to confidently apply the advice in order to minimise the use of restrictive practices.
The department recognises the importance of recording and reporting the use of force. This is why we will be enacting Section 93a of the Education and Inspections Act 2006, making recording and reporting incidents of reasonable force to parents a legal duty. This will be enacted to coincide with the publication of the updated ‘Use of reasonable force’ guidance, to ensure that schools have adequate advice on how they should be recording and reporting any incidents where reasonable force, including restrictive interventions, is used.
Asked by: Tom Gordon (Liberal Democrat - Harrogate and Knaresborough)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, whether she collects data on the number of post adoption (a) disruptions and (b) breakdowns in England.
Answered by Janet Daby
I refer the hon. Member for Harrogate and Knaresborough to the answer of 28 March 2025 to Question 37457.
Asked by: Tom Gordon (Liberal Democrat - Harrogate and Knaresborough)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what information her Department holds on the number of families that have experienced adoption breakdown in the last 12 months.
Answered by Janet Daby
The department does not collect information centrally on families that have experienced adoptions that break down.
The department publishes information on whether children starting to be looked after in any given year were known to have been previously adopted. The latest information available relates to the year ending 31 March 2024 and is in the table ‘CLA starting during the year by characteristics – National’ of the ‘Children looked after in England’ statistical release which can be found at: https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/data-tables/permalink/92f77d0d-7e95-45a1-f1db-08dd5cc661f7. This includes information on any known previous permanence arrangement for a child starting to be looked after.
Information for the year ending 31 March 2025 will be published in autumn 2025.
Asked by: Tom Gordon (Liberal Democrat - Harrogate and Knaresborough)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps she is taking to tackle adoption breakdown.
Answered by Janet Daby
The department has provided funding of £9 million in this financial year to Adoption England to improve adoption services in Regional Adoption Agencies (RAAs).
This includes £3 million of funding to develop more Centres of Excellence as multidisciplinary teams across the country to provide specialist and therapeutic support to families and the development of national standards for adoption support. It also includes a new framework for an early support core offer, ‘Becoming a Family’, for the first twelve to eighteen months of placement and an Adoption Support Plan to guide assessments of a family’s support needs. All are designed to improve support and reduce the risk of an adoption breakdown.
Adoption England are also planning work to develop a national protocol on how children’s services, front door services and adoption support teams work together to better support families at risk of adoption disruption.
Adoption England and RAAs work closely with adopters on all of their projects to improve adoption support services. This includes considering the latest evidence of why adoption disruptions have occurred in their agencies and across the country.
Since its inception in 2015, the department has provided over £400 million through the adoption and special guardianship support fund (ASGSF) to provide therapeutic interventions for around 52,700 children who have left care under an adoption, special guardianship or child arrangements order. The interventions are designed to help children and their families to deal with their trauma and attachment difficulties and have been independently assessed to have helped prevent adoption breakdowns. ASGSF funding for the next financial year is currently subject to business planning discussions and an announcement will be made shortly.
Asked by: Tom Gordon (Liberal Democrat - Harrogate and Knaresborough)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what estimate her Department has made of the number of foster care placements that were unsuccessful in (a) England and (b) Wales in the 2023-24 financial year.
Answered by Janet Daby
As part of my right hon. Friend, the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s Transformation Fund announced in the Spring Statement and building on the £15 million investment in the Autumn Budget 2024, the department will provide an additional £25 million over two years, beginning in the 2026/27 and 2027/28 financial years, for foster care as part of Children’s Social Care Reform. We expect this funding to help recruit an additional 400 fostering families, provide better peer to peer support for foster carers, and ensure more children in care have stability through ensuring a foster care placement is available to them when needed.
Currently, there are ten fostering regional programmes active across England, collaborating with 64% of all local authorities to recruit, retain and support foster carers. The department plans to move towards full national roll-out in the next financial year. This supports retention and support for carers through the recruitment of short break foster carers, who provide high quality care for children while their usual foster carers take a break.
This programme also includes an expansion of ‘The Mockingbird Family Model’, an innovative evidence-based approach involving six to ten families grouped into a constellation around a hub home carer. Mockingbird includes peer support, respite and training. It was found to substantially improve retention by an independent evaluation, which showed that participating households were 82% less likely to deregister than households who did not participate.
The department also funds Fosterline, a free independent source of advice and support to current and prospective carers.
To improve retention, the department is also acting on areas that matter to foster carers. The allegations process is a key contributor to high levels of foster carer deregistration, and the department is committed to improving practice and guidance in this area. The department has also begun conversations with the sector about proposed changes to delegated authority, ensuring that all foster carers have delegated authority by default in relation to day-to-day parenting of the child in their care.
Financial support plays a role in retaining and supporting foster carers. The National Minimum Allowance (NMA) was introduced by the Labour government in 2007 and has kept pace with inflation over time. Current levels of the NMA have been uplifted by 3.55% for the 2025/2026 financial year and can be found at: https://www.gov.uk/support-for-foster-parents/help-with-the-cost-of-fostering.
Finally, we encourage fostering services to adopt the Fostering Network’s ‘Foster Carer Charter’, which sets out clear principles of what support should be available to foster carers.
Regarding ‘unsuccessful’ placements, the department publishes statistics for children looked after in England only, not Wales. Statistics for other countries in the UK are the responsibility of the devolved administrations.
The department does not collect information on whether placements for children looked after were successful or not. These placements can end for a wide range of reasons and there is no specific category recorded as an ‘unsuccessful placement’.
The latest information on the main reason for placement changes during the 2023/24 reporting year is published in the ‘Children looked after in England’ statistical release at: https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/data-tables/permalink/c3ae926d-83e8-4ec9-3213-08dd6b9d125f.
Asked by: Tom Gordon (Liberal Democrat - Harrogate and Knaresborough)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps her Department is taking to help ensure that local authorities provide sufficient support for foster carers.
Answered by Janet Daby
As part of my right hon. Friend, the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s Transformation Fund announced in the Spring Statement and building on the £15 million investment in the Autumn Budget 2024, the department will provide an additional £25 million over two years, beginning in the 2026/27 and 2027/28 financial years, for foster care as part of Children’s Social Care Reform. We expect this funding to help recruit an additional 400 fostering families, provide better peer to peer support for foster carers, and ensure more children in care have stability through ensuring a foster care placement is available to them when needed.
Currently, there are ten fostering regional programmes active across England, collaborating with 64% of all local authorities to recruit, retain and support foster carers. The department plans to move towards full national roll-out in the next financial year. This supports retention and support for carers through the recruitment of short break foster carers, who provide high quality care for children while their usual foster carers take a break.
This programme also includes an expansion of ‘The Mockingbird Family Model’, an innovative evidence-based approach involving six to ten families grouped into a constellation around a hub home carer. Mockingbird includes peer support, respite and training. It was found to substantially improve retention by an independent evaluation, which showed that participating households were 82% less likely to deregister than households who did not participate.
The department also funds Fosterline, a free independent source of advice and support to current and prospective carers.
To improve retention, the department is also acting on areas that matter to foster carers. The allegations process is a key contributor to high levels of foster carer deregistration, and the department is committed to improving practice and guidance in this area. The department has also begun conversations with the sector about proposed changes to delegated authority, ensuring that all foster carers have delegated authority by default in relation to day-to-day parenting of the child in their care.
Financial support plays a role in retaining and supporting foster carers. The National Minimum Allowance (NMA) was introduced by the Labour government in 2007 and has kept pace with inflation over time. Current levels of the NMA have been uplifted by 3.55% for the 2025/2026 financial year and can be found at: https://www.gov.uk/support-for-foster-parents/help-with-the-cost-of-fostering.
Finally, we encourage fostering services to adopt the Fostering Network’s ‘Foster Carer Charter’, which sets out clear principles of what support should be available to foster carers.
Regarding ‘unsuccessful’ placements, the department publishes statistics for children looked after in England only, not Wales. Statistics for other countries in the UK are the responsibility of the devolved administrations.
The department does not collect information on whether placements for children looked after were successful or not. These placements can end for a wide range of reasons and there is no specific category recorded as an ‘unsuccessful placement’.
The latest information on the main reason for placement changes during the 2023/24 reporting year is published in the ‘Children looked after in England’ statistical release at: https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/data-tables/permalink/c3ae926d-83e8-4ec9-3213-08dd6b9d125f.