By Jay Vaughan, CEO, Family Futures
The BBC’s recent investigation into adoption, published last week (28 November 2025) has rightly prompted widespread concern. For those of us who have spent decades supporting children affected by early adversity and trauma, the issues highlighted are all too familiar. Many families have been in touch with me in the past few days to say that the painful experiences highlighted in the news reflect their own experience. This needs to change if children are to thrive in their adoptive families.
We need to look at what we’ve learnt from families and what needs to change so that children can recover from trauma and achieve their potential in life.
Family Futures was founded in 1998 because post-placement therapeutic support simply did not exist. At that time, adoption placements were already shifting from relinquished infants towards older children with complex histories of abuse, neglect and loss in their early developmental years. The need for a trauma-informed, multidisciplinary approach was clear then, and it remains as urgent as ever now.
I have worked with children from the care system for more than 35 years. The experiences described by families in the recent news stories reflect what we see daily at Family Futures in our Complex Trauma Service. Most adopted children have complex developmental trauma as a result of early life abuse, neglect and loss.
This appears in everyday life in different ways including: emotional dysregulation, difficulties with trust and attachment, heightened anxiety or vigilance, shutdown, impulsive reactions, sensory sensitivities, challenges at school, low self-esteem, boundary issues and food-related behaviours. Clearly, each individual child will have a different level and range of support needs but what is clear is that all children who have experienced trauma will need support to go on to thrive in their lives.
As families have said so powerfully when speaking out about their experiences, “love is not enough”.
Many of the children being placed for adoption or under special guardianship orders today are among the most developmentally traumatised in the country. Yet the system still offers no multidisciplinary assessment prior to placement, and there is no coherent model of early intervention so that their needs can be supported from the outset.
Children and families are left to cope with developmental trauma without support. Too many children do not meet the threshold for CAMHS, and, with the instability of ASGSF funding (Adoption and Special Guardianship Support Fund), there is now a chasm in provision.
We know where this leads. Without early, specialist support, the same children who struggle in their adoptive, kinship or foster care placements today become the adults who require high-cost interventions in the future: psychiatric hospital admissions, custodial sentences, or long-term homelessness. The emotional cost to each young person and their family is unacceptably high, with a huge financial cost to society as well.
When we assess children’s needs holistically at Family Futures with our team of specialists looking at children’s needs through different lenses (sensory, psychological etc) – it isn’t just an accurate diagnosis that we can provide. It is the very foundation for effective support that is going to change that child’s life and set them up on a positive trajectory. Without this multidisciplinary assessment and tailored support, we see escalating needs and family crises where children are left to struggle or offered a ‘one size fits all’ intervention that misses the mark.
Families often say to us that the multidisciplinary assessment is the first time their child’s behaviours make sense and they can start to understand how their child can be helped. Next comes the crucial question: how can they get the vital therapeutic support their child needs?
The ASGSF did, for a time, make a difference. As Adoption UK’s annual Adoption Barometer has shown, the ASGSF gave some families access to therapeutic support that would otherwise have been out of reach for them. However, the drastic cuts to the fund this year, the delays and the uncertainty about its future have left many children with significant gaps in treatment. Families are left with no clarity about what lies ahead. The resulting instability only compounds the trauma for children and the difficulties faced by families.
Meanwhile, the overall system is still failing to understand traumatised children. Instead of being offered early therapeutic intervention, parents are frequently criticised or blamed for their child’s behaviours. Group-based parenting programmes are often the default offer for adoptive families, despite having limited impact for children with complex developmental trauma, neurodiversity or FASD. Families tell us repeatedly when they come to us that they have previously felt judged rather than supported, while the parenting support they were offered did not help and has no evidence base.
Family Futures is both a Voluntary Adoption Agency (VAA) and a therapeutic service. As a VAA, we recruit, assess and approve people to become adoptive parents as part of our iAdopt service. iAdopt is unique in offering a free multidisciplinary assessment prior to placement. When we set up iAdopt we decided it was vital for us to invest in children’s futures by offering this holistic assessment of needs as part of our not-for-profit service. We know from our experience of working with local authorities that most do not have the budget for this and sometimes we hear the view that children “just need time to settle.”
Our experience demonstrates the opposite: children settle because they are supported.
Following the drastic ASGSF cuts this year, families are now left with significantly reduced access to the level of assessment and therapy than was previously possible. The previous £5,000 annual ASGSF allocation for adoptive families, plus £2,500 for an assessment, provided a far more realistic budget for early therapeutic work that helped families feel supported and set them up for long-term stability.
As an adoption agency, Family Futures has had to make difficult ethical decisions. Recruiting adopters and placing highly complex children – often aged six, seven or eight – with no guaranteed post-placement support is not acceptable. We have launched a fundraising appeal and thanks to a generous donor who has enabled us to set up our fund for new families, we are now able to ensure our families receive guaranteed therapeutic help in the first year while longer-term funding is negotiated.
This is a pioneering model of support for adoptive families which is evidence based from our published, peer reviewed research of what works to improve traumatised children’s outcomes. However, this essential support should not be reliant on philanthropy. The government should be funding this support for our most vulnerable children as standard.
The current model of adoption without adequate support is not fit for purpose. If we are serious about improving outcomes for traumatised children, we need a national shift in thinking.
Permanency planning must place therapeutic intervention at its centre, from pre-placement through to adulthood.
Our most vulnerable children need a coherent national model of trauma-informed support, ensuring adopters and special guardians are equipped to support children effectively and are not left isolated.
The BBC investigation and families speaking out have opened an important public conversation. We now need to draw on this lived experience of young people and families and include the clinical experience of trauma-informed specialists who have been working with families for decades and have seen what change is needed to move the dial. If we want to create lasting change, we must start by acknowledging that a permanent home and loving family is not enough for traumatised children.
Stability comes from supporting family life therapeutically so that children can heal and thrive.
