The Children’s and Social Care Secretariat

Kevin Yong: Children’s and Social Care Secretariat Contract Lead

Louise Jelks: ASG Data and Secretariat and Project Support Lead – leads on the ASG data collection, analysis, and reporting, and manages the Secretariat and Project Support

ASG Data Team

Ruby Jardine: Senior Data and Performance Analyst – manages the ASG data collection and supports with data analysis and reporting for the DfE and Adopt England

Kerry Moss: Data and Performance Analyst – provides support with the ASG data collection and data analysis

Secretariat and Project Support

Fern Whiting: Senior Administration and Communications Officer – provides secretariat support for the Adopter Reference Group and project support to Adoption England

Jennah Evans: Administration Officer – provides secretariat and project support to Adoption England

The ASG (formerly ASGLB) data return is completed by every local authority, regional adoption agency and voluntary adoption agency in England on a quarterly basis.

The primary aim of the collection is to collect information about children and (prospective) adopters in the adoption process and data on SGOs to enable decision-making at national, regional and local level to be evidence-based and informed by strong intelligence, and for agencies and regional boards to have the information they need to improve performance.

Each quarter’s return is commissioned on the first working day of the following quarter and agencies are given a month to submit their data. As LAs, RAAs and VAAs are asked to provide adoption data covering the full financial year (1 April to 31 March) for Q4, an extended submission period is given for Q4 – this allows LAs, RAAs and VAAs extra time to complete the full year’s child- and/or adopter-level return and to cross-reference their data with the SSDA903 return that is completed over the same period.

ASG Data Collection Key Dates for 2024/25

You can download the ASG How the Headline Measures are Calculated guidance document.

We have created a PowerBI template that will provide dashboard visualisations of your child data. This zip file contains the pbix file along with instructions on how to set it up. If you have any issues or feedback please let us know.

For Q3 2024/25, please note that the child- and adopter-level returns need to be submitted by Friday 31st January 2025.

Please click here to download the ASG Quarterly Data Guidance.

Please click here to download the ASG Adopter-Level Data Template Q3 2024/25.

All LAs will securely receive their individualised child-level template directly, but please click here to download a blank version of the ASG Child-Level Data Template Q3 2024/25 should you need it.

Data on Adoption and Special Guardianship

The ASG data return is completed by every local authority (LA), regional adoption agency (RAA), and voluntary adoption agency (VAA) in England on a quarterly basis.

The latest publicly available data covers the period from 1 April 2024 to 30 September 2024.

In Q2 2024/25, the response rate from local authorities for the child level section was 100% and the adopter level sections was 100% The response rate for the adopter level section from Voluntary Adoption Agencies was 100%.

As at Q2 2024/25 (30 September 2024), there were a total of:

• 860 Agency Decision Maker decisions
• 760 Placement Orders granted
• 760 Adoption Orders granted and 1070 Special Guardianship Orders granted, a total of 1830 permanence orders granted
• 2710 children with a PO waiting to be matched, of which 1320 had been waiting to be matched 18+ months since entering care, 640 had been waiting 12+ months since grant of PO, and 310 had been waiting 18+ months since grant of PO
• 710 Adopter Registrations, and 530 Adopter Approvals
• 2170 Prospective adoptive families not yet approved
• 1550 Approved adoptive families waiting to be matched

Data Publications

For previous releases of the quarterly reports published by the DfE, please visit – DfE Adoption System Performance

* these files were produced by CVAA on behalf of DfE

Adopter Characteristics Publication

Early Permanence Publication

The Adoption and Special Guardianship Support Fund (ASGSF) was established in 2015 to provide funding for therapeutic interventions designed to support adoptive children with difficulties relating to trauma and attachment. Since its establishment, the ASGSF has expanded to include children who have left care under Special Guardianship Order, Child Arrangement Order and Residence Order and their families. It has provided over £400 million to fund therapy for more than 50,000 children and young people.

In the interests of improving transparency, the Department for Education, in collaboration with its delivery partner, Mott Macdonald, has decided to begin publishing annual statistics about the usage of the ASGSF.

You can download the first of these reports here.

The report details how many applications there are for ASGSF funding nationally and how the number of applications has grown over time. It also breaks down applications by placement type; what type of therapy is being applied for; the amount of unused funding that is being returned to the ASGSF; who is providing the funded therapy; and the age, gender, SEN status and ethnicity of the children receiving therapy.

The report also provides data at regional level, allowing greater scrutiny of how ASGSF funding is being used to access therapy across the country. We shall publish this data annually in order to foster accountability and openness and drive improvements in how the fund is used.

For any queries about this data, or for further information, please contact the ASGSF team at Adoption.SupportFund@education.gov.uk.

A Report from the Adoption and Special Guardianship Leadership Board

The Adoption and Special Guardianship Leadership Board has made ending the racial disparity in adoption one of its major priorities. We launched a Task and Finish Group made up of black social workers, adopters, adoptees and experts in the field with one very simple aim: to present constructive proposals to end racial disparity in adoption.

The Transatlantic Summit on Racial Disparity in Adoption between the US and English governments gave us the opportunity to hear from black and mixed ethnicity young adults about their experiences of care and of adoption, as well as from government leaders, experts and adopters in the UK and the US.

Coram-i also commissioned an in-depth survey on the experiences of black adopters, adoptees and social workers.

We consulted with the Association of Directors of Children’s Services, Regional Adoption Agency leaders and the leaders of the Voluntary Adoption Agencies. This consultation, survey and summit have identified some critical areas for change and innovation which can be found in the report here.

Adoption and Special Guardianship Leadership Board (ASGLB)

Coram-i was contracted to provided a Secretariat service to the ASGLB between July 2019 and December 2022, which included administering quarterly data collection and Board meetings. The ASGLB has now been closed, but we continue to administer the voluntary, quarterly adoption and special guardianship data collection on behalf of the children’s social care sector in England.

About the Board

The Adoption and Special Guardianship Leadership Board (ASGLB) closed at the end of December 2022, following a decision made by the Secretary of State for Education. The ASGLB played a crucial role in providing leadership to the adoption system and supporting children leaving care under a Special Guardianship Order. The recommendations of the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care, published in July 2022, called for a reset of the whole system, and so it was decided to close the ASGLB as it had fulfilled its remit.

The Board was established in 2014 as the Adoption Leadership Board (ALB), to provide leadership to the adoption system and drive improvements in performance. In 2018 the Board became the Adoption and Special Guardianship Leadership Board (ASGLB), expanding its remit to cover previously looked after children subject to adoption or special guardianship orders.

During its lifetime, the Board produced good practice guidance, investigated key issues and regularly provided informative data on adoption and special guardianship. The Board also supported the development of Regional Adoption Agencies (RAAs), which work collectively and with the wider sector to deliver the National Adoption Strategy, supported by government funding, and will be part of the ongoing structural improvements to the sector to deliver change. The quarterly data collection and publication will continue on behalf of the sector, and the Adopter and Special Guardian Reference Groups will continue to provide key sounding boards as the DfE takes forward its care reforms.

The ASGLB met quarterly, until its closure in December 2022, to discuss a range of issues relating to adoption and special guardianship. Coram-i provided support to the DfE in administering the ASGLB from July 2019, including the production of the minutes from each of the Board meetings. Prior to that, such support was provided by the CVAA. The minutes do not represent the views of Coram.

The minutes for meetings held between July 2019 and December 2022 are published on this page:

10 November 2022

6 May 2022

3 February 2022

4 November 2021

22 July 2021

6 May 2021

26 January 2021

22 October 2020

28 July 2020

24 June 2020 (postponed from April due to Covid-19)

21 January 2020

15 October 2019

23 July 2019

The ASGLB’s annual report for 2019/20 can also be found here.