Special Guardians & Adopters together was started in 2017 as a campaigning organisation for change. two adoptive mothers, whose children went back into institutional care, struggled to comprehend how their adoption journeys had gone so badly wrong. loving mothers were being persecuted in the family court & were depicted as unfit parents who were a risk to the child; contact was stopped; children’s wishes & feelings were disregarded, children went from one placement to the next – and care orders were made returning parental responsibility to the state. the proper sharing of parental responsibility is not something that seemed to be of much concern and when eventually children were returned/reunited in some cases, and public law orders were occasionally discharged, so much institutional damage had been done in the interim. our vulnerable children were deprived of their right to family life. children who had already suffered massive trauma and loss, were suffering more losses. however, these are young people who suffer enormous disadvantage, who may not be able to live independently – and after a reunification we often remain carers of young people beyond adulthood.
a strong collective voice was needed to protect privacy and to highlight the problems and influence change.
Whilst an Adoption Order and a Special Guardianship Order are different legal arrangements, the children cared for often have similar needs – and our families face similar emotional and practical challenges, including managing complex family relationships and supporting a child’s trauma healing. Bringing special guardians together with adopters was also seen as vitally important in a system that seems to be divisive of us. From our perspective it made sense to come together – especially when adopters are increasingly raising their grandchildren – under special guardianship orders.
Through focusing on shared common experiences, adopters and special guardians created a space to support each other, build community, and campaign for change. We believed in the importance of relationships, understanding, and collaborative therapeutic and social work to help our children heal, and recover from trauma.
Coming together also helped highlight disparities between the families’ experiences under the different legal frameworks, unfairness, inequalities, and misconceptions. More importantly, we were able to consider how these issues were affecting some of our most vulnerable children. Children who had often suffered all ten of the ACEs (Adverse Childhood Experiences), which are associated with poor health in adulthood and shortened life expectancy/premature death from non communicable disease. UK Research (Bellis et al, 2017) has highlighted that continuous trusted adult support throughout childhood is a protective factor, mitigating against the detrimental health impact of the adverse childhood experiences. Yet, we found we were dealing with a system that all too frequently treated us as adversaries when we were seeking support for our children, removed our children instead of providing respite – and then pushed us aside.
No child benefits from re-entering institutional care, cut off from family and loved ones, and being made to feel rejected by care givers who were desperate for more support. There needs to be a better way of supporting relationships with our children, rather than the state taking away parental responsibility or diminishing a parent’s voice, or simply annulling the special guardianship order and disposing of the special guardian. Our knowledge of our children’s needs and difficulties should be a resource and many of our children need us to advocate for them when they re-enter care. On top of all this, unfortunately, the only framework for reunification of children from the care system with families is the one developed by the NSPCC. This is a checklist approach, which essentially starts with the premise that the parents were unsafe and need to be ‘managed’ with ‘goal setting’ and ‘progress reviews’. After a child has entered or re-entered care, it is parental compliance that is sought by professionals and the state – rather than parental knowledge.
One of the main methods we used, to try and highlight the issues, was through developing a program of lived experience research – asking questions that we felt needed to be asked – about problems that are not always given the consideration they deserve. Perhaps because the government is trying to attract adopters and foster carers, it is not the priority to discuss the difficulties experienced, particularly in the teenage years, in caring for children who have suffered early life trauma? It might deter future adopters.
We hoped for dialogue with the Department for Education, but when we met with them in 2018, we were informed our group, the only one bringing adopters and special guardians together at the time, was too small to have a voice or place at the table with the ALB (Adoption Leadership Board). This was disappointing. Nevertheless, after we called our group Special Guardians & Adopters Together in 2018, the government changed the name of the Adoption Leadership Board to the Adoption and Special Guardianship Leadership Board. This Board was closed in December 2022.
Josh McAllister’s Care Review was published in 2022. This highlighted the potentially adversarial nature of the system in general, which we as parents and caregivers were experiencing – when our children came to us traumatised from immense loss – if not abuse and neglect.
By 2022, without full time workers and with no funding – along with challenging family situations, and sometimes exhausting unwanted battles with those we had hoped to receive support from, we were struggling as a group. We simply did not have the capacity and resources to keep this group going.
Recently, the Cerebra Professor Luke Clements and Dr Aiello from the University of Leeds have produced an edited volume entitled ‘Understanding Parent Blame – Institutional Failure and Complex Trauma’. Although this book has no discussion or consideration of the impact of the adoption and special guardianship on children/families, some of the systemic failings SG&AT were trying to raise awareness of including the challenges we experienced as a campaigning group to be listened to, are discussed in relation to families where birth parents are struggling to achieve support when birth children have disabilities. There is a considerable amount of attention given to Fabricated Induced Illness (FII) in the book, which seems to have reached epidemic levels in the UK in recent years, suggesting something is clearly amiss. Using a pseudonym, one of the contributors also discusses how raising the alarm with the Department For Education – to benefit other children in future – can result in gaslighting, character assassination and dismissal, comparing the obstinate refusal of government to take positive action in the face of stark evidence of harm to children, with the way evidence was ignored for years in the Horizon/Post Office scandal.
Is losing your child, when you asked for help and support, not equally or even more more punitive than a prison sentence? Most people would prefer a prison sentence over losing a child according to Sir James Mumby, the previous President of the Family Court.
And what of the children? One of the most moving chapters in the book is written by a birth sibling whose sister was removed using the courts, and then returned after 18 months of harmful, intrusive scrutiny and investigation, hellish supervised contact – and with their mother treated as a criminal. The reunification was immediate, but no one ever acknowledged professional error, when it had devastating consequences for the children involved. In adoption and special guardianship, it is even worse. These are second families and often siblings have already been lost. The parent/carer has spent years rebuilding a child’s shattered trust – only for everything that was done to be totally undermined by harmful safeguarding action, and horrendous costly court cases where parent carers are tested against thresholds that literally make no sense. Our children are not beyond parental control – they are beyond control.
Re-parenting a traumatised abused child is not about control and compliance. What do boundaries and consequences really mean for a child who has had such a difficult start in life and lost everything – and now loses everything again because parent/carers asked for and needed more support?
However, getting factually inaccurate records amended after such catastrophic failings is proving to be nigh on impossible, and dealings with the Information Commissioners Office only seem to make matters worse when it is insisted that the derogatory opinions must remain on record – and this is called “good practice”. Professional opinion is also beyond the remit of an LGO complaint. Only in court can such opinions, no matter how preposterous, be challenged – and in the Family Court, parents will find that far greater credence is given to professionals.
Adopters are having similar problems with the police making errors and then keeping factually inaccurate records. In the worst cases the child’s horrific past – with a history of sexual abuse prior to the adoption – is used to keep the child trapped in care and justify the maintenance of a criminal record. Help was sought because the child’s behaviours clearly signalled a history of child sex abuse. Abuse where perpetrators were never brought to justice. But, it was the child, who couldn’t access therapy, who was held accountable, arrested unnecessarily, removed, stigmatised and socially isolated/excluded. Unfortunately, prejudicial attitudes within children’s services and the police -about children who were sexually abused going on to become perpetrators because of this abuse – seem to prevail at high levels within the police and local authorities – and no one is calling these people to account.
Too many adopters/special guardians end up regretting asking for support or reporting to the police because the consequences have been devastating for the children. Moreover, lived experience suggests the IOPC will turn on the parent/carer and rubbish/dismiss them – and we are finding that Social Work England will not conduct an investigation when senior managers who are responsible for the organisational culture and the attitudes of employees, are not members of a professional body.
What is the point of adoption or special guardianship if a parent/carer cannot safely report the devastating impact of child sex abuse?
In 2025 adopters and special guardians were finally brought together through a protest movement, about the Adoption and Special Guardianship Support Fund (ASGSF), which was under threat. The fund was continued, but it was further cut/capped. This further reduction in the amount that can be accessed was again done under the auspices of making the fund accessible to more families. IPSEA, the leading UK charity in the field of SEND law, has urged the public to write to MPs about these cuts, amidst growing concerns about ‘needs’ of families where children have SEND – being re-framed as ‘demands’ by government. The changes made to the ASGSF are outlined – and a template letter is provided on their website.
How will voices be heard now?
One problem for families is that many of the organisations that government works with at a local and national level, and many large charities, are not independent – and receive funding from local or central government. Lucy Fuller (2025) has highlighted that a lack of independence can be a barrier to change as there is a very real fear/risk that funding might be withdrawn with appropriate challenge to an authority. Lucy is a director and founder of the Parent and Carer Alliance, which has teamed up with the British Institute for Human Rights and this alliance supports families where children have disabilities.
Not all special guardians are relatives of the child but there are a number of charities and groups who provide a collective voice for kinship carers.
Within adoption, there are other campaigning groups now helping voices to be heard (in adoption) like PATCH.
POTATO (Parents of Traumatised Adoptive Teenagers Organisation), where many members ‘parent from a distance’, has recently conducted research, producing a report – Far Far Beyond the Adoption Order
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Special Guardians and Adopters Together 
It is inspiring that you are working together with others who have had similar experiences.