Case Studies

New Labour sought to tackle social exclusion and child poverty in the most deprived areas of the country. Specifically, they sought to increase speech and language development in children at two years and to ensure that pre-school children were adequately prepared for school in order to increase future life chances. There was evidence to suggest that service provision was failing those children most in need. The emergence of a growing body of international work and knowledge - including the Head Start and the Early Head Start programmes, the Abecedarian project, the David Olds Home Visiting programme and the Perry Pre-School programmes in the US – showed that children benefited from pre-school provision and outreach healthcare and parenting programmes. 

 Sure Start was a New Labour government initiative launched in 1998 that aimed to address the long-neglected policy area of children’s early years. As a social innovation that used evidence-based policy and open, consultative government, Sure Start brought together a wide range of stakeholders including professional, voluntary and private providers of social services, education, health services and those running child centres. It aimed to ‘join-up’ core services with outreach and home visiting, placing an emphasis on those who were hard to reach; providing support for families; providing good quality play, learning and childcare, primary and community health care; and supporting children and families with specialised needs.

At the centre of these was the idea of community control. The overall goal was to form effective partnerships between local authorities, primary care trusts, voluntary and private sectors, parents and other members of the local community which would work towards the goals of tackling social exclusion and child poverty. A series of seminars were held, bringing together speakers and practitioners from child development, social work, health and demography, together with local politicians. A review of research evidence was commissioned which demonstrated the potential for the scheme to achieve successful outcomes. Implementation In 1998 the then Chancellor Gordon Brown announced that 200 Sure Start Local Programmes (SSLPs) would be created in deprived areas across England, with £200 million a year coming from the DfES, which had been ‘ring-fenced’ for 10 years. The SSLPs provided services tailored to the specific needs of the local community, bringing together core programmes for health, education and play, and family support for children under four.

Emphasis was placed on outreach as a means to access difficult-to-reach families and local projects had the autonomy to provide extra services of their choice, for example debt counselling and benefits advice. An informal support network called ‘Friends of Sure Start’ was established, comprising those outside of government who were involved with the creation of the policy and who would be consulted in implementation and further developments. Sure Start’s model, while clear about the desired outcomes of the programmes, was relatively non-prescriptive about the means by which the outcomes were to be achieved in a particular locality. This is something local partners both appreciated and found frustrating. Shirley Mucklow, involved in a local programme in Bellingham, South London, claims that the ability to choose the ways in which the programmes operated was particularly empowering for the members of the local community, as they had the freedom to make changes and try out new approaches. However, more stringent statutory targets were later introduced.

By October 1999 it was reported by Norman Glass, the Treasury official with responsibility for Sure Start alongside the DfES, that only two local programmes were up and running. He argued in favour of a cautious approach suggesting waiting for evidence from the small number of programmes already in place before moving to establish a ‘second wave’ of programmes. However, this caution did not deter the scheme’s expansion, and July 2000 saw the announcement that a further 300 to 350 Sure Start programmes were to be established. Scaling up Sure Start was in part a response to the fact that not all disadvantaged children live in deprived areas. Difficulties arose because Sure Start programmes could only cater for a small number of children within a particular catchment area, while health agencies and local authorities were finding great diversity in the resources available within a given area. Within some programme catchments, one part of the locality might already have relatively well funded and well-organised early years’ provision, alongside another part of the locality with little or poorer-quality provision. The Every Child Matters Green Paper of 2003 proposed further integration of services and the government announced plans to create Sure Start Children’s Centres in the top 20 percent of most deprived wards in England. This shift effectively re-branded Sure Start Local Programmes into Children Centres: a controversial adaptation of the original idea.

By December 2004, there was a move by the Government to make Local Authorities responsible for planning, establishing and funding these Children’s Centres, rather than continue with partnership arrangements where one partner took the lead without formal legalisation. Since April 2006, the DfES has paid a grant to Local Authorities to fund all Children’s Centres, including all former Sure Start Local Programmes. Local Authorities are now accountable for delivering Children’s Centres and provide a range of services that go beyond the original remit of SSLPs. The scheme has continued to expand and a target was set for a Children’s Centre to be created in every community, (a total of 3,500 centres), by 2010. By March 2006, 800 Children’s Centres in England were providing services to around 650,000 children. The current target is to establish 2,500 centres by March 2008. Since 1999, the government has invested £1.8 billion in Sure Start programmes. Challenges The National Evaluation of Sure Start (NESS) assesses the effectiveness of all Sure Start programmes in England.

The impact of intervention programmes such as Sure Start is difficult to assess in the short term, but key findings so far include: • Joined up working between traditionally separate services is challenging, although progress is being made; • There is considerable variation in the funding of programmes, with some spending up to six times more per child than the lowest spending programmes; • It is difficult and time consuming to ensure families know about and access Sure Start programmes. Evidence suggests that those most in need are less likely to access services; • It is taking longer than expected to implement Sure Start programmes and to deliver a full range of services; • This partly is a result of Sure Start’s complexity evidenced by the fact that on average at least ten other government initiatives operate in Sure Start areas and interact with Sure Start programmes. The enhanced role of local authorities and the speed with which Sure Start has been expanded has also affected some key principles of the programme. In particular, the focus on child development as opposed to providing childcare places (to support parental employment), and the notion of community control have been compromised. Changes to the original conception of the programme have been characterised by: • A gradual shift from a focus on child development towards parental employability; • Children’s Centres developing or strengthening links with Job Centre/Job Centre Plus offices; and • Children’s Centres increasingly becoming a one-stop shop for a range of services that go well beyond the original remit of Sure Start Local Programmes. Local Authority control also raised concerns about a move away from community control and parental involvement. This shift was seen by some commentators and local groups as removing power from the organisations involved and in some cases disengaged those it was supposed to empower. This was amplified by the fact that Local Authorities are responsible for funding Children’s Centres and that priorities are based on Public Service Agreements, rather than the priorities identified by parents, carers and other community service users. By handing over responsibility to the Local Authorities, the ring-fenced 10-year funding plan came to an end. The Childcare Act of 2006 formalised Local Authorities’ responsibilities while changing funding arrangements. This has lead to controversy over whether Sure Start has been recaptured by the public sector and moved away from its roots in the voluntary and community sectors.

The process has also led to questions about how the funding for 524 local Sure Start programmes is to be spread over 2,500 (eventually 3,500) Children’s Centres in the coming years. As Sure Start was rolled out nationally, with allowances made for the different needs of local communities, variations in implementation and service quality started to arise. Early evidence suggests that families and children with less social capital, such as teen parents, lone parents, and workless households, were less able to take advantage of the services of Sure Start Local Programmes than their better off counterparts. A recent national independent evaluation of Sure Start has criticised the local programme scheme for failing to develop a sustained and strategic approach to working with ethnic minorities at a time of increased local tension between different ethnic groups.

Good practice existed in some projects but it tended to be isolated, and experiences were not widely shared throughout the programme. With respect to evaluation, those chosen to assess the programme have been criticised for being more concerned with targets than the real objectives of Sure Start. The targets set – for children’s speech, language, social and emotional development and reducing the number of children in workless households – have also been attacked as only partial measurements of programme success. It has been argued that academic performance, health and lifetime earnings should also be assessed, although those indicators will require a longer period of time before they can be measured.