Improving Services for Young Children

From Sure Start to Children′s Centres

Angela Anning, Mog Ball, Angela Anning, Mog Ball

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781446243114
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Éducation de la petite enfance

?This book is a welcome addition to the field of Early Childhood studies and would appeal to both students and professionals working with children and families in any area. The format of the book is clear and the style of writing is very readable and engaging? - ESCalate

` In this excellent book two of the principal investigators from the huge national evaluation of Sure Start bring together key findings of ??what works?? as the local programmes are turned into children?s centres and rolled out across England. Chapters on all aspects of Sure Start and children?s centres reflect the services themselves in providing a valuable ??one stop shop?? for those who want to understand how to work effectively with young children and their parents? - Dame Gillian Pugh, Visiting Professor, Institute of Education, University of London

This book sets out important insights gained from the National Evaluation of Sure Start (NESS). The contributors present the effects of Sure Start from a range of perspectives and explore the successful and problematic aspects of the programme with its vision of improving the life chances of the most disadvantaged families. They also map and evaluate the progression of the programme into Children?s Centres and Extended Schools.

Each contributor provides an overview of their specialist area before outlining the findings from the study and its implications for developing Children?s Services. These areas include:

-Ethnicity

-Childcare

-Parents

-Special Needs

-Maternity Services

-Domestic Violence

-Buildings and Spaces.

The chapters set out the practical lessons learned from these areas for practitioners, professionals and policy makers in the field of children?s services, as well as those involved in the setting up of Children?s Centres and reform of multi-agency children?s services.

The book will be relevant to undergraduate students on Childhood Studies Degrees, Early Years Professional Foundation Degrees students, postgraduate students on National Qualification for Managers of Children?s Centres and Masters related to Integrated Children?s Services. It is also for those with an interest in anti-poverty intervention programmes for young children and their families around the world.

1	What was Sure Start and Why Did it Matter?
	Angela Anning and David Hall

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Sure Start

Sure Start was a £500 million anti-poverty intervention set up in the UK in 1998 and funded by the New Labour Government Treasury Department under the leadership of the then Chancellor, Gordon Brown. It was designed as a 10-year programme, targeting all the families with children under four years old living in more than 500 of the most disadvantaged communities.

But Sure Start did not come ‘out of the blue’. Its story is part of a series of policy changes in children’s services; and the design of Sure Start drew on a history of international research evidence on the effectiveness of early interventions to improve the health, well-being and educational attainments of disadvantaged children.

We outline the history of policy and research in services for young children over the last two decades (1997–2007), before returning to the place of the Sure Start model within this history and to the evaluation of Sure Start Local Programmes (SSLPs), which is the focus of this book.

Policy

In 1997 when New Labour came to power, the modernisation of public services was high on their agenda. Tony Blair (1998) proclaimed four key principles:

1. High standards and full accountability.
2. Devolution of decision-making about service delivery to the ‘front line’.
3. Flexibility of employment.
4. Involving the voluntary and private sector to increase choice for users.

The first principle of accountability, high standards and (by implication) best value for money implied government control, with inspections and measurements against centrally prescribed targets. This imperative sits uneasily with the other three principles: devolution of decision-making from central to local control, flexibility of employment for workers, and increasing the stakeholders involved in delivering services and therefore offering more choice to parents. These three should promote the genuine empowerment of providers and users of services in local communities. The story of Sure Start exemplified the tension between the rhetoric of local empowerment and the realities of central government control.

From the start, the Brown–Blair partnership acknowledged the inter-connectedness of economic and social reforms. Critiques of the old-style public sector monoliths generated arguments for ‘joined-up thinking’ in the fields of health, education, childcare, social services, law enforcement, housing, employment and family support. The government’s aim was to reshape services: to make them more flexible and responsive to local demographics and priorities, more efficient by reducing overlap in diagnoses, treatments and record-keeping, and ultimately more effective. The history of Sure Start Local Programmes (from 1998 to 2004) was intertwined with these broader policy initiatives in the UK.

Two Green Papers, Every Child Matters (DfES, 2003) and Every Child Matters: Change for Children (DfES, 2004) (www.everychildmatters.gov.uk/multiagencyworking) led to the Children Act of 2004. Five broad outcomes were defined for all children from birth to 18: being healthy; being protected from harm and neglect; being enabled to enjoy and achieve; making a positive contribution to society; and contributing to economic well-being. The intention was that services should work together to respond to the needs of the whole child and their family. The Sure Start Unit was set up to co-ordinate all departments responsible for services for young children, including the Departments of Health (DoH), which had responsibility for social services, and Education and Skills (DfES). Later the Unit was absorbed into the DfES. In 2003 the first Minister for Children, Young People and Families was appointed. Regional centres staffed by civil servants were set up, with directors responsible for promoting the infrastructures to enable ‘joined-up working’ to happen. In March 2006 all Local Authorities were charged with employing a director to co-ordinate children’s services. This was in response to highprofile failures to protect young children from neglect and harm, such as the Victoria Climbié case referenced later in the chapter. Children’s Trusts, bodies responsible for joint commissioning of local children’s services and pooled resources across agencies were to be in place by 2008. The infrastructure of Trusts was underpinned by five principles: child-centred, outcome-led vision; integrated front-line delivery of services; integrated processes; joint planning and commissioning strategies; and inter-agency governance. Trusts were required to demonstrate effective leadership at every level, including front-line delivery, performance management driving an outcomes focus (from area inspections to rewards and incentives for individual staff), and strategies to listen to children and young people.

Whilst the roller coaster of reforms across the agencies delivering children’s services swept along, individual agencies were having to respond to policy changes. In Health, a National Service Framework for Children, Young People and Maternity Services (DfES/DoH, 2004) and the White Paper, Choosing Health (DoH, 2004) (www.dh.gov.uk) emphasised the importance of medical workers collaborating with social workers, nursing staff and other agencies to plan and deliver services, including information-sharing, to children within locally defined communities. Health agencies had specific targets: for example, percentage of 4–5-year-olds who were obese and percentage of mothers initiating breast-feeding.

In Education, since April 2004, all 3- and 4-year-olds have been entitled to a free, good-quality, part-time early education place (currently 12.5 hours per week for 38 weeks of the year). Parents can choose to access free places from a range of early education provision in the maintained, voluntary or private sectors. All providers, including childminders, must deliver the Birth to Three Matters curriculum (DfES, 2002) for 0–3-year-olds and Foundation Stage (DfEE/QCA, 2000) for 3–5-year-olds (www.standards.dfes.gov.uk/primary/publications.foundation_stage). From 2008 these two curricula combined into a single, coherent framework, the Early Years Foundation Stage, for the delivery of education and care. Under the duties of the Childcare Act 2006, practitioners were required to complete an Early Years Foundation Stage profile for each child. The profile records a child’s progression in physical, intellectual, emotional and social development against 13 assessment scales. By the time they start compulsory schooling at five, children are expected to score 78 points, with at least six points in the personal/social/emotional and communication/language/literacy scales. Local authorities return data, at individual child level, to the Department for Children, Families and Schools (DCFS). As progression will be traceable to the services/settings the child used, this level of accountability could be taxing for early years settings.

In childcare, a Green Paper, Meeting the Childcare Challenge (DfEE, 1998), set a target for developing 100,000 new childcare places for 2008. A Ten Year Strategy for Childcare (DfES, 2005a) predicted out-of-school childcare places for all 3–14-year-olds from 8a.m. to 6p.m. every weekday by 2010. There is increasing economic pressure on families for both parents to work and targets for local authorities to reduce the percentage of households dependent on workless benefits and to increase the percentage of teenage mothers in education, employment or training. Neighbourhood nursery initiatives, providing day care for under-fives to release parents to return to work, were funded by public/private initiatives (PFIs), often in former SSLP neighbourhoods. The expansion of childcare was linked to an ambitious agenda towards extended schools. Primary and secondary and special schools are expected to serve as a hub for services for families with school-aged children. As well as before- and after-school care, schools are expected to franchise activities such as sport, drama, dance, homework clubs, IT facilities and training, parenting and family support. They co-ordinate referrals for specialist treatments from, for example, speech and language therapists or mental health workers. By 2010, 3,500 Sure Start children’s centres will be established in communities to serve as the hub of a similar range of services for families with pre-school-age children.

Finally, in Social Services the tragic case of Victoria Climbié, who was tortured and murdered in 2000 whilst supposedly being monitored by health, social services and police workers, triggered a government enquiry culminating in the Laming Report (Laming, 2003). Laming was highly critical of local authority departments’ inability to work together, and recommended that there should be a Directorate of Children’s Services in each local authority. The term ‘safeguarding’ replaced ‘child protection’ to emphasise the message that it was the responsibility of all professionals working with children to promote their health and development. A common assessment framework (CAF) is the standardised tool for assessing the needs of children for services (www.everychildmatters.gov.uk/deliveringservices/caf). It can be used on its own or with specialist or universal assessment tools. It consists of a pre-assessment checklist to identify if a child needs a CAF; a protocol for collecting the views of the child, parent/carers and relevant professionals on the strengths and needs of the child; and a pro forma for recording and, where appropriate, sharing information across agencies about the assessments and treatments. A key professional, possibly the child’s teacher or social worker, will manage each case.

The implementation of this raft of radical changes in children’s services was monitored by a complex inspection system. The centrally-imposed systems of accountability implied a distrust of professionals doing their jobs properly. It is another example of the rhetoric of empowerment of practitioners being undermined by the realities of micro-management from central government control. Alongside centrally-imposed government inspections, individual settings were required to operate regular, detailed and time-consuming self-evaluation schemes. Now local authority children’s services have Joint Area Reviews, concurrent with auditing from the Audit Commission. Inspection teams include representation from the Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted), Commission for Social Care Inspection (CSCI), Health Care Commission (HCC) and Adult Learning Inspection (ALI). Local authorities have to demonstrate that they have surveyed the views of 600 representative children and young people using a web-based ‘Tellus’ questionnaire survey. The ponderous industry of accountability is thriving. Professionals have felt disempowered, with their autonomy threatened by its bureaucratic demands.

The government initiated a children’s workforce reform strategy to prepare staff for new ways of working. A Children’s Workforce Development Council (CWDC) (www.cwdcouncil.org.uk) is responsible for upgrading the workforce. Since we know that in 2006 more than half the personnel in care services were not qualified beyond Level 2 (the equivalent of a diploma), this is an uphill task. In contrast, in schools 80 per cent of those working with under-fives were qualified at Level 4 (degree level). Social work training was reformed towards graduate and registered status, with bursaries provided for social work students (www.gscc.org.uk).

But there are still lively debates about how to retain specialisms in training, such as teachers (who remain isolated from the CWDC reforms within the Teacher Development Agency remit) or health visitors, trained within healthcare systems, while ensuring that all early years workers share common core skills and knowledge (DfES, 2005b). A new concept of an Early Years Professional (EYP) developed, a pedagogue of graduate status trained to work across the sectors of care, learning and health. There will be an EYP in all Sure Start children’s centres by 2010, in daycare settings by 2015 and in the long term in every foundation stage setting. The blurring of the distinction between a teacher and an EYP raises the possibility of a distinct (and perhaps lower paid/lower status) category of teachers trained for pre-school settings.

The government also recognised the complexity of managing change within the structural systems of services for young children (Aubrey, 2007). All managers of children’s centres are now required to have a graduate status National Professional Qualification in Integrated Centre Leadership (NPQICL), managed by the National College of School Leadership (www.ncsl.org.uk/programmes/npqicl/index.cfm).

Research

The government claimed that its public service reforms were ‘evidence-based’. It commissioned reviews of research evidence in key policy areas (for example, of the impact of early years provision on young children [Melhuish, 2004] and what works in parenting support [Morgan et al., 2004]. But research findings in the social sciences are often irritatingly contradictory and ambivalent. Policy-makers can cherry-pick reports for evidence to justify their preferred course of action. However, before Sure Start Local Programmes were set up in 1998 a great deal of care was taken to review relevant research in the field and to apply findings to the design of the intervention (Utting, 1999).

The government also commissioned expensive evaluations of initiatives such as Children’s Trusts (www.everychildmatters.gov.uk/childrenstrusts) and indeed the Sure Start intervention (www.ness.bbk.uk). But the problem with large-scale evaluations of government programmes is that they are bedevilled by the complexity of what they are...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures and tables
• List of contributors
• Glossary
• Introduction
• 1 What was Sure Start and why did it matter?
• Part 1 Establishing appropriate sites for service delivery; effective communication and engagement
• Part 2 Intervening in people’s lives: the ethics of social engineering
• Part 3 Children’s and young person’s development: supporting transitions and multi-agency teamwork
• Part 4 Safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children: sharing information
• Index