Providing a Sure Start

How government discovered early childhood

Eisenstadt, Naomi

• Editorial: Policy Press
• Año: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781447306108
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Politique et relations internationales
• Categoría: Politique publique

This book tells the story of Sure Start, one of the flagship programmes of the last government. It tells how Sure Start was set up, the numerous changes it went through, and how it has changed the landscape of services for all young children in England. Offering insight into the key debates on services for young children, as well as how decisions are made in a highly political context, it will be of keen interest to policy academics, senior managers of public services and all those with a keen interest in developing services for young children.

SEVEN

Sure Start grows up

This part of the Sure Start story describes its change from a time-limited initiative to a permanent part of the welfare state, what in law every parent has a right to expect in their local neighbourhood for their young children. This chapter will tell three key stories in the development of Sure Start:

• the impact on Sure Start Local Programmes (SSLPs) of the merger at the Department for Education and Skills (DfES) of Sure Start, Early Years Education and Childcare, and particularly the impact of the 2002 Comprehensive Spending Review (CSR);
• the development of Choice for Parents, the Best Start for Children: A Ten Year Strategy for Childcare, the document produced by the Treasury and DfES that set the framework for early years and childcare services for the foreseeable future; and
• the launch of the Ten Year Strategy and the media uproar following the publication, which heralded the end of Sure Start.

The backdrop of these three strands is the development of the Every Child Matters (ECM) agenda. As the DfES took over responsibility for more and more aspects of policy concerning children, keeping Sure Start separate and special became increasingly untenable. What started out as key delivery aims for children under four – joined-up services designed flexibly to deliver improved outcomes for young children – increasingly became the aims for all children. The framework for all children, the ECM agenda, had to include the youngest and the poorest children. The 2002 and 2004 CSRs were moving Sure Start inexorably from a specialist, ring-fenced cross-departmental initiative to the mainstream of children’s services.

While the Childcare Review in 2002 started this journey, the publication of a major report, Choice for Parents, the Best Start for Children: A Ten Year Strategy for Childcare (HMT, 2004) committed the government to the end destination. The implications for what were SSLPs were greeted with dismay by some and enthusiasm by others. Certainly, the Sure Start experience as an innovative initiative with time-limited funding was drawing to a close. SSLPs, all now Children’s Centres, were to be integrated into a comprehensive service for all children and families. Three streams of work were identified at the end of Chapter Three: early education for all children; childcare for working parents; and integrated services for poor children. The Ten Year Strategy would bring all of these together to form a coherent offer for children before school age.

For some time during this period, Sure Start fell out of favour. Press reports about the loss of local control along with disappointing evaluation results began to tarnish the once-shining brand. Oddly, the two stories argued diametrically opposing positions; loss of local control was mourned as the death of the programme, but the evaluation results pushed for considerably more control from the centre. It seemed to some that by letting a thousand flowers bloom, we had cultivated a number of weeds. Detailed discussion of the evaluation results and government’s response to them will come in Chapter Eight.

The period from 2003 to 2006 also saw several changes of ministers, both at Minister of State and Secretary of State level and in both of the two key departments of Sure Start governance, the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) and the DfES. Charles Clarke, who had taken over as Secretary of State at the DfES from Estelle Morris in the autumn of 2002, left at the end of 2004 to run the Home Office. Clarke was replaced by Ruth Kelly. Baroness Ashton left the DfES a few months before Charles Clarke, in September 2004, to be replaced by Lord Filkin. Andrew Smith had replaced Alistair Darling at the DWP in 2002. There were more changes after the spring election in 2005; Margaret Hodge moved to the Department of Culture, Media and Sport, and was replaced by Beverley Hughes as Minister for Children. David Blunkett replaced Andrew Smith as Secretary of State at the DWP. Ruth Kelly left the DfES in 2006, and was replaced by Alan Johnson. Each one of these ministers was different not only in style, but also very often in substance. Finally, as described in Chapter Six, it was a very turbulent time for children’s services more generally, with the huge structural changes heralded by the ECM agenda beginning to take hold.

Another spending review, another Public Service Agreement

The 2002 CSR revised again the main aim of Sure Start and its Public Service Agreement (PSA) targets. The main aim is reproduced as follows, with the change in the aim from the 2000 CSR in italics:

Increase the availability of childcare for all children, and work with parents to be, parents and children to promote the physical, intellectual and social development of babies and young children – particularly those who are disadvantaged – so that they can flourish at home and at school, enabling their parents to work and contributing to the ending of child poverty. (HMT, 2002, p 43)

There were two critical changes in the aim: the ambition to increase childcare for children of all ages and the explicit reference to the goal of ending child poverty. The previous aims statements from 1998 and 2000 were about ameliorating the effects of poverty on low-income children in the current generation so as to break the cycle of intergenerational poverty. We were now in the territory of not only ensuring that the current generation of children are not poor as adults, but attempting to reduce current levels of child poverty through reducing the number of children living in workless households. There is no doubt that this was a huge issue in Sure Start areas. On average, nearly half of children under four in Sure Start areas were living in workless households (Barnes, 2007, p 31). The 2002 CSR brought together two key policy goals for the Labour government that had been evident since 1998: reducing child poverty and improving longer-term outcomes for disadvantaged children. The specific PSA targets linked to the aims were broadly similar to those of 2000.

Measuring the PSA targets was an ongoing problem. Success in meeting the targets that could be measured continued to be very slow, and the reliability of the data for others was very poor. We simply did not have the infrastructure to collect reliable information on eminently desirable outcomes like smoking in pregnancy in the Sure Start programme catchment areas. The agreement that some of the SSLP services like childcare would now be available for families outside the specific catchment areas made data collection and analysis even more difficult. Clearly, we wanted to encourage women not to smoke whether they lived in the catchment area or not. But would an individual who gave up smoking but lived in another area count towards the target? In retrospect, these may seem like silly arguments, but these were new processes that we really wanted to make work. Funding for outcomes rather than inputs was a key principle of Sure Start from the very beginning. We did not anticipate how fiendishly complicated it would be.

Furthermore, as was mentioned in Chapter Three, the overlap of CSR periods meant that, at any one time, SSLPs were trying to address two different sets of PSA targets while their main efforts were in getting programmes established. The targets were meant for fully operational programmes, and it was taking around three years for programmes to be fully operational (Meadows, 2007, p 121). Our original aim was for 250 programmes to be established by 2002 and then 500 programmes to be established by 2004. By June 2000, only 59 programmes had approved plans, which meant they could recruit staff and receive revenue (Melhuish and Hall, 2007, p 14). In the 2002 CSR, we were changing the fundamental nature of what an SSLP was meant to be when fewer than half of the 500 programmes were approved, let alone close to being fully operational.

The basic idea of a Sure Start programme continued to be a locally based centre with facilities for health, early education and play, parenting advice and support, and childcare. But, in addition, there would also be information, advice and encouragement towards employment. The Sure Start strapline on all the information and literature became:

Sure Start aims to achieve better outcomes for children, parents and communities by:

• Increasing the availability of childcare for all children
• Improving the health education and emotional development for young children
• Supporting parents as parents and in their aspirations towards employment. (DfES, 2002, p 7)

Estelle Morris resigned as Secretary of State at the DfES in the autumn of 2002. She was replaced by Charles Clarke. In preparing a brief on early years and childcare for the new Secretary of State, we established a new narrative: what government was offering all children – nursery education and childcare; and what government was offering poor children – SSLPs/Children’s Centres. At this stage, Sure Start still meant integrated services targeted in areas of deprivation, but now with the joint aim of reducing child poverty and improving the life course trajectories of poor children. The Sure Start Children’s Centres described in the 2002 Childcare Review replaced the SSLPs, and were the main service strategy for addressing poverty in families with young children. Eventually, the Sure Start Children’s Centre offer became an offer for all children and families, but that was yet to come. At that time, the challenge was making the childcare offer work for the wider age range of children, up to 13 instead of up to four, while greatly expanding the number of Children’s Centres and increasing what they offered.

Childcare for all: under-fives

The inclusion of childcare for all children in the Sure Start aim reflected the integration of the Sure Start Unit with the Early Years and Childcare Unit at the DfES described in Chapter Six. At this point, we were well on the way to fulfilling the commitment of free early education for all three- and four-year-olds. Encouraging much closer working between the Neighbourhood Nursery Initiative (NNI) and Sure Start was eminently sensible. NNI was set up to ensure that there was an adequate provision of childcare in poor areas for working parents. Given the difficulty of establishing childcare businesses, the NNI would provide a revenue stream that would reduce over three years while numbers built up in new nurseries. It made sense to use some of the capital funding for what were SSLPs for childcare provision. Putting both benefits advice and employment services in Sure Start Centres also made sense. Indeed, many SSLPs had already included benefits advice and some even had credit unions on the premises. The fundamental idea was that parents who came to a centre for any number of reasons, including just social support with other mothers and fathers, would, through engagement, be encouraged to consider taking up paid employment, or the kind of training that could lead to employment. The key was for the parents who were most likely to be on benefits to see the childcare on the premises and be reassured that care was available should they find employment. The benefits advice would reassure them that they would actually be better off working some number of hours per week, even with childcare costs, than if they remained unemployed. Indeed, in many of the centres the childcare was heavily subsidised.

However, for some centres the childcare offer proved difficult for a number of reasons. Some of the earliest programmes simply had not made any provision for childcare in their capital development. Many later programmes did their capital development linked to primary schools, which already offered free nursery education. The pattern in many of these centres was to have the children in the school for their free 2.5 hours a day, and then move them to the Children’s Centre for their wrap-around childcare, paid for by parents. Bizarrely, this sometimes meant childcare on one side of a corridor in a school building and nursery education on the other side, with different staffing and sometimes different management arrangements. Sometimes this resulted in greatly improved joint working between the school and the Children’s Centre, but at other times it continued to be fragmented. So much of what has been learned about the difficulties of joined-up services was evident in the variety of arrangements made for integration of the early education offer, basically through schools, and the childcare offer, usually through the private or voluntary sector. It was mainly in the Early Excellence Centres that real integration between care and education was happening. Real integration meant the high quality associated with teacher-led early learning in a childcare setting offering flexible hours for working parents. After all, the child’s needs do not change depending on who is managing or working in the provision. However, if it proved too difficult to offer this kind of ideal integration, many parents wanted to ensure that their child got some experience of settings with highly trained teachers for part of the day, even if it meant moving to what was likely to be a lower-quality setting for the other part of the day. The key was ensuring at least 2.5 hours a day of early education. These very difficult issues were to emerge again in the key debates in developing the Ten Year Strategy described later in this chapter.

Key barriers to integration included a schools culture that was often inflexible about offering different patterns of attendance suitable for working parents, and a schools culture that was reluctant to charge fees for additional hours beyond the free entitlement of 12.5 hours per week delivered over five days per week. Some teachers saw childcare as little more than babysitting. Given that early years education was, and still is, the lowest status area of the education world, combining it with childcare only reinforced the notion that this was basic work that anyone could do. Nursery teachers were particularly reluctant to do anything that blurred the distinction between childcare and education as it would weaken the already low status of teaching very young children.

Moreover, the overarching aim of increasing employment was also problematic. There was little point in encouraging the provision of new childcare places if local parents were not encouraged to seek paid work. While some programmes embraced this agenda, many others were deeply resistant. There continued to be a view that women with small children should not work. Evidence on whether childcare was good or damaging for children continued to be accumulated by the warring camps. Jane Waldfogel reviewed all the evidence in detail and concluded:

Two findings particularly stand out. One, children whose mothers work in the first year of life, particularly if they work full time, do tend to have lower cognitive test scores at age three and thereafter.… Two, we have learned something about how these effects come about. Some of the adverse effects of early maternal employment on later cognitive outcomes are due to children receiving poorer-quality child care or less sensitive care at home. But if maternal employment raises family incomes, there are positive effects on children’s cognitive development. (Waldfogel, 2006, p 55)

So the evidence supported the view that there were some risks in childcare for children under one year old, but that poverty reduction was good for children. Despite this, some Sure Start staff remained uncomfortable with the employment agenda:

While some Sure Start local programmes see encouraging parents to find paid work as a central part of their objective of improving the well-being of children and families, others perceive a tension between encouraging parents to go out to work and supporting the belief of many parents that part of being a good parent is to be at home with children when they are young. (Meadows and Garbers, 2004, p 3)

Recalling my own experience of working at the front line, I have a personal view on the resistance of many staff to the employment agenda. Many of the staff working in SSLPs positively enjoyed the work with adults: running groups, setting up drop-in sessions, engaging parents in a wide range of community activities and so on. Working parents would not be available to attend the baby massage session on Tuesday afternoon, or the cooking class on Wednesday morning. In many discussions with the people who worked directly with parents, they expressed concern that the (mainly) women who came to the centres did not want jobs. I think, to some extent, those working with such women were content to build their self-esteem, raise their confidence and continue to enjoy what often were very warm relationships until the children were of school age. The more women went to work, the fewer would be available to attend the groups and sessions run in the Children’s Centres. As reported in earlier chapters, ministers themselves had different views on the importance of childcare and encouraging employment in Sure Start Centres. Yvette Cooper commented in the interview for this book:

“I remember getting frustrated when Sure Start Centres were set up and didn’t have childcare in … for some of the early programmes it felt like a massive missed opportunity and that parents would be more likely to use the childcare if it was also in a centre they were used to going to for drop-ins and other informal services.”

As already mentioned in Chapter Four, both David Blunkett and Tessa Jowell were uncomfortable about childcare, Jowell because her focus was on babies and mothers, and Blunkett because his key focus was precisely the kind of community engagement that staff in the centres thought they should be doing. Margaret Hodge had as her main concern the quality of the early education experience for the child. As a champion of Early Excellence Centres, she worked hard to get this aligned with a childcare agenda, but her heart was in education. As we will see later in the chapter, Beverley Hughes was principally concerned with the quality of parent support and the quality of experience for the child. While she supported the childcare agenda, she was concerned that if staff were going to spend time on running groups for parents, they should be using structured programmes that had some evidence of effectiveness. Even from the very centre of government, there were differences of view. The Chancellor was strongly committed to childcare as a welfare-to-work strategy, and the Prime Minister had some concerns about childcare for very young children. Indeed, he was considering so...

Índice

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• List of abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• one: How it all started
• two: Setting the scene for change
• three: A star is born
• four: What happened next?
• five: How will we know it works?
• six: Stroppy adolescence
• seven: Sure Start grows up
• eight: Did it work?
• nine: What have we learned and what have we achieved?
• Appendix: Key events and dates
• References