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A Conservative blogger's visit to a Sure Start Centre - Part I: Before
Posted by Steve Conyers (@oxfordspring)
Tuesday, 2nd February 2010
This Thursday Oxford Spring, a Conservative blogger, is visting a Sure Start centre with his local Labour councillor. A critic of the Sure Start program, he will here explain, before the visit, his expectations and explain his current views.
Sure Start isn’t working.
When we are dealing with the futures of thousands of children, there is no room for sentimentality, no space private considerations, and no throwing good money after bad. Determination just isn’t enough anymore.
But Sure Start is essential. Its ultimate goal is to give children a greater opportunity to do well in school and later in life. In order to achieve this simple yet powerful aim, the programme is designed to provide a stable and trouble-free surrounding for the child and family in the earliest stages of its life, tackling those problems which often lead to a child being held back. The child and its immediate family should and must be central.
By giving that impetus and support to a child at a very young age, you save them. The child who starts school at the bottom of the class tends to stay there. By tackling these problems right at the start, you give the child and their family the hope and the opportunity to do anything and everything they want.
Which is why Sure Start needs radical changes.
In Britain today, youth unemployment is at a record high. Unemployment for 16-24 year olds has reached 19.8%, the highest rate since records began in 1992. A damming report from UNICEF in 2007 listed the UK as bottom among rich nations for child well-being. Children of lone parent families are currently 75% more likely to fail at school. The UK has one of the worst rates of child poverty in the industrialised world, and this government are set to miss its target to eliminate it by 2020. Child poverty is rising. Without substantial changes, a 2009 report 2.3 million children will be living in poverty in 2010 - more than half a million above the government’s target. That is 500,000 children. Inequality is at a record high according to the Gini coefficient index as used by the ONS. A boy in Manchester can expect to live seven years less than a boy in Barnet. A girl in Manchester can expect to live six years less than a girl in Kensington Chelsea and Westminster. These aren’t figures from 1997 – these are figures from now.
We cannot give up on Sure Start. The Conservative Party have made their position very clear: “The Conservative Party is committed to keeping Sure Start”.
Much good has been done – the 2008 national evaluation’s primary findings were positive – Sure Start is doing some very good work which may be seen here, and when I visit a centre I expect to find some brilliant and dedicated staff.
But overall, the plan fails because it does not fulfil its primary purpose. The programme which costs £3.1 billion failed to find any positive effects for children and families in more than five of the 14 areas examined in the same 2008 study. Ed Ball’s response at the time was to include two more outreach workers at each centre. Did that help? The National Audit Office has said no: Sure Start is still struggling to reach disadvantaged families, those who need it most.
Two of the most shocking facts for me came in the 2008 Ofsted report into children’s centres and extended schools. The first problem is this: the government does not check or record on how well the children and families do after they have reached school age. Excuse me? You do not “measure systematically the impact of their services”? This is only one of the many bureaucratic difficulties those who work in Sure Start centres face – multiple funding sources, little feedback, and no provision for long-term planning.
The second and more worrying problem is this: “Settings did not do enough to reach out to particularly vulnerable individuals or families, or those living beyond the immediate neighbourhoods”. Middle class parents have the internet, they are motivated, they have no problem finding the centres. It is those parents who don’t know what to do or where to turn who need our help. As David Cameron said in his speech a few weeks ago “The people who need it most – disadvantaged and dysfunctional families – are not getting enough of the benefit.”
To put is as Eleanor Mills did, “At my local Sure Start they banned nannies (a sure sign on middle-class colonisation) and their free crèche and yoga sessions became yummy mummy zones.”
The essence of Sure Start is to do the heavy lifting for families in most need. And it is not doing that because it is not aiming services at the most in need.
So this is why David Cameron has pledged a new generation of Sure Start centres: ones which do what the programme was intended to do in the first place and focus on the neediest, the ones most lacking in opportunity. This is along with 4,200 more Sure Start health visitors to support the child in its very first years. Funding needs to be unified to allow the long term planning children need.
I am sure that when I visit a centre this week, I will find much positive anecdotal evidence and will see much of the hard work that goes on by dedicated staff. But these are people who have been let down by the centralised Labour government, who have once again thrown money at a problem hoping it will fix itself. They have been determined and I do not deny that their heart is in the right place. But it hasn’t worked. And we now need a Conservative government to do a proper job.
