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Battle lines drawn over the best start for children

21 Mar 2010

At a recent opening of the 3,500^th Sure Start centre, the prime minister claimed the Conservatives would cut funding by £200m, which could force one in five Sure Start centres to close. However, the Conservatives were swift to respond with a volley of rebuttals and claims that the prime minister was attempting to spread fear and anxiety. However, suspicion grows that there may be some truth in what the prime minister claimed, with the fact being that the Conservatives have not promised to protect Sure Start, which is projected to cost the taxpayer £1.4bn next year, from budget cuts required to slash the deficit.

What this debate about money highlights is a difference in philosophies. It’s now an article of faith for the political leadership of Britain that children’s educational attainment, and therefore their power to earn, is determined long before they get to school. David Cameron has been on record, echoing the importance of the early stages of a child’s life, saying how “the key level of disadvantage kicks in in a child’s life between the ages of nought and three”. But Gordon Brown has attacked the Conservatives claiming they seek to pull up the ladders of opportunity, while Labour, in vowing to defend Sure Start, would ensure that “a child from a low-income background will, over the next few years, have twice as big a chance to get a middle-income job as they would otherwise have had”.

The Conservatives want to refocus Sure Start to serve deprived areas and to contract out their services to the third sector and co-operatives which, they say, would help many of the poorer recipients of government services to regain a sense of power over their lives. In a sense this takes Sure Start back to its original version which was a child-centred programme. What is largely left unsaid is that Sure Start has two purposes: first, to ensure that no child is left behind and, second, to provide nursery places.

There’s a widespread belief that the social mobility argument has lost out to the childcare agenda. Centres have been introduced to provide as many childcare places as possible to support maternal employment rather than to bolster a child’s chance of success.

So Sure Start has ended up with much wider ambitions, way beyond the educational intent – and the number of centres growing hugely. It was, according to Norman Glass (the late Treasury mandarin who was the driving force behind Sure Start) “a very British compromise – Scandinavian ambitions and British funding levels”. This is part of the British disease – first identified by the British academic and educationalist Professor Jack Tizard, of the University of London, facing an earlier era of austerity in the 1970s – that “a service for the poor is a poor service”.

The topic has definitely divided opinion across the board; but some people, such as, Katherine Rake, Chief Executive of Family and Parenting Institute, are utterly convinced of Sure Start’s value and vital importance. Rake recently said that: "Sure Start’s role was developed to intervene early so that poorer children did not start school with a disadvantage. But this is complex, and these latest reports show there is still a long way to go…Everyone now recognises that Sure Start is key to turning around the long-term cycle of disadvantage and that focusing on early years is incredibly important. We have to hope that with rounds of public-spending cuts coming, this is given priority and not seen as an easy target."

This fierce debate looks set to continue right through to the upcoming election.

(Story extracted from an article originally written for The Observer by Randeep Ramesh, Social Affairs Editor - the original article can be read on The Guardian website)

Tags: Talk To Your Baby