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Background
For more information visit www.surestart.gov.uk
For the Early Childhood Development Centre visit www.ecdc.org.uk
Examples of schemes used in Sure Start practice
Examples of local Sure Start practice:
Sure Start is the cornerstone of the Government's drive to
tackle child poverty and social exclusion in England. Responsibility for early education and childcare in Scotland, Wales and Northern
Ireland rests with the separate devolved administrations. Sure Start is run
through local programmes in the most deprived regions of England: it aims to achieve better outcomes for children,
parents and communities by increasing the availability of
childcare for all children; improving children's health, education
and emotional development; and supporting parents in their
role and in developing employment aspirations. The Sure Start
budget rose to over £1.5 billion by 2005-06.
Sure Start is based on the multibillion dollar US Government programme Head Start. This was launched in 1965 after a panel of child development experts drew up a programme to help communities meet the needs of disadvantaged pre-school children and prepare them for school. Beneficiaries of Head Start do better than their peers in terms of high school graduation marks and reduced arrest rates.
Launched in 1998, the Sure Start Unit was an integral part
of the Children, Young People and Families Directorate in
the Department for Education and Skills (DfES). It is now part of the Early Years Extended Schools and Special Needs Group of the
Children and Families Directorate of the Department for Children, Schools and
Families (DCSF). The group works
with local authorities, Primary Care Trusts, Jobcentre Plus,
local communities and voluntary and private sector organisations.
There are around 520 local programmes aimed
at families with children under 4, and they cover about 800 children
in each area. Facilities being provided include
drop-in centres, childcare and mobile health clinics. Each
programme is managed by a partnership of statutory agencies
(including health and education professionals), childcare
professionals and voluntary and community groups, as well
as parents, who work together to develop an integrated approach
to services for families. This partnership, which is different
in each programme, seems to be the unique factor in Sure Start's
successes.
There will be a network of up to 2,500 Sure Start children’s centres by 2008, and all the young children and their families in the most disadvantaged areas will have access to one. By 2010 there will be 3,500.
One of the ways in which Sure Start centres work is by providing
children with high quality play and learning experiences.
Children's early language development is a key determinant
of Sure Start's success, and the Government's initial target
was to cut by 5% the number of four-year-olds needing specialist
help with speech and language by 2004.
The National Evaluation of
Sure Start (NESS) investigates the effectiveness
of the programmes. Staff at each Sure Start programme are
also receiving Step Into Learning training to identify parents
and carers with basic skills needs and point them to learning
opportunities.
Timeline:
In January 1999 the first 60 'trailblazer' projects were launched by David Blunkett, the then Secretary of State for Education and Employment, and Tessa Jowell, then Secretary of State for Health. March 2000 saw the beginning of targeted home visits by 60 Sure Start teams. All parents of under-fours in selected catchment areas were offered a Sure Start visit. The aim was to help these families - many of them lone parents - head off potential child-rearing problems.
Following Gordon Brown's Comprehensive Spending Review 2002, Sure Start merged with the Early Years and Childcare Unit to form a new, cross-departmental unit. Baroness Ashton lead the unit as Minister for Sure Start, Early Years and Childcare, working from both the Department for Education and Skills and the Department for Work and Pensions. The merger bought together Sure Start and the government's childcare strategy, in order to help make the work done on 'mainstreaming' Sure Start more effective. A second wave of 69 projects began to develop their programmes in November 1999.
By 2004, the total of Sure Start programmes was up to 260 and the Sure Start Unit was given responsibility for the Government's extended schools programme. This is in addition to it's existing responsibility for children's centres and out of school care as well as provision for pre-school children. The 10-year strategy for childcare, published in December 2004, pledged that by 2010 there will be a Sure Start children's centre in every community. Children's centres were expected to be developed from existing Sure Start local programmes, early excellence centres and mini Sure Start local programmes in many areas. See also: Towards understanding Sure Start local programmes (Institute for the Study of Children, Families and Social Issues), available at www.surestart.gov.uk.
From 2005 Sure Start will have two main targets: to improve children's social, emotional and communication skills and to increase the availability and take-up of childcare. In 2005, the Sure Start unit agreed to fund the distribution of nine million books over three years in an extension of the Bookstart scheme. Most of the 534 Sure Start programmes began to become part of local authority-run children's trusts in 2006.
The Tandem project was an 18-month early-intervention educational programme. It was part of the Surestart initiative in partnership with Swansea City and county council, targeting three-year-olds. In the scheme, parents of pre-schoolers were given a series of games to play with their children over a six-week period. The games were designed to develop those basic capabilities which are thought to be crucial to the early development of literacy and numeracy skills.
The initiative had several key features: it strived to show parents that children can learn through play and aimed to increase the amount of one-to-one interaction between parent and child. The reading games included listening carefully to and repeating words, learning nursery rhymes, recognising and discriminating shapes and letters, and listening to stories. Parents' enthusiasm and motivation was developed by the maintenance of close links between project workers and families for the duration of the project. It also aimed to foster positive attitudes towards education so that both parents and children felt empowered to seek help on educational issues in future years.
When the children's skills before the project were compared with their skills after six weeks, there was a dramatic improvement which could not be put down to a simple progression as a result of maturation. Children who did not play these games made little progress in pre-literacy and numeracy skills over the same period.
(Independent, 10 January 2002)
from Sure Start:
A guide to evidence-based practice
This scheme was designed to promote language development,
concentration, social skills and independent activity, and
also to strengthen family life and prevent breakdown. It is
a joint social services, education and health programme which
began in East Sussex and Brighton.
It involves weekly visits (by purpose-trained visitors, including
experienced parents) to homes, where families discuss and
are introduced to a range of toys, books, art, simple cooking,
messy play etc. There are regular group sessions in a community
building, and also outings, for parents and children to meet
each other and share activities. "Moving on" sessions are
also provided to prepare the families for nursery.
Research found that, when compared with a control group,
16 Playlink children showed significantly greater concentration
during table play and had fewer speech and language problems
on starting at nursery. They also showed greater ability,
skill and self-confidence in talking to other children and
to adults. (1)
The
Child Development Programme
This programme aims to support and encourage mothers of new-born
babies, and to enhance the role of fathers/partners, by building
on their existing strengths and giving them a sense of control
over their lives and their children's upbringing. Parents
receive home visits which are more intensive than those from
traditional health visitors, exploring issues such as health,
development and maternal well-being, and are helped to set
themselves tasks which they can carry out with their children
between visits. Visitors may be specially-trained health visitors,
or experienced mothers from the community who are given training,
support and modest payment. User-friendly materials, including
some in cartoon format, give parents information on topics
including language and cognitive development. Parents are
encouraged to meet other parents for support and to promote
community involvement.
A study of children on the Programme, compared with those
who received conventional postnatal care, found that the children's
health, ability to concentrate and social behaviour were better,
and that they were more likely to have story books at home.
(2, 3) A study in the Irish Republic found that children who
received visits from community mothers were more likely to
be read to every day than those under conventional care, while
their mothers were less likely to feel tired and miserable.
(4)
Communicating
Matters: the development of language and communication during
the Foundation stage
This project is a joint venture between Sure Start, the National
Primary Strategy and the DfES SEN division, in recognition
of the need to improve the language and communication skills
of young children aged from three to five. The aim of the
project is to improve practice and practitioners' knowledge
in early years settings through developing high quality training
materials for practitioners, and to raise awareness among
all those who care for and work with young children. The project
team is based at the Institute of Education, Manchester Metropolitan
University, and is led by Professor Nigel Hall. More
on Communicating Matters from Talk To Your Baby
(1) Daines, R. C.; Turner, A.; Taylor, P.; Clench, J.; Gould,
D.; Fry, K.; Granger, N. and Ring, H.: (1989) Pre-School
Project. Evaluation of the nursery intake, East Sussex
County Council / Brighton Polytechnic.
(2) Barker, W. (1994a) Child Protection: the impact of
the Child Development Programme, Bristol: Early Childhood
Development Centre.
(3) Barker, W. (1994b) Empowering Parents: The Child Development
Programme, Bristol: Early Childhood Development Centre.
(4) Johnson, Z; Howell, F. and Molloy, B. (1993) 'Community
mothers' programme: randomised controlled trial of non-professional
intervention in parenting', British Medical Journal
306, pp. 1449-1452. | |
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