Recalling the impact and value of Sure Start should be seen as a resource
Ray Jones
Friday, January 26, 2024
Halfway through reading ‘Risks of returning to Sure Start’ by Rob Wilson (CYP Now January 2024), the deputy chair of the Social Mobility Commission, I genuinely started to wonder if it was not written by a Conservative supporter/commentator who would have been complicit in the decimation of Sure Start since the advent of Conservative governments in 2010.
Blow me – at the end of the article it was noted that the author was a Conservative MP from 2005-2017 and a minister within the governments of Mr Cameron and Mrs May.
A little online searching identified that he had consistently voted in support of reducing the value of welfare payments and funding for local government policies which have seen child poverty increase, more families in difficulty, and help for families denuded.
So what about Mr Wilson’s statement that “if a future government decided to return to Sure Start as the blueprint for family and parenting programmes, it would be taking a risk”?
Despite the spin placed by Mr Wilson on the recent Social Mobility Commission’s report, the report itself noted that “this is not a large, systematic review, and it is limited by the small scale of the project. We had to take practical decisions to limit the numbers of programmes we investigated, and the numbers of key papers we read in depth” and “also, the review did not explore each of the many impacts of Sure Start in depth but only collected a high-level account of the evidence available”.
Even so, this is what was stated in the Social Mobility Commission’s report: “In the longer term, there have been several significant positive outcomes associated with Sure Start. In the case of children, there is good evidence for a reduction in children’s hospitalisations due to injury and infections, increased uptake of free childcare, and improvements in the communication of health information and children’s speech and language skills. There is also good evidence that Sure Start had a positive impact on parents. This includes benefits relating to family life; namely, parental empowerment, reducing social isolation, and improved parenting skills.”
Sure Start was itself a national programme that was informed by, and learned and adapted and improved further, based on the research and evaluations which were undertaken.
It may seem that remembering the lessons and success of Sure Start might only be a risk for those who were involved in its decay and decimation since 2010. For others, recalling the impact and value of Sure Start should be seen as a resource rather than a risk in regaining so much of the ground lost for children and families during in the past 14 years.
Ray Jones is emeritus professor of social work at Kingston University.
