Conservative conference: Children's centres fail to deliver, says Sure Start group chair

Andrea Leadsom MP, who recently published a cross-party manifesto highlighting the importance of the first few years in a child's life, launched an attack on the family community hubs during a Conservative Party conference event hosted by Action for Children and think-tank Policy Exchange.

“Children’s centres are absolutely not, other than by exception, delivering what I think is a holistic support for family resilience. I think they are rubbish at it,” she said.

“At the moment children’s centres are a complete waste of money. I absolutely love them because they are the right delivery structure, but they are not doing the right things.”

Leadsom said she wanted to see children’s centres provide greater support for maternal mental health among a raft of other services, including birth registration and support for troubled families.

She called for all children’s centres to deliver universal provision without regard to where they were located.

Department for Education research published in July showed children’s centres were increasingly targeting services towards disadvantaged families as a result of local authority budget cuts.

But Leadsom rejected this claim and said the government had provided an “enormous budget” for children’s centres.

“It’s a nonsense this talk about the budget and how much it’s been cut,” said Leadsom. “The early intervention grant was not about early intervention in children’s centres. It always included old ladies slipping on the snow outside their homes.

“We’ve got an enormous budget for children’s centres. What we don’t have is either direction or proper quality control,” she continued.

“They’ve got to be universal even if they’re located in the most deprived areas. That doesn’t matter – what matters is what they deliver.”

Local authorities use early intervention funding to support children’s centres. The government top sliced £150m from this budget last year to fund a local authority adoption reform grant and announced a further cut of £49m over the next two years in January.

Naomi Eisenstadt, director of the Sure Start programme between 1999 and 2006, disagreed that the centres should operate universally in all areas.

“We should concentrate the centres in the poorest areas, but make sure in the non-poor areas that schools and health centres pick up the slack,” she said.

Eisenstadt said she and other founders of the Sure Start programme had made a mistake to design it to offer multiple services. She also regretted they had not placed more emphasis on language development.

“We really have missed a trick, and I say that as someone who started the programme,” she said. “One of the things we got wrong is that we tried to get children’s centres to do too many things.

“We would really shift the curve on social mobility if we had more focus on language development,” Eisenstadt continued.

“The difficulty is most of our parenting programmes start at two or three years, and language development is zero to two years.”

Policy Exchange’s head of education, Jonathan Simons, also rejected Leadsom’s suggestion. “There isn’t the money to have the high-quality universal system that people like Andrea are asking for,” he said.

In August, Policy Exchange published a report on the role of children’s centres in early intervention. It argued local authorities should focus their resources on more disadvantaged children by targeting children’s centres in deprived areas.