Outreach work is key to Sure Start

18 January 2010 1 min read Ravi Chandiramani Early Years Health Editorial

It is becoming pretty clear that Sure Start will be a key election issue. For months, Labour has claimed that a Conservative government would decimate the service it has created, an accusation consistently denied by the Tories.

And so David Cameron last week set out plans on how his party would aim to improve Sure Start. Given Cameron has identified very few services as fundamental to Tory reforms, his intervention helped to underline the continued importance of Sure Start. The thrust of his argument was that it needed to demonstrate better value for money and focus much harder on its original purpose of reaching society's most vulnerable families.

There has been no shortage of sceptics about the value for money Sure Start brings. They range from the Taxpayers' Alliance's loopy and barely substantiated call for it to be axed last autumn, to the National Audit Office's recent assertion that there is "still scope for improving cost-effectiveness" in its submission to the select committee inquiry.

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