James Hempsall, director of Hempsall Consultancies, which carries out training and research in the childcare and early years sector, said the government needs to continue to spend money on Sure Start before it can make a full evaluation of the strategy.
"Our politicians will need to be patient and fiscally generous for another 15 years, which should give them time to decide the best indicators upon which to measure the strategy and inform a realistic view of their expectations before they can criticise or applaud the strategy," he said.
Hempsall has recently completed an academic dissertation looking at the impact of Sure Start local programmes becoming children's centres, under the Children Act 2004. He said a similar programme in the US, Head Start, took "up to a generation" to completely evaluate. "Sometimes the impact we have on a child in their early years could be the impact on their own parenting," Hempsall said.
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