The headline conclusion of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research report into the £448m flagship government initiative was that the 120,000 families that had participated in the first phase had derived little or no benefit. In other words, it was a colossal waste of public money (see Analysis). Unsurprisingly, ministers and civil servants have jumped to its defence, claiming the research findings do not give a fair assessment of the programme's merits. They may have a point - local government and children's services leaders certainly think so.
Association of Directors of Children's Services president Dave Hill says the programme has helped galvanise services delivered by a host of agencies to work together to tackle entrenched social problems. Meanwhile, the Local Government Association highlights the role of key workers in co-ordinating this work, in addition to how the scheme has transformed how local services use data to understand need and improve interventions. The research, however, does not dispute that good work is going on under the aegis of the programme; rather, that it cannot be proved it was responsible for sustainable change in families' lives. The fact councils received payments for achieving targets with 116,000 families prompted the government to proclaim they had been "turned around". The research shows it was a claim too far, conflating inputs with outcomes.
The lesson, as Hill suggests, is that measuring success through "crude" payment-by-results systems is not how work under the programme should have been judged. Encouragingly, there appears to be relative consensus on the way ahead. Hill calls for a more "sophisticated and nuanced" system to assess the benefits to the 400,000 families being worked with under the second phase of the programme. This is consistent with former Troubled Families chief Dame Louise Casey's assessment that the "turned around" phrase should be dropped.
If ministers heed their advice, it will help give a more accurate, less politicised, assessment of the valuable work being carried out with vulnerable families.
Ministers must act to avert childcare recruitment crisis
Early years organisations, nursery providers and training bodies have for some time warned the government that the introduction last month of new GCSE requirements for entry to Early Years Educator Level 3 courses would create a recruitment crisis in childcare.
So far, the government has not listened. The results of the National Day Nurseries Association annual workforce survey should be a wake-up call for ministers (see Analysis). It shows staff qualifications falling and turnover rising, but, more significantly, 86 per cent of early years leaders say the recruitment problems will affect their ability to offer 30 hours of free childcare when the expanded entitlement comes in next September.
The entire sector wants a highly-skilled workforce, but the GCSE requirement is not the way to achieve it. With the national childcare workforce strategy pending, it must be scrapped if a full-blown recruitment crisis and failure of the 30-hour policy is to be avoided.
