Call for children's centres to focus on early intervention
Laura McCardle
Tuesday, February 25, 2014
The core purpose for children's centres should be remodeled to focus on early intervention for families with children under five, a new report recommends.
The report by children’s charity Barnardo’s examines the role of children’s centres and calls for them to be recognised as an "early help service".
The report also recommends that children’s centres should be refocused on providing services for families with children under five, supporting them from conception until a child starts school.
It was written in response to a report from the education select committee, published in December, which called for greater clarity about the role of children’s centres.
Jonathan Rallings, assistant director of policy and research at Barnardo’s and author of the report, agreed with the parliamentary committee’s conclusion that children’s centres are too diverse and need refocusing.
He said: “The ethos at the moment is a little bit unclear – are they doing stuff for the children, for the parents or for the whole family?
“We know that there is cross-party support for the concept of early intervention and I think what’s really crucial is that between the health visitor leaving and the child starting school we haven’t had a universal reach for children.
“I think if there was political leadership and you made it [a focus on early intervention] very clear, this could be very feasible and very easy to implement.”
Anne Longfield, chief executive of 4Children, welcomed the call for a greater focus on early intervention within children’s centres but said shaping the entire service around that would be limiting.
She said: “We absolutely endorse the fact that children’s centres need to be at the heart of early intervention strategy but we think we’ll be missing a trick if we leave them just to be about early intervention – in the areas where we think it’s working best, children’s centres are also tackling crisis.
“Thirty-eight per cent of children’s centres now work with children beyond five and we’ve always agreed that is a very positive thing.
“We’re concerned that there are too many short-term pieces of early intervention in families’ lives and we think it would be limiting the potential of centres if they stopped at five.”
