Child Poverty Special Report: Sure start - has it reduced poverty?

Last winter, Tracy Julian had to go without a warm coat so she could afford to feed herself and her two children. Julian, a full-time carer for her disabled nine-year-old son Sasha, is living below the poverty line. She receives £200 to £230 a week, including disability living allowance, income support, carer's allowance and child benefit. This is almost all obliterated by bills of around £140 a week, excluding shopping. Steep rises in fuel and food prices have hit the family hard. "Food gets cut back so I can stay afloat with the bills," she says. The family, who live in London, sometimes have to stop buying fruit to save money and the children wait weeks while she saves up the cash for uniforms, clothes or shoes.

There are 2.9 million children in the UK who, like Julian's, live below the poverty line, defined as 60 per cent of national median income before housing costs. Children's charity Barnardo's says many of these families are getting by on less than £10 per person per day, when to be above the poverty line one parent with two children needs £271 plus housing costs each week. One third of children go without certain essentials such as three meals a day or proper clothing.

The Labour government pledged to end their plight, promising in 1999 to end child poverty within a generation. The first milestone of halving child poverty from 3.4m children to 1.7m by 2010 is now looming but the number of children below the poverty line has risen recently after years of reduction.

In 1999, the government also launched the Sure Start programme to improve the health and development of children in deprived areas. Nearly a decade later, it is still going, albeit with modifications. Where it was once provided only in the 20 per cent most deprived areas, it is now part of the children's centres programme, which will see one centre in every community by 2010. Sure Start was not about raising family incomes, although some centres do this work, but it does help to alleviate the effects of deprivation on children's lives.

So, 10 years on, what effect is Sure Start having on child poverty? In Halton, the borough's children's centres are working with Citizens Advice to manage parents' debts and ensure they claim all the benefits to which they are entitled. Citizens Advice provides a fast-track service of home visits to parents of under-fives. This scheme has raised almost £300,000 in extra benefits and managed just under £400,000 of debt for the 479 families it helped in the year to March 2008.

Eileen Stein, children and young people's area network manager at Halton Borough Council, estimates that 173 families earned less than £7,200 a year when they first came to the centre. Just over half the service users were single parents and 77 per cent lived on less than the minimum wage. "One thing about poverty is people are often in work but in very, very low paid jobs," she says.

Hard-to-reach families

The children's centre offers plenty of other services too, including parenting advice, adult learning courses, free play groups and a volunteering scheme, which has seen nearly 30 parents progress to paid work or education.

Stein says Sure Start has helped lots of people but there is room for improvement. "We need to maintain the balance between being there for everyone and working with the poorest and hardest-to-reach families," she says. "We need to get better at working with other agencies to identify them."

However, focusing purely on the most vulnerable families would be "a huge mistake", which could stigmatise the service and make it even harder to attract the families that need it most, she says. Locally, the centre has a good relationship with health and social care but could improve the links with housing. "I think if we are going to have a real crack at doing something about child poverty and health inequalities then Sure Start is the right programme," she says. "But we are working with intergenerational issues so we won't see the impact for some time."

In Walsall, Palfrey Children's Centre is building up the skills and education of parents through training courses. These vary from courses on topics like paediatric first aid to NVQs in childcare and English as a second language. The programmes are popular with mothers but it is hard to say how many get jobs afterwards since some in the local Asian community prefer to stay at home to raise their children. Mick Davies, programme manager at the centre, says training and education are useful for parents even if they don't go on to employment. "They gain in confidence," he says. "It gives people the skills to take up employment and take control of their lives." Five mothers have gone on to get jobs at the children's centre.

The centre also offers advice on work and benefits, parents and toddler groups, a baby clinic with local midwives, swimming, breastfeeding support, days out, support for fathers, health outreach work, parenting advice and links with the local library.

The centre's role is about community development and tackling child poverty in its widest sense, says Davies. "One aspect of poverty is parents do not see the need to engage with their children. That has improved and parents see it gives them better life chances," says Davies. "Hopefully we will see the lessening of poverty in the next generation because of what parents and children have experienced at children's centres."

But there are limits to what Sure Start can do to tackle child poverty. The area around the children's centre in Walsall has been hit by the decline of industrial jobs. "We can equip people for work, but there have to be jobs for them to work in and that is beyond the remit of a children's centre," says Davies. "Whether we are giving people false hope I don't know, but by giving people the skills to take a job at least they are on the first rung of the ladder."

Meanwhile, as politicians continue to debate solutions to child poverty, the need to scrimp and save is taking its toll on Julian's 14-year-old daughter Sydnie. "She will always say 'mum, we are so poor'," recounts Julian. Now Julian cannot even afford the occasional treat of a CD for herself. Bills swallow up any money she manages to put aside and she expects they will push her into debt soon. "You feel like you are running like a gerbil in a wheel," she says. "It is nobody's fault that I am Sasha's carer and we are in this circumstance."

EXPERTS ASSESS LABOUR'S LEGACY

Professor Edward Melhuish, head, National Evaluation of Sure Start

"Initially, Sure Start seemed to have some beneficial effects for quite a lot of families but it wasn't reaching the most disadvantaged families very well. In 2004, government also had data that children's centres were very effective for the most disadvantaged families. On that basis they made all Sure Start programmes become children's centres. When we followed them up in March 2008 we found children born into fully functioning Sure Start programmes that became children's centres were doing better in social development than children who had not had the benefit of a children's centre. Their parents also tended to have better parenting techniques. It appears children centres are beneficial to all children but disadvantaged children have most to gain from them.

"We have looked at parental employment up to 2005 and we found no particular change in it related to children's centres. But we found health benefits, in that child immunisation and accidents were improved.

"Sure Start children's centres are not altering the level of child poverty in the sense that they are not altering parental income, but they alter the effects of poverty. Before 2000 there wasn't much spending on this age range, so we did not have many staff skilled in this kind of work. We are only in 2008 and it takes more than eight years to transform from zero provision to a very high level of provision."

Labour MP Barry Sheerman, chair, the Children, Schools and Families Select Committee

"The children's workforce is among the poorest paid and poorest trained groups of people in our country so we have a real problem about the quality of the stimulation of young children and the people working with them. Better pay and training would do more about family poverty than almost anything else and would open properly trained and paid careers.

"There are towns where industrial jobs have diminished and been replaced by jobs in retail and distribution, which pay poorly. I want these jobs to be jobs where people get a second chance at education and work their way up."

Conservative MP Iain Duncan Smith, founder, Centre for Social Justice

"Labour MP Graham Allen and I have just published reports on early years intervention and birth-to-threes. Our recommendations are about how you identify these families, and how you drag them in. We have talked about incentives like bringing child benefit forward. Sure Start itself won't be enough; there needs to be co-ordinated early intervention with the right programmes targeted at the right people."

Carey Oppenheim, co-director, think tank IPPR

"Children's centres and Sure Start have been a very important part of a rounded approach to tackling child poverty and deprivation. It is not something you can do overnight, but the evidence now on Sure Start is showing it is beginning to make a difference.

"Overall, it is a positive story, but there are big challenges in reaching families who are the most marginalised and least likely to be in touch with public services. It has been really difficult at a practical level to engage the primary care trusts and health service in children's centres. There is a growing understanding that we need to think not just about income and employment but also about a range of children's services to deal with child poverty."