Policy Reunion: Making Sense Of Sure Start

Sure Start has been hailed as one of the successes of the last Labour government, but the Coalition has reduced overall funding for children's services, and left it to local authorities to decide what to cut - leaving many Sure Start Children's Centres facing an uncertain future. The Institute for Government got together some of the key players in the original Sure Start scheme to look at how the policy was developed and implemented and the lessons for policy makers now.

Speaker

Naomi Eisenstadt, Director of Sure Start from 1999- 2006 and author, "Providing a Sure Start, how government discovered early childhood".

The Panel

• Rt Hon Tessa Jowell MP, Minister for Public Health, 1997-99
• Carey Oppenheim, adviser, No.10 Policy Unit
• Jan Casson, Children's Centre Locality Manager, Northumberland.

The session was chaired by Andrew Adonis, Director of Institute for Government.

Naomi Eisenstadt, former Director of Sure Start and author of Providing a Sure Start: How government discovered early childhood, described how Sure Start began, grew into a flagship policy of the last government and found its way in to all three major party manifestos at the last general election. She praised Sure Start's achievements which had made it a vote-winner, but regretted that the programme had moved away from its original focus and "lost the babies" along the way.

There were a number of factors, according to Eisenstadt, which created a "perfect storm" from which Sure Start could emerge following the 1997 election. It was "a case study in new government wanting to make policy in new ways", but the dynamics within the New Labour government were also crucial because "as fractious as the relationship was between No. 10 and No. 11 for other bits of policy, for children's policy it was absolutely fantastic. If you're an official it cannot get better than having the Prime Minster and the Chancellor fighting for the credit for your policy and wanting to be seen to do the most for young children".

Modernising Government

Sure Start provided a useful testing ground for new policy making ideas with Eisenstadt highlighting how services were user rather than provider led, co-created by the people they were for, and focused on outcomes not inputs. Sure Start was designed "not as an intervention, but to build a system." Other innovations had included the newly established Comprehensive Spending Review, which provided stability by allocating budgets for three years, and an open application process for selecting the management board that brought in outsiders such as her.

Eisenstadt acknowledged that the programme lacked a clear evidence base, but political will drove the policy through and made it work. This approach allowed Sure Start to evolve as policymakers collected evidence on what works best. In this respect, gaining input from parents was vital to determining how money needed to be invested. On the other hand, while it had been necessary to expand the programme quickly in order to embed change, she now feels it was a mistake not to build staff development into the system.

Outcomes

While a huge amount was achieved, Eisenstadt said the failure of Sure Start to adequately cater for the needs of under-2s remains a challenge: "We lost the babies. We were originally a minus nine months to plus four years programme. I used to say that when I went to DFE in 1999 they thought that children were born at five, when I left they thought that children were born at two... But we did lose the babies".

Tessa Jowell, the former Public Health Minister who helped found Sure Start, agreed with this point, but she also felt that the established Sure Start infrastructure can be used to get back to the original purpose of the programme which was "intervention to support vulnerable, unconfident young mothers and their babies in order to prevent the recreation of the circumstances that have shaped their lives in becoming mothers too young... that's the stage that Sure Start has got to revisit". Jowell was also keen to stress the importance of universal provision and rejected media criticism that middle class parents could use Sure Start too on the basis that "services only for the poor are poor services".

A new frontier

Yet Carey Oppenheimer, a former No. 10 policy advisor, said that the successes of Sure Start should not be under-rated. There was, at the time, no specific policy for under 5's or under 4's, with most spending on the under 8's going in to schools. In fact, she felt one of the major values of Sure Start was the way in which it "meshed" early years provision with other policies including flexible working and maternity rights and that this created "a new frontier for the welfare state."

Jan Casson, Children's Centre Locality Manager in Northumberland, said that the programme's focus in the future should be on building resilience in communities. She added that people living on some of the impoverished estates where she works are being encouraged to "take some care and control of their own destinies". Achieving this objective is "about trying to embed the ethos of Sure Start, being innovative and being brave and creative, and empowering local communities to take some of the control themselves [because] that's where we'll see long-term gain".

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