Improving Children's Services

From Sure Start to Children's Centres

Speakers: Professor Angela Anning and Mog Ball

Centre for Research into Childhood (CRinCh)

This was a very seminar that I attended yesterday. The two speakers where launching their new book

Improving Services for Young Children: From Sure Start to Children's Centres

The seminar was very enlightening and certainly for me, a novice in this field, helped to fill out many of the blanks in my knowledge especially regarding the socio-political background underpinning the radical policy shift and investment into early years during the past 10 years. The two speakers have both played important roles in reviewing the effectiveness of Sure Start. Both were in the lead steering body and each commissioned elements of the National Evaluation of Sure Start, one of the most expensive and largest social science reviews undertaken in the UK by the government.

So what did I take away from the seminar? Well I now have a much better understanding of the policy decisions leading up to the £500 million investment by the government in 1997. I had not fully realising how far the UK had fallen behind other leading industrial countries at the time in the provision and support for very young children and their parents or to quote Mog Ball "the government saw it as a private matter as to what happened between children and parents in the 80s and 90s." Consequently this had lead to great swaths of inequality and poverty throughout the country with essentially little support for those parents and families most in need leading to a cycle of poverty, ill health and unemployment. Regardless of one’s political colours you cannot help marvel at the socio-cultural shift that has happened in the past 10 years since New Labour fresh from their general election campaign raise the this area as a major focus for investment and policy. Only this week we have Labour and the Conservatives during their part conference in Birmingham trying to outdo each her with family policies!