Examination of witness (Questions 1 -
22)
WEDNESDAY 29 MARCH 2000
DR G PUGH,
OBE
Valerie Davey
1. Good morning. May I welcome you very warmly
to the Committee this morning? Your name, Gillian Pugh, is very
well recognised within the early years field, indeed within the
whole of the education area of work. We are delighted to have
you here. Thank you too for the written evidence which you have
submitted to the Committee prior to our meeting this morning.
May I ask you first of all from this particular point to look
both backwards and forwards? First of all, what do you think are
the major achievements of the early years policy in the last five
years, then looking ahead at the main challenges for the next
five?
(Dr Pugh) Certainly. I am delighted to be here; thank
you for inviting me. Looking backwards the seven bullet points
which I have put on the first page of my written evidence are
the things which I feel are the biggest achievements, which I
shall just run through very quickly. The considerable expansion
in nursery education started under the last Government and continues
with this such that all four-year-olds and growing numbers of
three-year-olds now have access to nursery education whether in
the school system or in the voluntary and independent sector.
The National Childcare Strategy is bringing additional resources,
particularly to out of school care. Looking forward, that will
be an issue for me as to how the nursery education expansion and
the child care expansions are dovetailed better together. The
network of early excellence centres, which I am very pleased to
be a part of. I am always a little concerned with the concept
of "excellence" because in a way there is a huge range
of things which are excellent other than the things which have
been designated excellent, but the idea of looking to see whether
we can do things in different ways and evaluate them properly,
such that others can learn, is something I find very exciting.
Sure Start, which I was very much involved in helping to establish
and which I think is one of the most important initiatives which
has been set up in the last two years because we know from research
evidence just how very important the first three years of life
are and we also know that this was a time when there were fewer
resources in communities for parents. So I am very particularly
pleased about that. The substantial piece of work which the Qualifications
and Curriculum Authority has just completed which I have been
very proud to be part of, looking at what is an appropriate early
years curriculum—and I am sure you will want to come back
to that later. The development at local level of Early Years Development
and Childcare Partnerships. In my previous job at the National
Children's Bureau I was very much part of trying to persuade the
last Government not to introduce a nursery voucher scheme and
suggested this partnership approach as an alternative which the
Secretary of State, Gillian Shephard was really rather taken with,
but there was an overruling and we know what happened next. As
a result of the nursery voucher scheme not working out, and the
realisation that we cannot provide for young children locally
other than through partnerships, the setting up of these partnerships
has been extremely exciting. As you would expect, they are not
all working quite as well yet as they could, but it is exactly
the right concept, recognising that there are different players
in the field and we are never going to meet the needs of children
and families just through the education system. Then, more broadly,
in terms of child benefit and working families tax credit, certainly
more money coming to families. Looking ahead I would now want
to ensure that there was more money coming into the system as
well as giving families the purchasing power. On a whole range
of strategies, both to do with understanding what children learn
and how we should structure that learning, right through to how
we can get people working better together to provide appropriately
for young children has been a huge development. Shall I go straight
on?
2. Yes; please do. That was the easy bit. Now
looking forward.
(Dr Pugh) Looking forward. I shall try to do this
succinctly and I am sure you will want to come back on things.
One of the big challenges has been the lack of people with early
years experience in positions of power, the decision makers. When
I was on the RSA committee, I was asked to do a paper identifying
blocks to progress, why, if we know so much about how young children
learn, we have not succeeded in setting up a system that the world
can look to with pride. Looking at countries who had made greater
headway, I was forced to conclude that at no level in the system,
be it central government, local government through directors of
education, within the QCA, the teacher training agency, OFSTED,
were there any people and certainly no people in positions of
ultimate authority who really understood the issues around young
children's learning. That is still a challenge for us. Things
have dramatically changed. When I was on the Rumbold committee
there was one sixteenth of a senior civil servant with an interest
in early years; there are now so many I have lost count. It is
much higher on the agenda but it is a complex area, it is the
most important area of learning, it is the most complex area of
teaching, yet I do not think that the messages are quite embedded
sufficiently within the system and I hope that is something which
this Committee will be able to address. I am delighted that this
Committee is looking at the education of children from three to
five, but my second point really would be around the need for
continuity from birth through to six. Sure Start is fantastic,
as I have already said; it is one of the most exciting things
this Government is doing. However, Sure Start will only be effective
if it becomes a mainstream strategy and not a short-term initiative
which disappears in three or four years' time. In addition it
needs to change the way we run services locally across the country,
not just in the 250 areas in which it will be based. It will also
only work if the lessons we learn from working in new ways with
children under three are consistent and continuous with what we
know about working with children from three upwards. I met with
five different Ministers two or three weeks ago when they were
re-looking at Sure Start to argue very strongly that we needed
to look at the quality of children's learning and so on before
three, but make sure that Sure Start was fully docked in. That
would be my second main point. My third point would be around
looking at equitable funding across all sectors. You will next
be hearing from Margaret Lochrie from the Pre-school Learning
Alliance and she will tell you about the numbers of groups which
are closing at the moment. Nobody is arguing that anything stays
open if it is not needed, but in addition to the role which pre-schools
and playgroups play in children's learning, they have an extraordinarily
important role to play in parents' learning. When I was at the
National Children's Bureau, the National Child Development Study
was in progress, that huge sample of 16,000 children who were
born in 1958. One of the key findings which came out of that was
the relationship between the home learning environment and mothers'
education in outcomes for children. The home and parents' expectations
of children and their learning is a very, very powerful indicator
of good outcomes for children. Some of the early findings from
the research which Professor Kathy Sylva is directing, put more
flesh, a good deal more flesh on those bones. If we want good
outcomes for children, then we must look to the role of parents
as their children's "educators". This is not to say
that we start instructing parents in ways of working with children
at home, but just that we need to recognise how important the
home is. Certainly one of the things which is striking home to
me now I am responsible for running services for children and
families is that work to support parents is not funded within
the mainstream. I am meeting with Education Minister, Malcolm
Wicks on Monday in my role as chair of the Parenting Forum to
argue for parenting education to be funded within the further
education/lifelong learning sector. If we are concerned, as we
must be, about children, then we need to look at how we fund,
work with and support parents. My fourth point is around staffing
and qualifications. There are several different issues there.
We have a work force which is not adequately trained and not appropriately
trained doing the most important job in the education system.
3. Many of us would agree and we want to come
back to that later.
(Dr Pugh) Perhaps you will want to pick that up later
but for me that includes ensuring that people with a lot of experience
but not much training have the funding so that they can do NVQs.
NVQs cost a lot of money for people who are on low salaries. It
is also to do with understanding the need to change the content
of teacher training, an issue which the TTA is now looking at,
such that child development is much more central to the training
of all teachers and particularly teachers of young children. A
third point which is very important for me is the importance of
in-service training and continuous staff development. Training
is not an injection you have when you are 21, it is something
which should happen absolutely all the time in an ongoing way.
The funding, particularly of voluntary and independent groups,
is such that they cannot afford to close for the five days a year
that schools are required to close. For me that links with your
questions about inspection and assessment as well. Practice improves
much more quickly if you reflect on your own practice with a mentor.
Those would be some of my main issues.
Valerie Davey: You have set us and Government
a huge agenda which we shall take up with relish.
Mr Foster
4. You mentioned the lack of early years experience
of those in authority but you did mention that there have been
some recent changes which improve the situation. Could you go
a little bit further and maybe enlighten us as to what has brought
those changes about?
(Dr Pugh) It is a complex matter which one would not
do justice to in a few words and of course one cannot expect that
all senior managers in education are going to understand all about
young children. The key is that they actually listen to the people
who do know. The changes have partly come about because on the
whole it is women who have trained to work with young children
and more women are becoming directors of education and perhaps
more men who have had primary experience. The expansion of nursery
education has meant that DfEE and OFSTED and the QCA and the TTA
have had to take on board issues about early education that they
were not so much able to do before. Certainly within OFSTED, in
the days when Rosemary Peacocke was a senior inspector within
OFSTED, there was good early years expertise. At the moment there
is not that breadth of experience and particularly with OFSTED
now taking on additional responsibility for inspection it is very
important that the people running the inspection service do understand
the particular needs of this age group.
5. You mentioned OFSTED and the worries you
have about them. Are there any other barriers to making further
progress which you want to flag up at this point?
(Dr Pugh) That was just about staffing, senior people,
which is what you asked me about particularly. This Government
is trying very hard to do its joined-up thinking and local authorities
in fact have been trying to do that even longer. There is still
quite a lot of ground to be made up there. Even within central
government the need to link the nursery education programme with
the child care strategy with Sure Start is at one level a huge
step forward but there are still implications of one set of policies
perhaps around funding, perhaps around inspection which do not
always tie up with what is happening elsewhere. The working families
tax credit is one example and that is something which is being
ironed out at the moment. The challenges are how you create a
strategy which hangs together but enable it to be implemented
flexibly at local level. There is a tendency when things are not
working to be more directive and this is one of the discussions
we have been having about Sure Start: should Ministers say more
about the way in which programmes should be delivered locally?
Yes, one can understand the need for certain standards and certain
criteria if particular targets are to be met, but, equally, it
is important that on the ground people can develop services which
reflect local need. Some of the main challenges for me are about
how we actually create an environment within which central and
local government people look at what we are trying to do for children
rather than "I'm responsible for education and my education
targets are this" and "My health targets are this"
and "My social work targets are this". A lot of the
work I have been doing is around trying to work both nationally
and locally to say children and families require these things,
then what all of us need to do to contribute to that. That is
a very difficult thing because people have their own professional
agendas.
Helen Jones
6. You talked a lot, both in what you have said
to us this morning and in the memorandum you submitted, about
the need to provide integrated services and the need for continuity
between the under- and over-threes. You talked about some of the
barriers just now in your answer to Mr Foster, but can you tell
us what you think the key benefits will be of integrating the
services and how we should go about it practically? You are right
that we have all different departments with different agendas.
(Dr Pugh) Might I give a small case study because
it is very typical of the services which I have been privileged
to set up with Camden at Coram Family which are based on 25 years
of advising other people what to do and now I have the privilege
of being allowed to do it? As any family with young children will
know, the needs of families do not divide into separate boxes
called care and education and play and health and housing. They
are integrated, yet parents who are both trying to bring up children
and perhaps return to work or further study and who perhaps have
a child with special needs who needs the help of an educational
psychologist or whatever, will find that they need to visit a
whole lot of different professionals and fill in a whole lot of
different forms if they are to get that rounded help. What we
have been doing at Coram and what is happening in a lot of other
centres around the country now, is to provide a nursery for 108
children which provides care and education from six months through
to five, so that the children can either have the nursery day,
the three to four-year-olds can have the ordinary nursery education
day, or by paying a little they can have the wrap-around before
and after and the holiday provision. In addition to having the
care and education for children for 48 weeks of the year, either
full time or part time, depending on parents' choice, there is
a huge range of activities for parents. This is an area where
one third of local parents are in bed and breakfast accommodation,
nearly one half are in the Bangladeshi community, huge numbers
of unemployed families, so one can offer both access to training
to those parents but also opportunities to do workshops and understand
how children learn and how they can support their children at
home, as well as parenting education groups which can give them
help and develop skills in handling difficult behaviour or children
who will not sleep. In addition to that there is a social worker
on site and there are health visitors on site and there is a clinical
psychologist on site. The 600 families who use this combined,
integrated service, have a "one-stop shop". We are not
the only people who do that; there are growing numbers of centres
like this but it does require a huge amount of planning because
you have four or five bits of the local authority coming together
with a health authority, coming together in our case with five
voluntary organisations. You have to learn to trust each other
and it often needs people, like the role we have been able to
play, to bring people together across those barriers. It is not
impossible, but unless you have joint planning at local authority
level, through the partnerships, which says this is what you want
to achieve and in order to do that you need people to work in
different ways and have joint training and joint funding, then
it is quite difficult. However, it is possible and the evaluation
which Professor Chris Pascal is doing of these centres and the
work which Professor Sylva is doing through her EPPE project does
show that this kind of integrated provision has huge benefits
for children in terms of continuity and quality as well as benefits
for parents in terms of the services offered to them.
7. Most of us would agree with that. The difficulties
on the ground perhaps come from the fact that we have a whole
range of providers, not just local authority services but also
pre-schools, private day care and so on. What role would you see
those other organisations playing as we move forward once more
into integrated services.
(Dr Pugh) In a way that goes back to my answer to
Mr Foster's question in terms of the range of providers which
is required and the way in which one needs to build up from what
a local community is already offering. In our small community,
the one I have described, there were already five voluntary organisations
involved, working with special needs families, and a nursery and
homeless families. So the partnership is between the local authority,
the health authority and five voluntary organisations. It seems
to me that if local authority child care partnerships are working
properly, then both across the authority as a whole and within
local communities that is the mechanism by which that joint planning
needs to happen. As with any partnership, when there are unequal
partners, in terms of power and financial resources and so on,
the voluntary sector is often the sector which finds it hard to
come to the table and be treated with respect and equality. The
challenge for the partnerships is to try to make sure that, looking
at what is available locally, one builds on that rather than trying
to steamroller a uniform approach which perhaps means the closure
of some very good voluntary groups.
Charlotte Atkins
8. On the nought to three part in particular,
where you have working parents, clearly you have to have a tremendously
high staff:child ratio for that nought to three group.
(Dr Pugh) Yes.
9. Certainly when I have spoken to play groups,
they are increasingly worried about the school age coming down
to three and a half and making them uneconomic. How can we go
forward in a situation where you are going to have a lot of parents
who are working and the best provision is going to be sometimes
in the voluntary sector, but that normally does not cover the
whole day, so increasingly we are looking towards the private
sector. In that situation the care is extremely expensive if you
are going to be looking at that very young group and especially
if the maintained sector is taking in pupils at three and a half.
(Dr Pugh) Yes, the biggest expansion in working parents
is amongst working parents in the middle class who have jobs which
are paying quite well, who can afford the fees of private nurseries.
It seems to me that it needs to be a mixture of money coming to
parents who are on low income, such as the working families tax
credit, but that on its own is not sufficient. Certainly for play
groups and for voluntary sector groups which do not have the capital
and other infrastructure which is needed in order to set up, this
was one of the troubles with the voucher scheme; that the voucher
put all the money in the hands of the parents and it meant that
no nursery had the funds to develop its own services. The model
we have tried to develop at Coram, which is one which others have
also developed, is one where within one nursery there is a mixture
of families which are at risk or in need, for which the social
services pay, families who can afford some fees but with working
families tax credit particularly that can be topped up, and families
who are on good wages and can afford the full fees. That seems
to me to be the ideal but it does mean that you would have to
put money into the services as well as into parents' pockets,
if you were really going to have the level playing field. As you
rightly say, the ratios, particularly for children under three,
are high and that does make it very expensive.
10. Would you say that the maintained sector
should play a greater role in this nought to three age group?
At the moment it is such a patchwork of different provisions and
I know most parents find it incredibly stressful finding somewhere
when they are going back to work, apart from employing someone
in the home which is stressful enough in itself, where they are
willing to leave their children.
(Dr Pugh) I started off by saying that there has been
a lot of expansion but that has been for nursery education which
by working parents standards is part time. The biggest gap is
still the provision for children under three and the maintained
sector has to play a bigger role. As with discussions over the
last five years about how we expand, the expansion needs to be
across all sectors, but there certainly need to be more incentives
to providers to set up services as well as money in the pockets
of parents on low pay or no pay in order for them to be able to
afford it. I whould certainly see the maintained sector playing
an important part, but it will only work, as with the nursery
education expansion, if it works across all sectors and creates
a playing field which pre-schools and independent nurseries can
be part of as well.
Mr Marsden
11. You said earlier that you were a little
concerned about the way in which the word "excellence"
tends to be bandied around. I suppose the same is true of the
word "quality" but nevertheless I am going to have a
stab at it and ask you how you would define quality services for
young children and families. Given what you said earlier about
the relative lack of information in the echelons of government
about this, is it not important that we do try to have a stab
at some sort of definition?
(Dr Pugh) Yes. I cannot do a polished definition although
I would refer you to the second page of my written submission.
It seems to me that there are three pillars underpinning quality.
One is understanding children's learning and providing an appropriate
curriculum. The second is well-trained educators who understand
children's learning and provide that curriculum, and the third
is involvement of parents and looking at and understanding parents'
roles. That is extraordinarily brief but those for me are the
things which will provide a quality experience for children. As
I have said in my written submission, I think that the new QCA
guidelines which are in draft at the moment, certainly in terms
of their underpinning principles, spell out very clearly the kind
of curriculum which reflects our understanding of how children
learn, the fact that they are born curious and eager to learn,
that they learn through play and through direct experience and
through language and particularly when they are confident and
secure. One of the things perhaps we have not stressed enough
in the past is the importance of children's social and emotional
development during this period. The only way we can provide a
curriculum like that, which is structured and which stretches
children but at the same time offers them the security they need,
is when those working with children are properly and adequately
trained and remunerated. That in itself is not sufficient. Parents
are of course their children's main educators and whatever happens
in group settings, be they schools, pre-schools, child minders,
has to build on and reflect the work which is happening at home.
12. Yes, group settings are of course very important.
Does the enormous variety of pre-school providers hinder the attainment
of those quality goals which you have mentioned?
(Dr Pugh) Yes and no. Five years ago those of us working
in this field, and the Government which was thinking about expanding
nursery education, could have said the only place which children
would find the kind of experiences that they need was in state
funded nursery education. We did not take that view. Those of
us working together on the Early Childhood Education Forum which
represented the private sector, the voluntary sector and the state
sector, agreed that what we needed was a common understanding
of what good quality early years education looked like and the
staff and that we then needed to try to work towards as common
as possible standards across all settings. The reason that some
are still faring less well, as Kathy Sylva's research is showing,
is for a range of reasons. One of the main reasons is that some
sectors are better funded than others and some staff have had
access to more training than others. I see absolutely no reason
why we cannot provide excellent early education in a whole range
of sectors, but only if we provide adequate training for the staff
working and adequate resources.
13. Given that you accept that plurality of
approaches, it seems to me that puts an additional emphasis on
the inspection or the evaluation processes which are undertaken
and obviously we have the recent decision to combine the OFSTED
and Social Services Inspectorates, which I understand you welcome
in your paper. What would be the deficiencies in the current Social
Services Inspectorate which led to the recommendation that OFSTED
should be included?
(Dr Pugh) I cannot answer that question from the inside.
I can only say from the outside that to have three lots of inspections
in a year is extremely debilitating and extraordinarily wasteful.
It made logical sense to have one system. The logic of it going
within education was that we were looking here at children's learning
at the first stage of the education system. The disadvantage,
as directors of social services have been swift to point out,
is that the current OFSTED regime does not at the moment include
people who have much understanding of young children, whether
their care or their education. In a way the issue now, given that
the decision has been made to create one system, is first of all
to make sure that it is staffed by inspectors who know what they
are doing, in that case, back to my earlier point, with an OFSTED
team which knows what it is doing. The second point, which I also
raised briefly earlier, is that we inspect more than almost any
other country in the world and as I have often said, you cannot
fatten a pig for market by continually weighing it. Yes, you need
inspection but you need nourishment and that comes through your
ongoing in-service. The model of self-assessment with a mentor,
with occasional inspections, seems to me is going to do a great
deal more than people coming in and waving sticks on a very regular
basis.
14. You are obviously going to be an interesting
interlocutor for Mr Woodhead as this process goes along then.
(Dr Pugh) I do not think I am alone in what I have
said; others can speak for themselves.
15. May I pick you up on that last point? You
make the vivid analogy about the pig and I think that is acceptable
to most of us here. However, if you are saying we should look
at self-evaluation, we should look at self-appraisal as well as
an inspection process here, does that not put the onus on us being
confident, the general public, parents and so on, that those self-evaluation,
those self-appraisal processes are a little bit more than navel
gazing? What confidence do you have, what evidence can you produce
to the Committee today, that these self-appraisal and self-evaluation
processes are in fact rigorous?
(Dr Pugh) I personally am not in a position to answer
that question. There will be others who can and it is early days
in a developing system. There will be more evidence. One of the
things I would say is that personally I have always regretted,
although I can understand why, that the advisory system and the
inspection system have been so separated. The point I was making
with reference to the pig analogy was that we had put a lot of
emphasis on inspection but have under-estimated the power and
the need for good advisers. The answer to your question, without
being able to cite evidence at the moment, is that what we need
to do is make sure that there is a good advisory system and service
in place which provides the mentoring. Navel gazing and recycling
stale air is no way to improve a system. If you have a rigorous
mentor who comes and works with you as a staff team on your staff
training days, then a combination of that and an inspection system
is the best way we are going to help people to own their own growth.
16. To be very clear, do you see the advisory
and the inspection process as being compatible under the same
organisation or do you think they should be different?
(Dr Pugh) No, I do not think the advisers should be
answerable to OFSTED. I think that OFSTED has a inspection role,
but all early years settings just as all schools need to find
ways of ensuring that they have whatever mentoring, advice, whatever
one calls it, which helps them to reflect on and develop their
own practice. We only change in life when we internalise the need
to change and do not on the whole change just because somebody
keeps telling us to.
Valerie Davey
17. That is profound and beyond just early years.
(Dr Pugh) Yes, it is way beyond early years.
18. You have consistently reminded us of the
importance of involving parents. Can you remind us how we can
more effectively bring them into the early years settings and
particularly the fathers, in mentioning fathers especially perhaps
absent fathers, stepfathers, as well as the mothers?
(Dr Pugh) This whole issue of parental involvement
is enormously complex. One of the difficulties when I was doing
a lot of detailed work on this was the sense of guilt which it
induced in parents who were working or for various reasons could
not actually be in the nursery. When we are talking about the
role of parents it is not just how many bums on seats or pairs
of hands washing up the paint pots you have, it is about respect
and it is about mutuality in terms of having joint understanding
of what this enterprise is about. There are all kinds of different
ways in which parents will want to be involved; some will want
to be involved in the pre-school and in the group itself. Some
will want to be involved on management committees and governing
bodies, some will be very glad to be part of outings for children,
others' work commitments and other commitments will not enable
that to happen. The key thing is working with parents to see in
what way they would like to be involved but also making sure that
parents have the support they need to understand what is happening
in the nursery. With regard to fathers, both those living at home
and those absent, there are no easy answers except to come back
to the issue of respect and asking people in what ways they can
and would like to be involved. In our own work we have done things
like outings with fathers and children, but then the mothers got
rather cross about that and said "Why should the Dads go
to Alton Towers when we just ...". There are the traditional
tasks for men to do but that becomes a bit stereotypical. The
key issue has to be that both parents, whether present or absent,
need to understand that they have an absolutely critical role
in relation to their children's learning. Even if they only see
their children once a month, or if they see them every night,
or during the day as well as at night, that role as a parent remains,
whether you are married to each other, living together or not.
For me that is the really important issue, that parenting goes
on for life, wherever you are. There are all kinds of fun things
which you can do together which tie in, but it needs to be an
enterprise where the nursery and parents work together.
Charlotte Atkins
19. I want to ask you first of all about the
Early Years Development and Childcare Partnerships. You mentioned
them in passing. How successful do you think these have been in
terms of bringing together the various players? You were saying
that you very much proposed this sort of approach. How is the
approach being implemented and does it come up to your very high
standards?
(Dr Pugh) Because I am no longer working in this field
specifically, I am afraid I cannot answer the question. I know
that the National Children's Bureau has just published a report
which I have read about early work with partnerships. All that
I could say, as you will not be surprised to hear, is that some
are working a great deal better than others. A lot depends on
who is chairing the partnership, a lot depends on the extent to
which the local authority—it goes back to my power issue
earlier—is really prepared to consult and value voluntary
sector involvement. Ironically, it can often be the best local
authorities in terms of the level of provision and the way they
are working together who find it the hardest to recognise that
anybody has a role to play apart from themselves. For me, they
are still potentially the best way of ensuring that a whole range
of players can make a joint contribution. I am afraid that I cannot
give you a bird's eye view because I just do not know.
20. What do you think would make them more effective?
We all accept that there is a range of success across the country
but what do you think, what would be your key points which need
to be in place to make them effective?
(Dr Pugh) There needs to be clear guidance about what
the expectations are and that is probably in place. More could
be done to link the zones and initiatives together. In the authority
I am working in, our early excellence centre is not quite docked
into the partnership in the way it should be. These are part of
growing and developing and I imagine that most Sure Start schemes
are docked into their partnership, but I have some evidence that
they are not. There is a plethora of short-term initiatives at
the moment. This is the thing which worries me most: at one level
it is extremely exciting and those of us in the field are breathless
from trying to respond and apply for money and put it in place
by yesterday and tick all kinds of boxes to say all these outcomes
are being achieved. At the same time, if it is just "funny
money" and after three years it all goes away, then we are
really back where we started, although worse because we have raised
expectations. I would hope that the partnerships could play a
very, very important role in harnessing the new initiatives into
making the way we run services right across the board operate
differently. For me that would be one of their main functions.
21. Even if some of the money does dry out the
partnerships as partnerships and the commitment should continue.
(Dr Pugh) Absolutely. The only way that there will
not be lots of closures down the line will be if those partnerships
are really working. If health visitors are involved, social services,
education and the voluntary sector, as start-up money begins to
tail off they can look at the good things which have been set
up and they can be continued. The other key role for me, given
what I was saying about training, is the role which the partnerships
are playing and should continue to play in responding to local
training need and providing links into the main training providers
in an authority for that ongoing training which I was talking
about.
22. You have said some very nice things about
Sure Start, that you think it has been exciting. How can we ensure
that the contributions made by Sure Start are broadened out, particularly
for the nought to threes, because clearly in many ways children
can be at home from nought to three and those parents are really
getting very little support, apart from the first few days out
of hospital? I certainly had a case of a child who arrived at
school unable to speak because he had been sat in front of television,
probably with the sound switched off, for most of his life. These
things do happen, even in a situation where we do value early
years education.
(Dr Pugh) For me the value of Sure Start is that it
is based firmly on research evidence. I remember the director
of the National Children's Bureau about 20 years ago saying we
could almost stop doing research now if we only actually implemented
what we knew. I keep coming back to that remark. The reason that
Sure Start has been set up is because we know how important the
first three years are, because we know how important parents are,
because we also know how many parents struggle both through post-natal
depression, low income levels and so on, to provide that environment
for their children and because we know that if children come into
school not able to speak, not able to take advantage of what school
has to offer, then in a way they probably never catch up. For
me Sure Start is about much more than 250 schemes, important though
those are. For me, and perhaps this is more than Sure Start can
achieve, it is actually about changing the way in which we provide
services in communities right across the country for young children
and parents. It is about understanding that if we are not providing
support during the ante-natal and post-natal period, then we can
plough any amount of money into the system later but we have lost
those children. I hope that in addition to encouraging people
to work in new ways together, and asking communities and involving
communities in decisions about what is appropriate, which goes
back to my question earlier, we will begin to realise (a) that
we have to put more resources into this period of young children's
lives and (b) we cannot go on working in our separate boxes or
funnels or channels. It is really what I was saying earlier. We
need to define within communities what outcomes we want for children
and families and how between us we can contribute.
Valerie Davey: I have to stop you there, reluctant
though I am, and say thank you very much. You have certainly given
us a very good Sure Start in evidence towards this report. Thank
you very much indeed.
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