Examination of Witnesses (Questions 20-39)
22 JANUARY 2007
DEPARTMENT FOR
EDUCATION AND
SKILLS AND
DEPARTMENT OF
HEALTH
Q20 Mr Dunne: What analysis have
you done of the numbers of children's centres provided by local
authorities, public sector bodies, voluntary groups and charities?
Sheila Scales: It is a moving
picture at the moment. I can let you have the figures for the
current position, but local authorities clearly now have the statutory
responsibility for ensuring that the centres are up and running.
We encourage them to work with local partners and the private,
voluntary and independent sectors in running the child care in
the centres, in particular, but we also encourage them to work
with someone else to manage the centres. It is very much a moving
picture.[1]
Q21 Mr Dunne: Have you been able
to assess which group of providers deliver best?
Sheila Scales: The Sure Start
local programme evaluation, which relates to the predecessor body,
suggested that those based in primary care trusts and run by the
health service were particularly effective.
Q22 Mr Dunne: How do you measure
success?
Sheila Scales: In terms of reach
to disadvantaged groups and outcomes for children. In setting
up a new performance management framework for the new Sure Start
children's centre, we are being very clear that we need an outcome-based
focus because we are not attempting a one-size-fits-all approach.
It is mainly about outcomes, but it is also about having a clear
requirement to measure the percentage of the various disadvantaged
groups that are being targeted. Success will be measured by outcomes
for children and access for the disadvantaged.
Q23 Mr Dunne: I am pleased to hear
that because if you look at page 17, table 7, which shows performance
against the public service agreement targets, it does not look
as though you are achieving those targets very well.
David Bell: Some of those are
ambitious targets—there is no getting away from that. However,
they are the right kind of targets to focus on, for example ensuring
that we have children achieving an appropriate standard by the
age of five, closing the disadvantage gaps, and so on. There is
no getting away from the fact that those are difficult targets
and that there is an awful lot to do.
The other aspect of evaluating the success of
the programme is to assess what is happening now in terms of the
criteria that Sheila identified, as well as to look over the longer
term at the success achieved. For that reason the Sure Start evaluation
is trying to take a longitudinal approach and to understand over
a longer period of time whether the gains acquired in the earliest
years are sustained as children get older and move on. That would
be consistent with the international research that has tried to
understand the outcomes of early intervention.
Q24 Mr Dunne: Do you regard it as
a success or not that the number of neighbourhood nurseries joining
the programme has fallen from 1,300 to 400? Some have obviously
converted, but you are closing one neighbourhood nursery for every
two Sure Start facilities that you open up.
David Bell: A lot of the work
of neighbourhood nurseries has, of course, been subsumed into
the children's centre approach. One of the interesting characteristics
of the programme is that a variety of different models are now
being drawn together in the children's centre programme. The big
task for us is to ensure that we allow local flexibility and discretion,
but at the same time have a more consistent set of expectations
for all children's centres in future.
Q25 Mr Dunne: Do you see that consistency
applying to funding as well? As we have already heard, one of
the problems is the short-term nature and variability of the funding,
which may particularly affect private sector nurseries.
David Bell: May I draw your attention
to the table that has already been referred to on page 20? As
well as the table being of interest, the caveats at the top of
the table are quite important because they indicate at the one
end of the table, on the left-hand side, that there have been
some very well funded programmes, while the other side of the
table indicates some small-scale programmes. What we will be doing
through the children's centre programme is to have a more consistent
set of expectations. As I said in an answer to the Chairman, I
think we will see over a period of time a convergence of the average
expenditure in centres. That is bound to happen. Of course, many
of the centres have started from very different baselines.
Q26 Mr Dunne: I am pleased to hear
that. One of the problems in an area such as mine, which is very
rural but still has areas of high deprivation, is the demographics.
In our area and the Welsh marches we see declining birth rates
and school rolls. We are at the cusp: one or two children coming
in or not coming in each year threatens the viability of the entire
centre. Have you steps in place to address such problems?
David Bell: That is where the
local priority setting is important. It is for local authorities
to determine and decide where best to put the centres and, at
the same time, to take account of the factors that you have described.
In any funding system for any organisation, we cannot necessarily
account for every single change in circumstances. That is not
something that we can prescribe nationally. Deciding how to deal
with variations such as those that you have described has to be
done at a local level.
Q27 Mr Dunne: Do you think that the
increasing regionalisation—if I can use that word—of
some of the partner agencies, such as Jobcentre Plus and primary
care trusts, which are now being given responsibility for much
larger areas, will make that job easier or more difficult?
David Bell: It should not make
it more difficult because there are statutory obligations on Jobcentre
Plus, the health system and so on to work to provide most effectively
for children's services. I do not think that the configuration
of those other services should matter. In fact, as the paper points
out and as we can highlight, there are lots of extremely good
examples of Jobcentre Plus and the health system working to provide
services in children's centres.
Q28 Mr Dunne: That is fine if they
are there, but if they are down the end of a telephone line 100
miles away it makes it a lot more difficult, does it not, to identify
those people who are not already in touch with them? How will
they do that?
David Bell: Absolutely. I do not
think that we would suggest that providing services at very local
level is just about picking up a telephone and calling a call
centre, for example. I know that the children's centre that I
visited recently in London had Jobcentre Plus staff there occasionally.
Importantly, Jobcentre Plus staff were helping to provide the
children's centre staff with the information, facts and figures
to help the parents who were coming in. However public services
are organised at a macro level—if I can put it that way—this
is about ensuring that the people who need to be there are as
far as possible there to help the people who use and attend children's
centres.
Q29 Mr Dunne: For my last question,
can I take you to page 24, paragraph 2.27, which has to do with
governors? There is an alarming sentence at the end of the paragraph,
which states that the majority of managers of centres "felt
that governors either had difficulty understanding the key issues
or did not understand them at all." If that is an endemic
problem in the present governance structures, you have to sort
that out, do you not?
David Bell: Yes. I think it is
probably worth clarifying the use of the term "governors".
If a children's centre is attached to a mainstream school, the
school governors will obviously have responsibility. It is a fair
assumption that school governors, given their previous experience,
will be more secure about what their responsibilities are. When
you talk about other centres that are not based in schools, you
are not talking about governance in the school governance sense
but about advisory bodies and boards. However, the point still
stands. We need to ensure that whoever is involved in helping
to oversee children's centres at the most local level is well
aware of their responsibilities. An obvious point to make is that
for those centres that are not on school sites and are therefore
not under the control of school governing bodies, the local authority
is essentially responsible for their governance. It is the local
authority's responsibility to ensure that their governance is
secure.
Q30 Mr Mitchell: I start by saying
that I am an undiluted enthusiast for Sure Start children's centres,
so you will not hear any carping accountant's criticisms from
me on the matter. However, there are one or two problems that
we should explore.
Let us accept that Sure Start, which has been
a great success in Grimsby—its achievement is brilliant,
so all praise to it—is undertaking a task that has been
difficult for every other organisation involved. That task is
reaching out to what you might call the underclass—the deprived,
the people who are disadvantaged and who are really not part of
organised society. No other groups can do it—the parties
cannot do it, the Churches cannot do it—so why the hell
should we expect such brilliant results straight away from Sure
Start?
David Bell: I think that I agree
with you, if I am allowed to do that. You are absolutely right.
Many of the difficulties in getting to those groups are not new
to children's centres. Having said that, I think that children's
centres have created conditions that have not previously existed.
We often hear that one of the reasons why hard to reach groups
find things so difficult is that services are often so dispersed
that you cannot get them all in one place. One of the virtues
of the children's centres approach is that it has brought together
a lot of services that were previously separate. That at least
creates the right conditions, but as I said earlier in response
to the Chairman, you cannot assume that if you just sit there
in a children's centre, everyone will come to you.
Q31 Mr Mitchell: Okay, we agree on
that, but why did you not give the centres clearer, firmer guidelines
on how to do that or suggest a pattern of outreach, which seems
to be used in only a small proportion of centres, but is clearly
the way to go? Why did the Government or the Department not plan
the centres' futures for them better, by telling them how best
to approach the issue?
David Bell: Part of the underpinning
philosophy, certainly in the early programmes, was to allow those
sorts of decisions about how best to reach people in the local
area to be determined locally.
Q32 Mr Mitchell: But folk don't know—they
can be told and they can be helped, but it is difficult if you
say, "Do as inspiration strikes you".
David Bell: But on the point about
allowing local discretion, as the report points out, some bodies
have been very successful. We have consolidated that good practice
advice in examples, and the guidance that was issued in November
last year provides a lot of detail.
Q33 Mr Mitchell: So do you now circulate
best practice?
David Bell: That guidance went
out at the end of last year. There probably was an expectation
that more of these centres and their predecessor bodies would
have had success, but the task has proved to be harder than we
all expected. But as you said, this is a problem that public bodies,
private providers and so on have always found difficult.
Q34 Mr Mitchell: I turn to the evaluation
of performance. I do not want to carp, but, to be frank, I do
not care that the amount spent per child varies from £350
to £2,500, as long as that £2,500 is spent in Grimsby.
Is the evaluation done by Birkbeck College of the University of
London—it is in box 19, on page 38, paragraph 2—a
user/non-user evaluation, comparing the outcomes of the two groups?
David Bell: The evaluation is
largely focused on those children who are in Sure Start areas.
Q35 Mr Mitchell: But how can you
evaluate them unless you compare them with groups that are not
in Sure Start?
Sheila Scales: What is being evaluated
is the impact on the local areas, rather than those who use the
services.
Q36 Mr Mitchell: So it is not one
class of kids as against another class of kids?
Sheila Scales: No, that study
was an attempt to evaluate the Sure Start local programmes, which
were well funded to be very experimental, because they were trying
to develop the answers to those problems.
Q37 Mr Mitchell: I see a point in
that, but less point than in comparing the withs and the withouts.
In that connection, one finding about the early impact of the
programme seems inconceivable. Children of teenage mothers scored
lower on verbal ability and social competence—you would
expect that—but the Report also says that: "children
from the most deprived families were being adversely affected."
That seems inconceivable.
Sheila Scales: That was one of
the findings of the evaluation. All the early evaluation evidence
was of relatively marginal shifts—
Q38 Mr Mitchell: But on a priori
grounds, is that result not insane?
Sheila Scales: It seems hard to
explain, other than because the attention of that local area was
now spread across a wider group of disadvantaged children and
families, so there was less intensive support for that particular
group.
David Bell: May I supplement that,
Mr Mitchell? Box 19 at the bottom of the left-hand column says
that the positive and negative effects identified were all relatively
small, as would be expected at this early stage. We need to be
careful not to over-interpret those findings at this stage, which
in a sense is what the evaluation said. These are very early days.
Q39 Mr Mitchell: We are dealing with
a national movement, and in a sense previous years have been partly
a process of trial and error—finding out what is right and
what is wrong. Instead of emphasising local authority training,
why not have national training. So that people can be plugged
in to best practice more effectively and can compare notes over
the country?
David Bell: We would argue that
we are doing both. There are nationally run programmes—for
example, to do with centre leadership. Some programmes are organised
out of the National College for School Leadership with a particular
focus on centre leadership. At the same time, an awful lot of
local training is going on. In the recent publication of good
practice guidance we tried to draw together the best of what we
found out nationally, so local areas can choose what is best.
It is quite a good combination of national training programmes
and local choice. The body that I described earlier—the
Together for Children group, which is assisting local authorities
as they expand the programme—is also advising local authorities
and centres on the best and most appropriate kind of training.
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