Examination of Witnesses (Questions 100-114)
22 JANUARY 2007
DEPARTMENT FOR
EDUCATION AND
SKILLS AND
DEPARTMENT OF
HEALTH
Q100 Mr Bacon: Chairman, I have run
out of time. May I just say this? Given that we are an accounts
Committee, not a policy Committee, it is pretty important that
witnesses appearing before us understand that we need to know,
and they should be able to tell us, how much money they have spent
that has been voted for by Parliament on the project that we are
considering.
Q101 Helen Goodman: I am sorry I
was not here at the beginning. I was in another Committee, so
I hope that the Chairman will stop me if I repeat questions. Mr
Bell, when Ho Chi Minh was asked what he thought of the French
revolution, he said, "It's too soon to tell." Are you
really saying that about Sure Start?
David Bell: I hope it will not
take 250-plus years or whatever to make that judgment. I am trying
to draw a distinction between the aspects of the programme that
you can perhaps judge quite quickly—for example, whether
you are reaching groups that you have not previously reached—and
the aspects of the programme that will take longer to determine,
such as whether children have improved their school attainment
as a result of investment in early years. In some ways, we are
having to look at the longer-term consequences of programmes such
as this to come to a final conclusion.
Q102 Helen Goodman: Figure 2 sets
out the benefits, challenges and concerns. What would you say
was more important—the impact on children and families,
or the evaluation and monitoring?
David Bell: Can you refer me to
the page?
Helen Goodman: Pages 10 and 11. There
is a big chart showing all sorts of things that are going well
and that are not going so well. Of these two—impact on children
and families, and evaluation and monitoring—which do you
think is more important?
David Bell: The impact on children
and families.
Q103 Helen Goodman: So, in so far
as we can tell, what is happening now in the programme is going
quite well.
David Bell: Yes, and as I suggested
earlier, the programme is about trying to put in place the conditions
for success to reach some very disadvantaged families. It seems
to me that one aspect of those conditions is getting partnership
working. In the end, however, professionals and others can work
as well as they like with each other, but the only real impact
of the programme is felt if children and families benefit as a
result of it.
Q104 Helen Goodman: In one of the
appendices, the study done by Birkbeck is described—on page
38, box 19, but you will know this; you do not need to look. One
of its criticisms involved the apparent impact on children who
had not gone to centres. Do you think it is wholly reasonable
to measure the impact of a programme in terms of the impact on
people who do not avail themselves of the service?
David Bell: As Sheila said, the
evaluation programme is principally concerned with the effects
of the programmes in the areas where the centres are based. It
is probably quite difficult to speculate on what might have happened
or what has not happened in areas where the services have not
been offered. The principle underpinning the evaluation programme
is: what impact has the programme made in the areas where Sure
Start centres and children's centres have been established?
Q105 Helen Goodman: I have six from
phase 1 in my constituency and two in phase 2. Mrs. Scales, obviously
everyone is concerned that children's centres should make provision
for the most hard to reach families, but is not one of the criticisms
of the scheme—that middle-class people are keen to get their
children into it—in fact a positive, because it shows that
the service is not stigmatised, but is community-based and it
is seen as of a high quality?
Sheila Scales: Certainly the notion
that it is a universal service and that there should be no barriers
to entry is very important. It is also important to remember,
as David Bell said, that although the most disadvantaged may not
have been reached in the proportions that we would have liked,
some very, very disadvantaged people have been helped by the centres
and there are examples, as you see when you go to centres, of
people whose lives have been changed as a result.
Q106 Helen Goodman: One of the things
about measurement—this comes out of the Report, but we also
see it more generally—is that when it is seen as a way of
checking and controlling, local centre managers are often resistant
to taking part in it, whereas if measurement involves measures
that are chosen by the people in the community because they have
particular aims and objectives and they want to improve their
services to particular groups of children in certain ways, people
tend to run with the measurement in a much more proactive way.
What input on measurement has there been from the work on the
ground?
Sheila Scales: We consulted on
the performance management framework, which we put out in its
final form in November. We talked to people a lot of centres and
solicited contributions about whether people thought we were picking
the right set of indicators. We have gone for a set of indicators
which are mainly about outcomes, but which also cover reach, and
they confirm what a lot of people told us. We have deliberately
left space and encouraged people to think about what local indictors
they might want to add. We also designed a self-evaluation form
so that people can clearly see that this is to help them do their
job as opposed to an imposition from us.
Q107 Helen Goodman: I did not know
about that; that is interesting. May I just ask you about figure
10 on page 20, which looks at the centres developed from Sure
Start local programmes and the other centres? My understanding—please
correct me if I am wrong—is that the early Sure Start local
programmes were more strongly built up in partnership with local
parents groups and the voluntary sector. My first question is:
is that right? My second question is: why is there a difference
in emphasis between the early programmes and the later ones?
Sheila Scales: The earlier programmes
were run and managed by a variety of different bodies including
community and parent's groups, but the principle of close involvement
with community groups and parents is carried through into the
new arrangements for which local authorities will have overall
responsibility. The change has happened because the local programmes
were deliberately set up to be experimental—they were to
try new things and tackle problems that clearly had not been solved
before. We hope that as we move forward, develop good practice
from those programmes and share it more widely, we will converge
on a set of measures that are the most cost-effective in making
a real impact.
Q108 Helen Goodman: Colleagues have
asked you questions about the training and have focused on the
management training and the difficulty of different professions.
However, my recollection is that when this began six or seven
years' ago there was a severe shortage of people with early-years
professional qualifications. To go back to the Chinese analogy,
you needed to recruit red army-scale numbers of people. Where
are you on training people in early years skills now?
Sheila Scales: We have a major
investment programme of £250 million over two years in a
transformation fund that is designed to help upskill the early-years
work force. We are just starting on that programme and it is designed
to train graduate leaders for early years and make sure that we
have more people at NVQ level 3 in the work force. The numbers
at that level have been increasing—I do not have the figures
at my fingertips, but we can let you have a note on it. There
is a lot more to do in general for the early-years work force
and for those working in children's centres.[5]
Q109 Helen Goodman: The fact that
people find it difficult to cross boundaries raises a question
about the content of the courses and whether they are sufficiently
cross-boundary in the early-years sector.
Sheila Scales: The Department
produced some general training modules in April last year about
integrated working, working across boundaries and working with
the Children's Workforce Development Council in order to ensure
that we have a whole suite of support for that training from management
level to front line. As you say, the most difficult thing to do
to is to break down the cultural and professional barriers that
have existed for so long.
Chairman: Austin Mitchell has a supplementary
question.
Q110 Mr Mitchell: I think it is clear
that a number of us are concerned that the transfer to local authorities
could mean a dilution of all of the achievements of Sure Start.
What guarantees can you give us that the impetus, ethos and achievement
behind the first 1,000, which I think, although perhaps lawyers
do not, have been an outstanding success, will be maintained and
not diluted and that money will not be transferred to the broader
purposes of the 3,500 centres that we will establish that will
serve a lower—or perhaps smaller—set of purposes?
David Bell: In relation to the
Sure Start grant, we require each local authority to sign and
agree to the terms of a memorandum of grant that, among other
things, actually lays out the purposes of the grant and what it
must be spent on. We have a measure of control that way. Equally,
as we have emphasised throughout this afternoon, the aim is not
to specify in precise detail from the centre exactly how every
children's centre should be organised. As far as the general conditions
of the grant are concerned—
Q111 Mr Mitchell: If it has been
a success, we want that success to go on, do we not? To be frank,
I am worried about local authorities' involvement.
David Bell: I think that there
are two dimensions to that. The formal part is grant conditions
and the like, and the informal part relates to sharing best practice.
We need to work on the assumption that every local authority involved
in the programme wants to make it work and to make it work well
and will therefore be keen to access the best information about
what is working. Together for Children, the body that is working
with us on this, will keep its eye on and work with local authorities
to see what is working, whether there are gaps in provision, what
needs to be improved and so on. Of course, our inspection programme
on the joint area review gives us that kind of information about
how well children's centres contribute to outcomes.
Q112 Mr Mitchell: But if local authorities
start to dilute the programme and do not fulfil the purposes,
have you any reserve powers?
David Bell: Under the conditions
of grant we can indicate what the grant is to be spent on. The
other point to make is that through the arrangements with Together
for Children and working with local authorities, we will have
a clear picture of what is happening from place to place. We will
not necessarily know every last detail about what is happening
in every children's centre, but we will know if local authorities
have remained consistent with the principles that underpin the
programme.
Q113 Mr Mitchell: Just one further
point. Last week, when we raised the issue of anti-social behaviour,
the way in which the Home Office deals with it and Louise Casey's
work in that area, we heard that there is going to be an attempt
to deal with problem families. It will not involve only parenting
orders but a whole series of interventions to try to help problem
families so that the kids do not develop into problem adults.
Will the children's centres play any part in that?
David Bell: I think that they
do already. If you look at the range of services outlined in the
Report that are provided, many are designed to help parents that
might be struggling with their children, who might have concerns
about their children's behaviour or who might be concerned about
health or diet.
Q114 Mr Mitchell: I was talking about
a kind of disciplinary approach, and the Sure Starts are a more
voluntary approach.
David Bell: Yes. People are not
compelled to come to Sure Start children's centres, and nor should
they be, but equally, as the Report has highlighted, there are
groups that do not naturally make use of such services, so the
responsibility on each of the children's centres is to encourage
those who would not usually come in to come. The approach of children's
centres is intended to be much more positive in the sense that
it is not seen to be a punishment to bring your child to a children's
centre, but rather an opportunity to do things that you might
not otherwise have done.
Chairman: Mr Bell, your predecessor went
on to the Home Office. Come the next reshuffle of jobs, there
may not be a Home Office to go to. We will have to wait and see.
Mr Mitchell: There will be two posts.
Chairman: You may have a choice, Mr Bell.
I thank you all for your attendance and for
answering our questions, although I have no doubt that the Committee
shares Mr Bacon's surprise at not being able to get answers to
his questions about how much the whole project has cost. Mr Bell,
you are the Accounting Officer for the Department and we would
expect you to have that information. If you did not have it to
hand I would have thought that your colleagues behind you would
have been able to assist you. We will require you to write to
us to give us those details. Thank you for your attendance.
The Committee will now go into private session
to consider the Chairman's draft report. Our visitors from Portugal
and India are welcome to stay if they so wish.
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