UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 1091-i

HOUSE OF COMMONS

MINUTES OF EVIDENCE

TAKEN BEFORE THE

CHILDREN, SCHOOLS AND FAMILIES COMMITTEE

 

SURE START CHILDREN'S CENTRES

 

MONDAY 2 NOVEMBER 2009

 

PROFESSOR EDWARD MELHUISH, PROFESSOR IRAM SIRAJ-BLATCHFORD, TERESA SMITH and DR. MARGY WHALLEY

 

Evidence heard in Public

Questions 1 - 55

 

USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT

1.	This is an uncorrected transcript of evidence taken in public and reported to the House. The transcript has been placed on the internet on the authority of the Committee, and copies have been made available by the Vote Office for the use of Members and others.
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4.	Prospective witnesses may receive this in preparation for any written or oral evidence they may in due course give to the Committee.

 

 

Oral Evidence

Taken before the Children, Schools and Families Committee

on Monday 2 November 2009

Members present:

Mr. Barry Sheerman (Chairman)

Annette Brooke

Mr. David Chaytor

Mr. Andrew Pelling

Helen Southworth

Mr. Graham Stuart

Mr. Edward Timpson

 

Examination of Witnesses

Witnesses: Professor Edward Melhuish, Executive Director, National Evaluation of Sure Start, Professor Iram Siraj-Blatchford, Professor of Early Childhood Education, Institute of Education, Teresa Smith, Department of Social Policy and Social Work, University of Oxford and Dr. Margy Whalley, Director of the Pen Green Centre Research, Development and Training Base gave evidence.

 

Q1 Chairman: I welcome our witnesses: Professor Edward Melhuish, Dr. Margy Whalley, Professor Iram Siraj-Blatchford and Teresa Smith. Thank you very much for coming. I must apologise to Professor Melhuish, because I'd forgotten that some time ago he did give evidence to the Committee, so we have no first-timers with us today.

There is likely to be a general election, not before Christmas but certainly some time around the spring, so many of the inquiries we are doing are for the short to medium term. We are not doing the long inquiries that we are known to do. This is one of the medium-term ones-one of the medium-length ones-but we believe we can look at Sure Start children's centres in the time that we have, with your help and assistance, and this is the first session. Usually we have a seminar to get us started, so this may have a seminar feel to it, because we're looking at the origins and tracing the beginnings and the development of the whole process. Ted, where are we with children's centres?

Professor Melhuish: You have to remember that the root of them was back in 1999; they started off as Sure Start local programmes. They rapidly expanded over the next few years, so that by 2003 we had over 500 Sure Start local programmes. We were undertaking the national evaluation of Sure Start in those early years, and we presented evidence on the progress of the early Sure Start centres in deprived areas. It is important to note that all the early Sure Start programmes were in deprived areas. We presented mixed results: some good things and some bad things were happening in the early stages of Sure Start programmes. That report was published in 2005. As a result of that work and also, partly, some of the work coming out of the EPPE project that Iram and I were both involved with, which showed that integrated children's centres were a particularly effective form of provision, the then Secretary of State changed Sure Start local programmes to become Sure Start children's centres as of 2006. At the same time, they were transferred to local authority control.

 

Q2 Chairman: As there is such a churn in Ministers, could you tell us which Minister that was?

Professor Melhuish: Margaret Hodge.

 

Q3 Chairman: The inspiration for Sure Start came from which Ministry and which Minister?

Professor Melhuish: The inspiration for Sure Start came from Gordon Brown and his drive to break the cycle of disadvantage.

 

Q4 Chairman: Where did he get the idea from?

Professor Melhuish: It's been a long-held idea of his, for some time, that there is a need to break the cycle of disadvantage whereby generations replicate the poverty of their parents in terms of their educational achievement, employment and other things.

 

Q5 Chairman: But he wasn't inspired by the American programme?

Professor Melhuish: It was inspired by the American programme. I'll go into a bit more detail. Gordon Brown took over on 1 May 1997 as Chancellor of the Exchequer. A couple of days later, he passes control of interest rates over to the Bank of England.

Chairman: And had nothing else to do!

Professor Melhuish: What happened then was that he had a bank of economists, who had at the time been running models to work out what the interest rate should be and who effectively had nothing to do, so he delegated those economists to look into other issues of public spending. He gave one of them, Norman Glass, the job of looking at the issue of the cycle of deprivation. Norman Glass was given the task of spending a year reviewing all the available evidence. He came across all the American evidence, etc.-America was where the majority of the evidence was at that time-and came up with the view that the early years are where we have to act if we are to have any chance of breaking the cycle of disadvantage. That gave rise to the 1998 cross-departmental review body. Then there was the first announcement of Sure Start, and the first Sure Start programmes came into effect at the end of 1999. So that is where the original idea came from.

The original evidence was based upon a number of American studies. They were largely randomised control trials, where you have an intervention, randomly assigned-some of your poor families received an intervention, some did not get it. Then, several years later, you see what happened to them. Those randomised control trials presented very strong evidence that certain kinds of intervention worked.

What was interesting about the way in which Sure Start was initially set up was that it emphasised community control to such an extent that communities that had a Sure Start programme could decide more or less for themselves what to put into place, without any particular model being offered to them as guidance. That was exactly the opposite of what the evidence was telling us, which was that very tightly defined programmes produced good results. In that sense, while there was some evidence that inspired this idea that early intervention works, the way that Sure Start was initially put in place did not pay too much attention to the detail of that evidence.

As we started to collate evidence, people started to pay attention to the evidence, and that is partly why there was a change in 2006, with the Sure Start children's centres, which have a model that is much more highly specified than the previous Sure Start programmes. It was also after 2006 that the idea of rolling out Sure Start more generally to the whole population, by setting up 3,500 children's centres by 2010, was started. They started to come on stream around 2007. So we are now in a situation where there are 3,500 children's centres, of which about 700 to 800 are in deprived areas, which was the original model of Sure Start, and the remainder are in relatively more affluent areas.

In our research work, we have concentrated on the Sure Start children's centres in deprived areas, which were originally Sure Start programmes, so our research cannot say too much about the Sure Start children's centres in non-deprived areas, although anecdotally one gets the impression that they are radically different from the Sure Start programmes in other Sure Start children's centres. One also gets the impression that with the changeover to local authority control from 2006, quite large local authority differences have started to emerge in the way that Sure Start is put into practice.

Chairman: Let's leave it there for the moment. Margy?

Dr. Whalley: I am sorry-I have got a completely different perspective, which is useful for you guys, I guess. I am a practitioner-researcher in a research base in a children's centre and I have been there since '83. Children's centres have a very long history in this country. Actually, they date back to Peckham in the 1920s-working, picking out. There was a very strong movement in the 1970s and 1980s both for family centres, which were coming from a social work base-a lot of them were in the voluntary third sector and social services-and for integrated children's centres, as they were called in the 1970s and 1980s. There were some outstanding integrated centres, many of which were involved in the EPPE study. The centre that I work in was set up in 1983. So there is this long tradition in this country of fully integrated children's centres.

What has come on since then is the notion of the early excellence centres, which happened in 1997 and were the first response of this Government to try to pull together education and care, and integrate the education and care. Integration is the key word when we are thinking about children's centres and I think that it has got lost along the way a bit.

Early excellence centres were the first shot at trying to integrate education and care in a kind of children's centre service, building on some of the best practice of the 1970s and 1980s. Then we had neighbourhood nurseries, where the focus-this was when Gordon Brown came in-went much more towards child care. Perhaps one of the most challenging things for children's centres is that a preoccupation with a narrow view of child care has actually slanted the way some outstanding community practice has evolved, and we need to look at that.

Then we had Sure Start local programmes, and their greatest strength was that they were community-driven. I see that as a real strength. It didn't go far enough, because the professionals who work in children's centres have to change their professional practice if they are going to work. Some of those initial community projects were outstanding, and they were engaging with some of the most minoritised groups, and those minoritised groups were very active in driving forward some of the centres' practices.

I agree that the notional core offer that came up-there was this list of the kind of activities that children's centres ought to have in them-was not helpful. It wasn't strong enough on philosophy and the underpinning need for really high quality services, which don't come cheap. Children's centres are very thrifty as organisations, but they're not cheap, nor should they be cheap.

And then we had the new model of children's centres, which really built on all the ones that had gone before. We exported them to Australia in the 1920s. They thrived all over the world as models of integrated service provision, and Australia is just reinventing them and looking to the UK for good ideas, because they've seen what we've done and they think that it does work.

There is some evidence of that; but I think it's pulling together the community development work that went on in the '70s and '80s with the understanding that high quality early education with care is what's needed. It's as if Rumbold had never happened-those reports, which showed us that it's only when we integrate education and care as the actual rock for these services that you will get the kind of transformational impact that children's centres can have on communities.

The biggest challenge for Sure Start was always "Are you working with the most minoritised groups in your community: the people who find the public sector really hard to engage with?" And the truth was that they weren't, but that's the bit where we require the professionals to work differently. It's no good just to co-locate in the community and go on working the way you've always worked, because if you do that you're going to get the same outcomes you've always had, and you need to engage with local people.

Chairman: Iram, what's your take on this? Your two colleagues have two very contrasting views.

Professor Siraj-Blatchford: I think children's centres can't be seen as the panacea for solving all the problems of the country, and I think that in some ways it is historical. We had Sure Start local programmes, which were community-based, when all the evidence that I knew about, at least as a researcher, was that centre-based programmes were more effective, or at least gave you a bigger bang for your buck in terms of children's outcomes and support for parents.

There are parent support programmes that are important, and I don't think we've ever got over that, because the community-based work, which was working with families with the children kind of attached to them, moved to a centre-based programme, which was trying to pick up on the research, which was linked to children's outcomes.

I come from the background of having done, with Ted, the EPPE study, which has been following 3,000 children for the last 13 years from all types of different group provision, including nursery schools, which you heard about last week in the single formula funding Committee, and also the combined centres-play groups, private day nurseries, and so on. Our evidence did suggest-this was something that caught the imagination of Ministers like Margaret Hodge-that quality is based on the experiences children have of the amount of education that they get.

When I put it like that I don't mean children being rote taught, or fed education, but a high quality provision that combines care and education, as Margy said-you have to have the right proportion of staff, and the quality of staff. So my issue has more to do with what research was telling us at the time. It was telling us that the Illinois parent-child centres were working. Even in India, the integrated child development services were based around centres rather than communities. Around the world, we had that experience. Our own research was telling us that centres that did the wrap-around but also supported parents and families tended to have a stronger history in our own country.

I don't think that we have been good at looking at the evidence of what actually impacts on children's and families' outcomes. Sometimes there has been a tension between family outcomes and children's outcomes, but the research has continued to develop, and people have talked about intergenerational outcomes, and that you need to work with families and children together. I think the best place for that is centre-based, rather than simply community-based. That is not to say there shouldn't be community-based programmes, but for programmes of this size and this volume of public funding, at best, the centre-type approach does help to target provision. At worst, you can have too many things going on, so it's almost like a spray and pray approach: "If we try to do as much as we can, somebody will get something."

But again, the evidence is telling us that it's better to have targeted, focused interventions that are intensive for those people who need it. Your colleagues are probably aware that once there is a poverty of aspiration in communities or families, there is a level of inertia that needs pulling out, and that requires quite an intense amount of investment and intervention, and not a series of services just being there. Even now, children's centres are bemoaning the fact that they don't reach the hardest to reach. That is an issue. It is expensive as well.

I question whether children's centres aren't trying to do too much. I'm not sure they're ready to do care, education and health-all of those things. If they could, it would be absolutely brilliant. Shall I tell you why they can't at the moment? The reason I think they can't at the moment is that there is a problem with staffing. We've expanded too quickly. There's a lag in capacity and quality of staff, and one thing we have not worked well on is the training of staff, either in initial training or in terms of ongoing continued professional training.

The other piece of work that I've been doing is evaluations on the early years theme of research for the Centre for Excellence and Outcomes. That shows that it is too early to talk about integration working, certainly at local authority level, because the structures have only just been set up. There is more evidence that integration is working at children's centre level, especially where you've got discrete aspects of integration, like the integration of education and care, which ensures that children are getting stimulation that is cognitive as well as social and emotional, and some support for their parents as well.

But I think we need to question whether we have the capacity in terms of staff to be able to deliver the agenda that children's centres are trying to deliver. We also need to question whether children's centres have enough information on what works-evidence-based interventions that can support families and children-and then whether the staff have the skills to be able to do that work.

 

Q6 Chairman: Teresa, this has been a long journey and an expensive one. Has it been worth it?

Teresa Smith: For children's centres, for the country or for the Committee?

Chairman: For children's centres.

Teresa Smith: I sit here as a witness today. I come as a member of the five-year evaluation of children's centres that's just been commissioned by the Department for Children, Schools and Families. We are at the very beginning of the journey of being able to demonstrate to you whether children's centres work and to what extent they work, but you're not going to be able to wait five years for that evidence, so what I have to do today is be able to tell you where I think we've got-the beginnings of evidence and where we in the research and the evaluation are going to be trying to focus very hard on the questions that need to be asked, and that we will, I hope, be able to ask, although people around this table may vary as to what extent we can.

I think that there are five crucial themes about the starting points for children's centres. They are about the evidence from what, 30 years ago, were called combined nursery centres, which for the first time were putting together education and care, as other people have already talked about. That was very hard evidence, and it continues to be hard evidence: if you put young children in particular in high-quality learning situations, often with older children and with people who actually know about teaching and learning, the evidence is that you get much better cognitive outcomes-learning outcomes-for those children.

That is the first bit of evidence. The second starting point for children's centres for me has been the question of access and what, at various times, we have talked of as one-stop shops. The idea is that families who may not be terribly engaged with services, or who think that services are not particularly relevant to them, can actually get access to services through one door. We know a good deal about how to construct those services from previous research, and we also know quite a lot about the impact of co-locating those services as access points for families.

The third thing, which people have not really talked about so far, is child poverty. That, I think, was a major issue for the current Government when they were first elected. Strongly based research shows that child poverty was crucially damaging to children's life chances. There were then a number of ways to tackle that: do you tackle it by giving more benefits to families, or by enabling families to make more use of the labour market?

The Government have clearly gone down that second route, and have seen a route into the labour market as one possible route for tackling issues to do with child poverty. But we know from previous research that you cannot do that without also working on people's skills, people's readiness to engage with the labour market-and, indeed, engaging with the labour market itself, because there is no point in having high-quality training for parents who are desperate to get back into work tomorrow unless (a) there is a job and (b) there is child care. That, I think, is fundamentally why there was that very radical shift, as Ted and others have pointed out, to include child care as part of the Sure Start menu-of course, people vary on that.

The fourth is integration-the integration of services not just of combined education and care but of a whole range of family support services. The fifth one that I would want to talk about is the engagement of parents. The crucial aspect that children's centres have to work on, and are trying to work on, is how to excite parents. How do you excite parents about what their children are learning and what the possibilities are for children's improvement in health, and for their own improvement in health? A depressed mother, for example, may have a child with learning difficulties or speech delay. As we again know from research, that is most likely to be bound up with parental depression. It is just one example. How do you actually change that parent's view of what is possible?-but the excitement that you get when that parent does.

Those are the five starting points that I would see. Children's centres are currently working on all those starting points. I have to say that they are all areas that we, in research, are going to be focusing on when we look at implementation; and we try to feed in what we find from the implementation into questions such as can you isolate dimensions of service or can you isolate types or models, and putting together those services into types of children's centres that are more or less effective in the way that they change parents' thinking and actually improve children's outcomes.

Chairman: Thank you. That has started us very well.

We now come to questions. When one of my colleagues asks a question, will you indicate who wants to lead? Just catch my eye. I ask you and my colleagues to be quite punchy, as we have a lot to get through.

 

Q7 Mr. Chaytor: Would more progress have been made over the past 10 years if the children's centre brand had been adopted straight away at the start of the '97 Government, rather than moving from Sure Start local programmes, dabbling with early excellence centres and talking about neighbourhood nurseries? In the early years, there was massive confusion about what all those things were and how they fitted together. Would we have made more progress if we had had children's centres from day one?

Professor Melhuish: Yes.

 

Q8 Mr. Chaytor: Why?

Professor Melhuish: Because you have to remember that prior to 2000 we were effectively a policy desert in this area. We had a history of integrated children's centres, going back several decades, but that was largely in the voluntary sector. There was very little large-scale work of this kind under way. Because it was a policy desert, there was a complete lack of adequately trained staff to staff these places. If you bring in poorly trained staff because they haven't done anything of this kind before, and then tell them to do something that is rather diffuse, ill-defined and without any clear guidelines, you don't get too much happening. Some of them did extraordinarily well, but a lot of people didn't. A children's centre model gives them a clear set of guidance about what should be done, and they therefore know that they can hit the ground running in terms of delivering services. That is primarily why it would have been better to begin with that model, because it is a much more clearly defined set of services for delivery and we know from previous evidence that it works. In that sense, we would have been better off if that model had been adopted from the word go.

Dr. Whalley: Integrating care and education was the first stepping stone and it needed to move on from there. We didn't have the wonderful policy seminars that we had for Sure Start. We had lead-in time for Sure Start, but we had no lead-in time for early excellence. When Labour was in opposition there was a series of seminars and discussions, but everything had to happen very quickly and the most important focus seemed to be to get the education and care right. We had very highly qualified staff during early excellence. They were highly qualified teachers and highly qualified early educators with nursery nurse backgrounds. The money has run out a bit, but the qualifications and training of the staff, as Iram said, are absolutely critical. Under the early excellence centres we had it. With early excellence, I think we also started a very good model of validated self-evaluation, in which we encouraged the staff in the integrated centres to see themselves as very self-reflective and self-critical. It was all beginning, but it went off in a different direction.

A lot of the Sure Start work was outstanding conceptually, but running it into practice very quickly, we didn't have the understanding of what it takes to run a service in the community. We're not talking about some kind of dualism between community services and a centre. We have always needed to talk about a centre, and there is good evidence that local people need to see a centre delivering something. But when Sure Start started, I don't think we fully understood what it would take to get professionals working collaboratively. The balance of the primary task of a children's centre is absolutely critical, and I believe that if a centre is to work and have its impact it must retain the safeguarding element, which is the child protection-we are working with the most vulnerable families-alongside the very high quality early education with care. What happened with later implementation of programmes was that we went into child care exclusively, rather than education with care, which requires teachers. We have to have teacher input. We have to have well-qualified staff leading the pedagogy and that side of it. You have that balance there.

We then have to have the bit that Teresa talked about, which never had the chance to establish itself-where are the parents in all this, parents who are deeply committed in every case? I have worked in the field for 38 years, in the 10 to 20% most deprived wards, and parents passionately want something more for their children than they had for themselves, but may not feel that they can get into the public sector services. They find schools surrounded by barbed wire and Rottweiler receptionists that they can't get past. They find health centres equally difficult to engage with. We've got to try to train staff to work in a different way, but they must be highly qualified, and have supervision and support, so we harness the energy of parents for early education and their passion for their children's learning and development. It can be done. We know from the work of Feinstein and that of Jo Blanden that when you get parents as advocates for their children you will get transformation in the poorest communities, where families have had no positive experience of the public sector.

 

Q9 Mr. Chaytor: But is the answer yes or no?

Dr. Whalley: I think the answer is that we tried hard at each stage, but what we did not do was to stop and get the primary task of the children's centre sorted out. There is research coming from so many different directions-all of it useful research. However, we can do it now; we have got time now to do it. This inquiry will help it to happen, I believe.

Professor Siraj-Blatchford: Somebody asked me this question in Melbourne on Friday, about whether the Victoria Government should go for integrated centres. My advice was the same as it would have been here. On Friday, I said, "No, don't expand them the way that they were expanded", because there has always been a tension between quantity and quality. I think that the issue of centres just being expanded has to be based on the question of what they are for. What do we want them to do and can they deliver it, realistically, for the numbers we have got and with the quality of staff we have got?

They are taking that advice on board. In 1997, the Department for Children, Schools and Families, or the DFE-whatever it was called then-was not ready to accept that we even needed to study nursery schools and combined centres, because there were something like 70 combined centres in the country at the time, 500 nursery schools and something like 11,000 nursery classes. So in terms of the number of children going to them, they were seen as expensive and very few in number. It was only in the second year, when we worked on a proposal to combine them, that the evidence started building up in a bigger way. But for some of us the evidence was there already, because we had been working with combined centres for a long, long time.

However, we know that the combined centres required a great deal of depth and expertise, and they were quite expensive. To try to do this on the cheap is a problem. I would rather have fewer centres-say 500 children's centres-doing a fantastic job across the country than 3,500 delivering a squib.

I really think a lot of children's centres out there are doing a fantastic job, particularly children's centres in phase one, which did suck up a lot of the quality staff, and then we have got a real mixture in phase two and phase three. Hindsight is a great thing, but looking back now I think that we were not ready for it; I am not sure we are ready for it now.

 

Q10 Mr. Chaytor: Is that an argument for diversity and variety of projects at local level, or is it an argument for stronger central direction? I ask, because earlier your comment was that the real problem was lack of capacity and that expansion had come too quickly and too soon, because there were not enough trained staff. Does that view not justify the case that there should be less experimentation at local level and more of a sort of centralised national children's centre model?

Professor Siraj-Blatchford: To begin with, I think that it would have been nice to get one thing right and then expand, with local experience, from that one thing. I think that local experience is very important and you do get different populations of children and different areas with different needs. However, we need a core and at the moment I believe that the core is too big. For instance, the high-level reviews that I have been doing show that health is very poorly integrated and yet an enormous amount has been spent doing that. Maybe we are going to get there in time, but I just question whether we are trying to do too much, too soon, at once.

Chairman: Teresa, would you like to come in on this?

Teresa Smith: Can I just add one point?

Chairman: I cannot call all four of you on every question, or we will be here at midnight.

Teresa Smith: Very quickly, I just want to add one point about your question about 1997. I think that what Sure Start gave us was the opportunity, which children's centres at that time would not have given us, to place much more emphasis on questions about how local neighbourhoods and local communities set about defining their needs. I suspect that we are now asking children's centres to do that because of the experience we had in Sure Start.

 

Q11 Mr. Chaytor: Well, that leads me to my next question. As yours was such a short response, Teresa, maybe I'll put the next question to you as well. Over a 10-year period, how well has the national children's centre programme built on the experience of the various previous experiments? Have we learned from experience, and have we paid attention to what the research said?

Teresa Smith: That's a very difficult question for me, because it's precisely one of the overall encompassing questions that we're going to be trying to address in the evaluation; but looking so far at how centres are developing, I think that the programme has certainly learned the lesson that you may get more of a common menu of services, if that's what, at the centre, you say is required. That is point one.

Point two: there's a very strong focus on narrowing the gap and on ways in which you evaluate that. That is a profoundly difficult task-to narrow the gap, to make sure that everybody improves, that all children improve, but to make sure that the gap is narrowing. Will we ever do that? I suspect one lesson that has not been learned is that the impacts of programmes like this are always going to be relatively small scale in comparison with the outset expectations and that one has to build one's expectations along those lines-that there will be small-scale improvements, but they will be in the right directions.

From neighbourhood nurseries-NNI-I think that one of the lessons was that if you focus on disadvantaged areas you can get better and more provision in those areas, and that has certainly been the case. The second lesson from neighbourhood nurseries I am not sure is being learned. It is that there was much greater difficulty on the part of the private sector in getting engaged in the most disadvantaged areas, partly of course because those areas were economically much less likely to provide sustainable provision or sustainable employment for the families that most needed it. I think that is a major issue that has to be tackled by children's centres, by the Government and by local authorities now, but I don't as yet see signs of that being learned, particularly in the provision of early child care, which, as you know, has to be a self-sustaining, self-financing entity within a children's centre.

 

Q12 Mr. Chaytor: Finally, back to Ted. Have we lost the original drive of the Sure Start centres? They were absolutely focused on the children from the poorest backgrounds. In the move to national children's centres has that been lost, somehow? Is it too dispersed now?

Professor Melhuish: I think a certain amount of drive at the central level, within DCSF, has been lost, in that managing this whole area of Sure Start has become an administrative chore, and there doesn't seem to be the drive that there was in the early years to do something revolutionary, or to do something that really affects the lives of people in an important way, so in that sense a bit of drive, I think, has been lost. But at the local level, if you talk to the managers of Sure Start children's centres, they are every bit as committed and driven as they were in the early days. I think it's a question of giving those people support.

Points I would like to make are: one-I think you have to tackle local authority diversity, because that's a major problem now, and it didn't use to be.

 

Q13 Chairman: Sorry. Local government diversity didn't use to be a problem, and it is now? In what sense?

Professor Melhuish: Because before 2006 all Sure Start programmes were controlled centrally. It was only in 2006 that control transferred to local authorities. They receive the money direct at the local authority, and there's absolute authority to divvy it up in the way they see fit to particular children's centres. Up to then, before 2006, children's centres got their money direct from central Government.

Q14 Chairman: What Minister was in charge then?

Professor Melhuish: Margaret Hodge was in charge up until that point, and then Beverley Hughes took over just before, but the decision had been made to transfer the local authority control by Margaret Hodge just before Beverley Hughes took over.

The other major issue that has to be tackled is the integration of health services with children's centres. We have some evidence that where there is good integration of health services, children's services function better and get better outcomes. The trouble is, there's a completely different administrative hierarchy between local authorities and health trusts. They're completely separate areas of government. In some areas of the country, they integrate well and co-operate well; in other areas of the country, they barely talk to each other. That's another major problem to take on board.

Chairman: I'm sure we're going to come back to that. Let's talk about the expansion of children's centres. We're going to be led by Helen.

 

Q15 Helen Southworth: In terms of the way the expansion operated, what has been learned about being able to narrow the gap between more disadvantaged children, either in a disadvantaged community or in mixed communities?

Dr. Whalley: What's been learned from the Sure Start programme is what Hadow said, I think, in 1929: what a good and wise father wants for his children, a state should want for all its children. If you negotiate outcomes locally, they're not going to be very different from what a Government would want. The bit that we learned in terms of outcomes and narrowing the gap was around whether negotiating those outcomes locally with families and children in the community really does work.

What didn't happen, though, was putting the training in for staff who, under early excellence, were given training in how to evaluate and look at the impact of what they were actually doing with children and families. It was begun, but that journey didn't continue, partly, I think, because the research and evaluation went national rather than local, and at early excellence centres, a lot of funding went to individual integrated centres to conduct their own research. They were allowed to engage with local universities. But they learned a lot of skills about becoming local researchers, and they were able to focus very much on the impact on children and families.

An enormous future investment needs to be in skilling up the work force in being very effective practitioner-researchers, really understanding how to negotiate outcomes locally with families and holding themselves responsible for "Are we actually making a difference?" At the moment, they deliver things. They deliver services, but whether those services are actually making any difference to people has been put to one side. When DCSF-DFES, as it was-was in control of delivering the programme, there was passion at DCSF, DFES or whatever it was called then. When it went out to Serco and became about quantity and delivery within 3,500 children's centres, we lost that sense of "What's going on in them?", "Where's the quality agenda?" and "What difference are these children's centres making?"

Professor Siraj-Blatchford: I'm horribly jet-lagged; I've forgotten the question. Is it to do with narrowing the gap?

Helen Southworth: Yes.

Professor Siraj-Blatchford: I think that there has been some progress in narrowing the gap, but it's very, very difficult to assess. It's partly because, as I said earlier, centres need more evidence-based practice in order not just to understand whether the gap is narrowing but to be able to evaluate the impact that their practice is having. At the moment, both training and leadership courses are very poor on how to look at impact and evaluation. They're good at other things, but this is what local authorities and centres seem to be crying out for-again, this kind of capacity throughout.

 

Q16 Chairman: You're basically saying that it's been 10 years, and they haven't got their heads round what they deliver effectively. That's pretty damning, isn't it?

Professor Siraj-Blatchford: Well, they probably haven't got their heads round it, actually, other than that we've got the foundation stage profile information. Some local authorities document better than others. I wouldn't want to say it's like that across the board, but I do think that there are confounding issues. For instance, we have the whole tension between universal services and targeted services.

 

Q17 Chairman: Why is there tension?

Professor Siraj-Blatchford: Because if you're talking about narrowing the gap and if you improve quality for everyone, you actually can extend the gap.

 

Q18 Chairman: I've been to a children's centre, and it can only take 50 out of 800 kids of the sort of age who would be of interest to it. It takes 25 poor kids and then, with the competition, takes 25 non-poor kids. What is the impact of that?

Professor Siraj-Blatchford: The research shows that the impact should be quite good if those kids are integrated, but quite often they are not; because the funding streams are separate, they are quite often kept separate. We know from the research that we and others have done that children from disadvantaged backgrounds in mixed settings tend to do better, but you need to show that somehow as well. Many settings are documenting what they are doing against the early years foundation stage profile, but others are not-they haven't got the skills to be able to do that effectively, because, legally, you don't have to do it until the child is five and in reception class. So the monitoring of children's progress is an issue.

We have some figures from the early years foundation stage profile that show that the gap is narrowing, but in some areas it is widening and in others it is narrowing a lot more. What I think we should be doing a lot more of is looking at where things are working and then trying to use that practice in other areas. But it is not universally narrowing the gap.

 

Q19 Helen Southworth: When the original concept was established, it was clearly focused on providing opportunities for children who would not otherwise have access to them. Who benefits in the current position with the expanded programme? What work has been done to identify who is benefiting from that focus of resource?

Teresa Smith: That's actually a very difficult question to answer, because there are a number of entirely different aspects. One is the actual location of the centre itself-where is the centre based? We know whether centres are based in the 30% most disadvantaged areas, or whether they are based in the 40% or 70%, so we have a range of information about a centre's address. That does not necessarily tell us anything about the children who actually use that centre.

Secondly, the centre will have a catchment area that has been defined for it by the local authority. We find that information from the local authority, but somebody has to ask it what the catchment area is, because local authorities will have divided up their most disadvantaged areas and ensured that each centre has a responsibility for covering some part of that. But that still doesn't tell us where the children who live in those areas go, and it still doesn't tell us whether children who live in more advantaged areas go to that centre.

So the third question is about the children who actually go to that centre, and you can only answer that question if you have the address of the child who uses that centre, as well as a pretty good idea of the children who live in the most disadvantaged areas and where they go, or do not go. Answering that question is one of the things we are going to spend quite a lot of effort disentangling. You may have centres that are located near, but not in, the most disadvantaged areas that do a much better job of attracting children from those areas than the centres that are bang in the middle of them. It is a perfect possibility, and we know that that is exactly what was happening in the neighbourhood nurseries initiative research.

Helen Southworth: I don't know whether the information is available to you or not, but-based on disadvantage rather than on where people live-statistically, a child living in a disadvantaged area is more likely to be disadvantaged, but a child living in an advantaged area could also be similarly disadvantaged or could be very advantaged.

Teresa Smith: Yes. Indeed.

 

Q20 Helen Southworth: I've had a number of approaches from people who've been complaining that children who are mobile and whose parents are able to identify what is the best educational opportunity have been able to access centres in very disadvantaged areas-from an advantaged perspective outside but linked to that area geographically. How will that be dealt with?

Teresa Smith: You're asking two questions there. One is that disadvantage is not solely a geographical phenomenon and yes, that's of course absolutely the case. How you answer that question is dependent very much on what data children's centres collect about the circumstances of their families-whether the parents are in work, whether it's a single-parent family, whether it's a non-English-speaking family and so on-and whether those data are made available. One would hope that the data would be made available, but it's not necessarily the case.

The second part of your question is about how what we used to call the sharp elbows of the middle classes operate. It's one of the real dilemmas about services that we've been trying to put over. It is very complex, because in universal provision you're trying to balance services that are high quality and actually reach the people who one is trying to provide those services for, with the equally important principle of choice. How do you balance that kind of dilemma? That is a dilemma that all local authorities and all children's centres will wrestle with.

I know how the authority where I live is currently dealing with that dilemma. First, it is the case that all parents have access to free choice of the children's centres available in the authority. Secondly, all children's centres are expected to exercise very careful negotiation in order to keep enough places open in their centres for the most disadvantaged families in their areas. Thirdly, there is the "annual conversation" that the authority will be having with each children's centre, which will be along the lines of, "We notice from your records that although your places are full, you're not at all serving this particular area of need. Can you please discuss with us why that might be the case?"

 

Q21 Helen Southworth: Are there specific groups that local authorities should be targeting or having targets for, such as young people who have been in the care of a local authority who are parents? What would you say about that?

Dr. Whalley: We already have those targets. One of the things we have is a target for minoritised groups and groups that are finding it hard to get into public sector services, so those would all be target families. I'm beginning to be depressed about children's centres and I don't want to be, because they are doing a very good job in many cases. The highly competent leaders of children's centres are mapping and tracking their children and families. They will have a unique identifier for every parent-that the father is not in the family home, or that there are step-parents-and then it's a matter of looking at how those people are using services in increasingly complex and wonderful ways. That can be done very effectively, but there is a tension and it's partly about how you deliver the services-how the professionals actually engage with the families.

Baby massage has to be the most popular activity in any children's centre. The primary schools that are children's centres love those "clean" activities where nice parents come in and everybody is celebrating babies being born and baby massage. But it's whether you get families who are on methadone maintenance and whether you get families from the travelling community or the new age travellers coming to those same services, because if it's important for all babies to reduce their cortisol and increase their serotonin, we have to get families who might not see themselves doing those things. We have people who say, "I'm not a baby massage mother-I am not that kind of mother", and then you have families from Leicester driving 20 miles to come to a gorgeous children's centre where they can use those services. You have to manage it very carefully.

In those most advantaged areas-the 70% most advantaged-there will be 20% of the population with post-natal depression, seriously impacting on those parents' capacity to be the kind of effective parents they want to be. They too have a right to services that support infant and adult mental health. But the children's centres have a tough job. They need to be highly skilled in mapping and tracking the uptake of their services and the use of services, and it is not easy to do. We are working with learning sets across children's centres, and they are learning to be very good at critiquing their own practice and thinking about how they need to work differently-offering services at the weekend so that young parents and fathers can come in and have baby massage in the centre on a Saturday or a Sunday, and also taking services and-maybe for three years-visiting a family in the home before they ever come into a children's centre.

It is much more complex than just having this wonderful place that everybody comes into. But I think children's centres are beginning to really address those issues.

 

Q22 Chairman: It's about time, isn't it? You have 10 years of experience, and Teresa's going to do five years of research. You would think that someone would have a pretty good idea by now, without five more years of research.

People in my constituency don't like going to facilities deep in the middle of their tough estate. They want to be on the periphery, so that their kids will mix with other kids. That's true of all schools. Why do we need research, Teresa, to find that out? We know it.

Teresa Smith: Why do we do research to find that out?

Chairman: I'm just feeling irritated. There is 10 years of experience and another five years of research. Is it your policy to report in five years' time?

Teresa Smith: No, no. We will be reporting to you before that, don't worry.

Why do research? Because if you want serious answers to the most difficult questions, which are the questions that you are quite rightly posing, then you may get quick answers from the 10 centres that are nearest to you, but who knows if those centres are in any way representative of services across the country? That is basically why we do research. You want soundly based answers that will hold water, broadly speaking, across the whole range of services that you are talking about.

Chairman: Teresa, take no notice of me. We are going back to Helen. That was me being irritable because nine years ago, when we looked at early years, I thought that we had sorted all that-except that the Government didn't listen. Helen, back to you.

 

Q23 Helen Southworth: A final question: how important are the children's centres in terms of social cohesion within the community, over and above the impact on the individual family?

Dr. Whalley: In terms of community cohesion, they are unparalleled in their ability to pull families and children together. But the reason it is taking so long-it must sound incredible to you all-is because we are asking for a very different job. If we'd had teachers, early educators and social workers working effectively in 1996, we wouldn't have needed Sure Start. We wouldn't have needed all these new ways of working and new programmes.

At the moment, we have a very divided society, so it is a critical issue. Running children's centres in ways that are acceptable to local families is the critical issue. I work in a community of oppression, where the steelworks is closed and everybody is feeling pretty depressed. But within that, it is a very divided community. It is not a homogenous group who find it easy to get on with each other. The children's centre, because of its particular way of working, is honouring parents' needs to get together, to have support in a time of great isolation and loneliness and vulnerability when bringing up young children. It can be a fantastic community catalyst.

There are bits we have not talked about. In an effective children's centre, we have 140 staff who work throughout community very intensively, and 46% of those are parents who have grown up through that centre-parents who have gone on to do adult education and study. Some of the children's centres have become the universities of the workplace, and they really engage parents who have not had positive experiences at school into taking a learning journey. That takes time. It is intra-generational.

Our centre has been open 28 years; many centres have been open a long time. The new centres are not going to have achieved all that. They are still working really hard at getting professionals to get their act together and work in a different way. They need to have some sustainability, not too many changes in the near future-a really good deconstruction of what the primary task of a children's centre needs to be, then some really positive action in terms of initial training and post-qualifying training. But they also need to be budgeted effectively, and they're not. The money has gone down incrementally, so children's centres have been making redundancies every single year for the last four years.

Chairman: We're going to deal with the money in later questions.

 

Q24 Mr. Stuart: Have there been any negative impacts from the establishment of children's centres? For instance, has it contributed in any way to the diminution of the universal health visiting service? Now that there's to be a health visitor in each children's centre, what negative impacts might the establishment of children's centres have had on the existing organic-voluntary, third sector or private sector-provision in that area?

Professor Melhuish: I suspect there has been an impact on the private sector and the voluntary sector-there are certain kinds of pre-school education, for example, where the expansion of these children's centres has meant that there's been less for the private and voluntary sector to do, basically, so we have seen a concentration of work in the private sector as a consequence of that, and changing their mode of delivery of services. Also, the voluntary sector has had to adapt to that as well.

 

Q25 Mr. Stuart: Has anyone done any work on that? I know of people who lost their staff because the children's centre or Sure Start arrived and paid more. All the best staff left and were taken by the children's centre, and the quality of staff is absolutely critical to the quality of care and education, so it had quite an impact on the surrounding businesses-not only their viability, but their staffing levels and the rest of it.

Professor Siraj-Blatchford: In early years, unlike other sectors of education, we've always been in the marketplace. That's always happened, and if it happens when you get children's centres it wouldn't be surprising either, but it has been something we've talked about for the last 15 years-the fact that we've had the private sector, the voluntary sector and the maintained state sector. Quite often, the staff who are getting trained on the job in children's centres are very desirable to other providers as well, including the private sector.

I wouldn't think that salaries were that much better in children's centres, because one of the issues is the diversity of the work force-the diversity of pay and conditions. There might be more community cohesion-or what I prefer to call sustainability, arising from the kind of question that Helen asked-for the community, but it's certainly not good community cohesion of the work force in early years, because they are becoming even more disparate and separate. I'm assuming that the Committee is aware that we are talking about children's centres all the time, but that a very large number of children's centres are not in centres at all-they are in primary schools.

I was in a local authority three weeks ago talking to heads of children's centres, and they were all primary school head teachers, some of whom had what they call a strategic children's centre manager, who was maybe one of two members of part-time staff who were working in a catchment area that fed five primary schools. So it was just two part-time staff-one full-time equivalent-in a primary school, and that's classified as a children's centre.

So the diversity out there is quite huge, and I think it's important to understand. I tend to think in terms of centres as well, because I've been a governor at the Thomas Coram children's centre for over 12 years, and we work in a particular way, but that was one of the earliest centres.

 

Q26 Mr. Stuart: Sorry to interrupt; I just want to focus. When you get a positive measure like this, which people broadly want to see, one sometimes sweeps under the carpet or ignores the negative impacts. I was just trying to tease out what they may have been and whether there are any lessons of any past negative impacts to inform us, going forward, so that we make sure we do no evil, as well as trying to do good.

Teresa Smith: One very quick point. There clearly are changes in, for example, the voluntary sector provision, which may have no connection at all with the setting up of the children's centre programme. For example, across the country, there's a great deal of data that play groups are increasingly not offering sessions of three or two and a half hours in the morning; they are now offering full-time day care. That's not because of the children's centre programme; it is because parents want to use early years provision for their children in a completely different way.

Dr. Whalley: On the positive side-

Chairman: But he's asked for the negative side.

 

Q27 Mr. Stuart: It's positive that you've got so little negative. Do you believe that the Government made a proper and adequate assessment of the supply of qualified staff before going ahead with the rapid expansion of Sure Start and the transition to children's centres? If you don't think they did, do you believe that the expansion should not have gone ahead, given the supply and availability of staff?

Professor Melhuish: It's a bit of a chicken and egg situation. Did they do an adequate survey of their staff needs and plan accordingly? No, they didn't. But on the other hand, until you start setting up the provision, which is going to provide the jobs for these people, you're not going to get people bothering to do the training. It's chicken and egg-one needs to evolve a service over several years as one builds up staff training capacity and trains staff.

One of the negative sides of the rapid expansion has been that children's centres and some of the private and the school sectors have poached off each other, because there have been so few adequately trained staff available. Particularly in the early years-I think it's less of a problem now than it used to be-there was a big problem of managers staying in their job with a particular centre for only a few years because they were being poached by another centre, which had offered them better facilities. There were so few adequately trained staff available.

 

Q28Mr. Stuart: Thank you for that. What assessment have you made of the supply of effective leaders trained to the standard of national professional qualification in integrated centre leadership for children's centres? I assume all of you would recognise that leadership in almost any institution is critical to the outcomes. We don't talk about leaders in children's centres to the same extent that we do in schools, where we're obsessed with them.

Chairman: Teresa, are there leaders, managers, entrepreneurs?

Teresa Smith: What exactly is the question? Are there enough leaders coming through this new programme, or is there an evaluation of this programme?

 

Q29 Mr. Stuart: What assessment have you made of the supply? Do we have enough good leaders, and what do we need to do?

Dr. Whalley: I have been banned from talking about money, but I have to. If you get any page of last week's Nursery World or Children & Young People Now you'll see the variations in salary for leaders of children's centres. They go from £25,000 to about £65,000. It doesn't always have any relationship to what kind of children's centre they're being asked to lead, the size of the children's centre or the complexity of the organisation they're being asked to lead.

There are national standards for children's centre leaders, which are exemplary. They're rather better than the national standards for primary school heads. I helped to write them, so I'm committed to that, but they are largely being ignored by local authorities, because this would bring up the bugbear of the fact that these are services you're going to have to pay for. You're going to have to pay staff. You wouldn't quibble about the salary of a primary head, but early childhood is still the poor relation. People think it's doubtful that you would want to expend a head teacher's salary on a children's centre leader, but you need to.

There are outstanding children's centre leaders out there. However, we wrote the NPQICL as a leadership training programme for the first phase of children's centres and hoped that the second and third phases would offer leaders the same kind of potential opportunities. In primary schools, it is very rarely the case, as we hoped would happen, that the children's centre leader is actually on the senior management team of the primary school. Highly effective children's centres and primary schools have the leader on the management team of the primary school. It's where extended schools wonderfully embeds with children's centres, and the two meet in an effective primary school.

More often than not, the children's centre leader in a primary school is called a children's centre manager and is on a very low pay scale, is not included in the CLT of the school and is therefore constantly fighting to make their voice heard. So, I think that the big debate with local authorities has not happened about what these children's centres are and the difference that they could make to the local authority. When that debate happens and when the local authorities see the children's centres as instrumental in the first phase of education and the welfare state, they will be happy to pay them accordingly. Then we can invoke the national standards, which have been enshrined in legislation but are ignored in practice. Then we will get people excited about being leaders.

Mr. Stuart: Thank you for that. Iram, can you come in on leadership?

Professor Siraj-Blatchford: Yes. I think that there are two things: the issue about the leader and then the people that they lead. However good a leader is, you also need a certain critical mass within your staff to be able to deliver better outcomes for families and children.

I think that there has been probably more funding for heads of children's centres and leadership than for any other sector of leadership in early years, and that has been important. However, I also think that we need to have leaders who understand what leadership is for effective settings, in terms of making a difference to the outcomes for families and children.

Some of the research that we have done has shown that managers who understand that a core of their work includes leadership for learning and contextual literacy of the families that they have tend to have better outcomes than those who are good at absolutely everything but perhaps not so good at those focused areas. So, we need to look at what it is in leadership that makes a difference. We have a little more research to do there as well.

 

Q30 Mr. Stuart: I apologise for interrupting, but can I ask you whether you think which discipline the person comes from matters? I ask because there are issues around whether health professionals, teachers, nursery heads, social workers or other child-focused disciplines should take the lead in children's centres. Is there any evidence as to who is best?

Professor Siraj-Blatchford: There is some evidence that you need a certain critical mass of teachers to help children to move forward. I am not certain, quite frankly, whether the manager needs to be a teacher. However, given the work that we have done, I suspect that the vast majority have been teachers, although not all of them. That is not to rule anybody out, but to say that if you have had training where you have had a focus on education, children's learning or working with families to support their children at home, that makes a difference. So that aspect is pretty important.

When we talked to Margaret Hodge in 2003 about our findings that quality was important, we made it quite clear that the combined centres involved a critical relationship between the disciplines. Those were nursery schools that were coming out with higher quality, which is still persisting in terms of its association with children's outcomes at age 11-and only higher quality, not lower. They had their team of nursery officers, trained for two years-care professionals working alongside teachers, and 50% of each, so it is not massively expensive.

However, what we have in children's centres is quite often only one teacher. So the model, in terms of the difference it makes to children on a day-to-day basis, is watered down quite a lot more. But you need some other professionals to do some of the health work, and so on.

Mr. Stuart: I think that Teresa wanted to come in. Then I will ask one more question, if I am allowed.

Teresa Smith: I just wanted to say very quickly that it is clear that leadership in integrated, multi-service children's centres is quite different, and ought to be quite different, from leading a primary school or nursery school. Those qualities of teaching will be essential, but there may well be other dimensions of leadership that will be involved. That is precisely one of the questions that we will be looking at in the research. First, we will consider what those dimensions are across all the children's centres that we are looking at and, secondly, what the associations are between those different dimensions and the outcomes for children.

Mr. Stuart: Yes, and the skills are not only internal, because you are having to make it political whether it is a children's trust, a local school, a local authority or a PCT-God forbid.

Teresa Smith: It is strategic thinking, as well as actual integrated service provision. It is also about how we support an integrated or, at any rate, a multi-service staff who may or may not be working in that particular building.

Dr. Whalley: I worked very hard at understanding whether having a social work need, a health need or an education need makes a difference. I have worked with about 500 different children's centre leaders very intensively over a period of three years. I think that it is about the leadership team, and making sure that we have the key components of education, social work and health in the leadership team. I do not think that it matters which one of those people is the leader, as long as they know what they do not know and as long as they can use the team effectively.

The critical thing about children's centres and leadership is that there is the potential in children's centres to make such a huge impact because we are engaging with the children and families in a radically different way from what schools can do. From a very early age, we have three or four years with those children and families if we engage with the parents right the way through the process. The leaders have to be able to look at the impact of children's learning and development, family support, advocacy and community engagement, so it is a different leadership role than a traditional school head.

 

Q31 Mr. Stuart: Thank you. Iram said something very striking earlier when she said that she would prefer to have 500 top-notch children's centres. I understood that is probably aligned with the original ideas of narrowing the gap, tackling disadvantage, going in with the highest quality teams possible and making a difference, rather than 3,500 ones in which the central things get diluted. That is a pretty important message about whether we should want a comprehensive model or whether we want something of high quality but more limited.

Professor Melhuish: It is pretty clear from the research that only a high-quality provision produces an effect. If you are going to roll out a massive programme of diluted quality, you will not get the effect.

Professor Siraj-Blatchford: Or value for money.

Dr. Whalley: I totally agree with that. I think that social injustice, the way society is divided at the moment and the state of community cohesion are absolutely critical. If you are in a town, as I am, with a population of 52,000-there was only one children's centre for 22 years-there is no way one children's centre can meet all the express needs of the community. I would rather work with the four children's centres as a consortium and bring on the other ones, but we need secure funding. That is critical. They are all funded in different ways because each children's centre is different and responds in a different way. I want the community to have an entitlement to a children's centre so that every child can say, "I know which children's centre I am going to." Otherwise, we will not shift and change.

Professor Siraj-Blatchford: It depends on what it is an entitlement to. For instance, New Zealand has just a handful of centres of innovation, but they are really stunning. It has really developed them and will presumably expand on that. We are not disagreeing in the sense that we do not want to expand. It is how we do it. The Chairman keeps saying that we have had 10 years to do this, but the majority of children's centres have been set up in only the last two years. There has not been a long period of time to develop and sustain, and we should nurture a small number of centres that can do it better and build on that. We had 70 combined centres, and Margy was the head of one of them.

Dr. Whalley: One hundred.

Professor Siraj-Blatchford: There were 100 early excellence centres, but there were 50 to 70 combined centres in the '70s and '80s that were doing that kind of stunning work. We offered that as a model to build on, but the expansion has been a bit rapid.

 

Q32 Annette Brooke: Can I just follow on from the leadership and teachers within children centres? With the creation of the early years professional qualification-presumably to make it achievable to have at least one graduate in every centre, whenever it has to be achieved by-are we not diluting the teaching element and certainly some of the excellent nursery school teachers whom we were talking about last week, or do you think that it will be an asset overall?

Professor Siraj-Blatchford: I think what policy makers have chosen to do is interpret some of the research findings, which basically have teachers making a difference to quality, as graduates making the difference. When the research was done we did not compare between EYP and teachers, because we did not have EYP. The CWDC has just funded a large-scale project evaluating EYPs, but again it is not a comparative study so we are unlikely to find out, even after further expenditure, which are better for children.

I think it is a very difficult question, because one would want children to have more access to graduates. The problem as I see it is that we are separating out care and education again. We made a huge fuss about bringing care and education together through the early years foundation stage framework. We made a huge fuss about bringing the inspection together-everybody having the same inspection by Ofsted. But we have taken the model from inspection into training and we have almost got this separate route of training for the private, voluntary and independent sector. They will have this one graduate with early years professional status, working in the private and voluntary sector and not being paid on a par with qualified teacher status, but being told it is equivalent to qualified teacher status, which is in the education and maintained sector. It is almost like teachers being rationed in children's centres as well. So yes, we have a real issue there and I personally believe, from the research we have done, that that is watering down our quality.

 

Q33 Annette Brooke: Thank you for that. I want now to ask a very basic question, because I recall visiting a fairly early Sure Start programme-not the current expansion. I was, not surprisingly, looking around for children. On the day I visited there were no children there. I asked, "Where is the nursery education?", and there was none. Obviously, with the early projects there were great differences between them. I have seen the wonderful all-singing and dancing children centres, but the one that I described-which was doing some excellent work, I have to say-was doing a few mother and toddler groups, but there was definitely not any form of nursery care or education there. Was that unusual?

Professor Melhuish: No. In the early days-we're talking pre-2006-there was great diversity. One of the lessons of the early research findings was the enormous diversity there was in the early programmes, with some of them doing some very good work and having very good effects on children and families. Others were doing rather mediocre work and some were doing some fairly ineffectual work.

 

Q34 Chairman: That is localism. You tell people that they can do it-it's localism. Some people love it. It was a failure of localism, wasn't it?

Professor Melhuish: People talk about closing the gap and so on. You could break down the early perspectives, on how Sure Start probably should work, into three types. Some people thought, "This is community-based, we have got to make this community better". If you make the community better, the parents will feel better about themselves and because they feel better about themselves they will then treat their children better and the children will benefit. Okay? The trouble with that is that it takes about three years before anything you do, at a community level, starts to filter through to actually affect the children. In the meantime, those children have grown three years older. Three years of their lives have been lost.

Another approach is: let's deal with the parents. Let's make the parents better. Those programmes seem to work, but they work with a lag of about a year. Then you have programmes which say, okay, we have got to affect these children quickly because they are growing up really rapidly, so we work directly with the children. Those tended to be the most effective programmes, because they actually did something about the children's lives in a very immediate way. The programme that Annette was talking about was probably adopting a community-based approach, which was basically trying to foster community spirit and so on, but not doing very much with children.

Annette Brooke: That's true.

 

Q35 Chairman: Annette is trying to find out, as the rest of us are. You have been very critical of the early days, because localism was very patchy and it was evaluated as such. Then I hear a voice saying that the Department ran it centrally, and you quite liked that-that is what I'm hearing-but that you don't like it now, under the charge of local government. I get a very centralist feel from you.

Professor Melhuish: I think that you've summed up things wrongly.

Chairman: Tell me why.

Professor Melhuish: Okay. You have to remember that when the programmes were controlled by central Government, they were the ones who then devolved it-they paid the money into the local programmes, so they controlled it by giving them the money, but they then let them choose entirely for themselves what they did. So there is great local variation in the period when there was central Government control. They then moved simultaneously to a model that was children's centres, and also gave monetary and financial control to the local authorities. That happened simultaneously.

Chairman: I thought you said there was a gap between them.

Professor Melhuish: No. They occurred-

Chairman: I'm sure that Margy did. I understood her to say that there was this golden era between letting them get on with it and then saying, "Ah, there has to be some central framework delivered so that we do not have the mistakes of localism."

Dr. Whalley: I think what I was describing was that Serco, a big national organisation, has taken over the delivery of the children's centres. That has meant a very big shift, because when it was in DCSF's hands there was a good understanding of trying to negotiate with the local authority. I am not sure that that has been attained. I am not sure that there was ever a golden age, as such.

As for the kind of description that Annette gave, I could legitimately take you to a fabulous children's centre where there is no nursery education provision because it is just around the corner. That centre was set up as a Sure Start local programme. It is offering some of the most powerful work within infant and adult mental health that I have ever seen. There could be a good reason for it. It may have been a misconception; I think that at the heart of every children's centre should be early education with care. The mistake was to allow it to be four or five co-located services within a mile of each other. It needed to be a much clearer understanding that children and family work was at the heart of it-and education and care.

 

Q36 Annette Brooke: Can I just check? Obviously, research on the early centres is very difficult to interpret because of the different models. I am clear about that. Have we now moved to an era where, at the very least, any performance indicators or whatever to which local authorities will have to conform will give rise to this integrated work? In my particular example, a playgroup was next door but there was no connection between the two.

Professor Melhuish: Are there performance indicators? We have in a sense a kind of performance indicator, which is the foundation stage profile of every child in the country. If you were to tag that profile to particular children's centres, which is perfectly feasible, you would be able to see by weighting the foundation stage profile with the family characteristics of the child whether particular children's centres were being particularly effective in altering the developmental trajectories of children. If you were able to do that, you could then focus on what the most effective centres are doing that the least effective ones are not. Unfortunately, the Government are not interested in doing that at the moment.

 

Q37 Annette Brooke: Would that type of approach-may I ask everybody this question?-give us the answer to the question of whether local decision making is leading to the best outcomes for their localities?

Professor Melhuish: It would tell us whether the decision making of effective centres was different from the decision making of the ineffective centres, and whether that was the locality of it or whether it was due to the management style or whatever it might be. I cannot say, but it would certainly tell you the difference in the patterns of decision making associated with effectiveness.

Teresa Smith: In the 2006 Every Child Matters "Sure Start Children's Centres Planning and Performance Management Guidance", eight performance indicators, which all children's centres are expected to meet, are listed. They are learning and development outcomes, health outcomes, child poverty outcomes, outcomes for teenage mothers, access for the most excluded groups, and parental satisfaction. All children's centres will be collecting data against those performance indicators, and that data will be available and will be discussed by the local authority on an annual basis with the children's centres.

Professor Melhuish: But if those data are not collected in a uniform manner-

Teresa Smith: Exactly how those data are collected is one of the problems. The Sure Start evaluations are not of children's centres-forgive me Ted-but of the Sure Start local programmes and in the transition-

Professor Melhuish: They have become children's centres.

 

Q38 Annette Brooke: My questions really centre on children's centres. I can quite see that we want to measure the outcomes at the centre level-I am entirely on board with that-but I still don't know what is going to tell me what is a good children's centre. I don't know what the balance is between central control and local decision making in that respect.

Chairman: Short answers to this one.

Professor Siraj-Blatchford: I think that we need to assess children's centres in relation to their effectiveness in terms of reach. You can have a children's centre that achieves what it wants to with 75% of its population, and one down the road that achieves that with only 25%. But the one with the 75% may only be reaching 20% of the people in the community who need to be using that centre. So, it has to be looked at in the wider frame.

One of the things that I have noticed- I don't know if this is relevant-is how data rich but information poor we are as a country. Going around England, looking at how the nine Government regions presented their data on health education and care, quite frankly I was appalled, because there was such huge variation. Our children's centres are supposed to access this information on low birth weight and on who is the local GP, but it is very difficult for them to access it. In an economy that is moving fast in terms of, say, job prospects, where do they get that information from? Where do they get their information on health from? Some local authorities are more together and are able to provide a good children's lead from the PCT, which will help to access that information if it's to do with health visitors or family nurse partnerships; but other local authorities are not-the variation is huge. We might have these eight areas that the centres are supposed to respond to, but I think we underestimate the amount that the centre staff have to do to get that information at the local level. There's the local authority level, but there's also the regional level.

 

Q39 Annette Brooke: Ted, do you think that the local authorities have a role to play now that all these centres are set up? Can they be more or less autonomous of the local authorities?

Professor Melhuish: Local authorities control all children's centres. They are the governing body for children's centres.

 

Q40 Annette Brooke: Is that a good thing?

Professor Melhuish: Is that a good thing? Well, it has enabled the integration of various services such as social work and education, which are all controlled within a local authority. We now have directors of children's services who oversee those various services and integrate them reasonably well at the local authority level, but what we don't get is integration across health services and the other services because the health services have a completely different administrative route. Local authorities inevitably, I think, have to be the controlling body for children's centres if children's centres are going to be a national institution. We need an administrative infrastructure to operate through. It would be almost impossible, for example, to operate the school system without local authorities as an intervening stage of management. Children's centres have now expanded to such a level of distribution that one does need that administrative infrastructure.

Chairman: Margy, briefly, because we have to move on to the next question.

Dr. Whalley: A lot of the children's centres are now located in primary schools, so they are not governed by the local authority; they directly respond to the Secretary of State, actually through their governing bodies. Certainly, as a children's centre that is a nursery school we are accountable through a governing body, but the money is coming down from the local authority. It is only ring-fenced until next year. So when the ring fence ends, I think in 2011, that will be interesting, and what local authorities will do then will also be very interesting. It will be interesting to see how much local authorities value their children's centres.

 

Q41 Annette Brooke: May I ask one final question? In my constituency, where children's centres are being rolled out some of them are in libraries, for example, which is leading to some battles-a turf war-as you might imagine. Is there a real difference between the children's centre that has a dedicated specialist building and spreading the money quite thinly to get as many centres as possible-as is obviously happening in my constituency?

Chairman: I will only take one of you on that point. Who wants to answer?

Professor Melhuish: There is certainly a dramatic difference between the children's centres that were originally set up as Sure Start programmes in deprived areas and the rapidly expanding number of children's centres-roughly 2,500 of them-since 2007 onwards. Primarily the first types of centre, phase one as it might be, often have a dedicated building and the later ones often don't.

Chairman: We have to give Edward and Andrew a chance to ask their questions. Edward.

 

Q42 Mr. Timpson: Margy, you said earlier that children's centres are the first phase of education and that there has been an emphasis on, and a move towards, child care but that education is still going to be absolutely key in trying to narrow the gap in terms of educational attainment, as we have spoken about a lot today. We may have to wait for the five years of Teresa's research, but I am hoping that we might get an answer earlier about whether children's centres in their current form have the capacity to try to narrow that gap in educational attainment. What evidence do we have that they are doing so?

Dr. Whalley: In our local authority, we appear to be narrowing the gap. Whether the children's centres can take ownership of all that, I doubt very much. But I think that it is having very highly qualified teachers on the staff that has helped our children's centre to ensure that we are mapping and tracking children's progress, from birth right the way through, and we can show the value-added that the children's centres provided. So regarding the earlier discussion about EYP, about ensuring that the EYP status is just an initial qualification and that we encourage those people to go on and become highly qualified staff, I think that that is making all the difference.

I think I have lost track. Did I answer the question? I hope I did.

Professor Melhuish: We are producing a report, which will be published early in 2010, on five-year-olds who have spent all their lives in programmes that were originally Sure Start programmes and that have now become children's centres, and we will be able to answer the question about whether there has been a narrowing of the gap for the children within those children's centres. However, that is a very narrow part of the total panoply of children's centres that we now have.

 

Q43 Mr. Timpson: But if the evidence is that in children's centres with high-quality staff the educational attainment is rising, particularly among children from more deprived areas, does that mean there should be a greater focus within children's centres on that aspect of their remit, or should they just continue in the way that they are currently going?

Professor Siraj-Blatchford: First, we do not have to wait for children's centre research to tell us this; we have a lot of evidence that this is important. The second thing is the way that we interact with the home learning environment of the child before they are five. Children's centres should be in an ideal position to raise the educational aspirations of parents for their children and to support them in raising the early home learning environment, because we have found that to be very powerful. Ted and I have been looking at our data. There is an independent but separate effect, say from mother's education, but it is almost similar. So in that respect, we are talking about social capital and cultural capital, and not just about social class. It is the education that happens in the centre, but you get a double effect if you are also able to support the parents in terms of education within the home.

Dr. Whalley: It is not just about supporting them; it is about acknowledging the amazing stuff parents already do. I think there is a huge class assumption that working-class parents are not doing amazing stuff. Very good research was carried out in the '70s that showed that parents were doing very exciting things for their children at home, but it is not recognised that there is knowledge and learning going on in the home. If we shifted the balance of power a bit and actually looked at where parents are making a major contribution, and if we gave children's centres an indicator that was about parents' involvement in their children's learning, celebrating the knowledge from home and building on that in our nursery settings, we would have a revolution in the system.

Professor Siraj-Blatchford: Yes, this is what we are saying. Research is showing that it is not just middle-class parents who are doing that. We are not talking about social class; we are talking about social and cultural capital. I was teaching 30 years ago, and we were working with parents on taking home books and reading to your child. There were lots of projects that all the people around this table know about, so I am not going to patronise you by mentioning them. They have had an effect; they have raised social and cultural educational capital for families, and there are lots of families doing wonderful things with their children, whichever background they are from. It is about sharing some of that with the parents who maybe do not have the knowledge, and about giving them access to it, as well as doing it at the centre level and within the centre.

We also have lots of research, Edward, that shows that children need to have a good vocabulary by the age of three-for a three-year-old-and that if you are disadvantaged in that at age three, it has an important implication on your reading at age 10. We also know that there are many middle-class children who have heard something like 30 million more words when they start school than their disadvantaged counterparts, so we have lots of research that shows that education really matters, whether it is informal modelling within the home or whether it is slightly more structured modelling, and working with the children in a nursery-based environment.

Dr. Whalley: Or whether it is a completely different look at the professionalism of the early educator and real acknowledgment of a co-education role for parents, where we would actually be honouring the work that parents are doing in educating their children at home and building the curriculum around that when the children come into nursery. It links with what Annette said about, "Are we celebrating and looking at all the strengths in the community, or are we directing them to build up their children's knowledge so that they fit nicely into school?" I think it is a very different approach and one that we really need to learn about.

 

Q44 Mr. Timpson: Can I raise one other issue, Ted, about some of your earlier answers revolving around how we deal with the provision of health care within children's centres? You said that there is an administrative gap between how that is currently set up and how it could possibly be delivered. How would you try to resolve that dichotomy?

Professor Melhuish: I think that the Secretary of State for Health should take a much more active role in directing PCTs to take an active role in the running of children's centres. At the moment, PCTs vary dramatically in their involvement with children's centres, even though there is a statutory obligation to do something, which is very loosely defined. I think there should be active direction, because PCTs, left to their own devices, will not automatically do so. There needs to be more joint training in the early years between health service staff, education staff and social work staff-the core staff of most children's centres-because at the moment there are gaps in understanding between those professions that could be overcome by joint training.

 

Q45 Mr. Pelling: I want to ask Professor Siraj-Blatchford something. I am very grateful for the written submission that you have given on this particular point. What do you feel are the barriers to the very best liaison between the children's centres and the health service, particularly the PCTs?

Professor Siraj-Blatchford: What are the barriers?

Mr. Pelling: Yes.

Professor Siraj-Blatchford: In some ways, Andrew, I think that the health service has a longer history of integrated working. Had the money been given to the health service to integrate children's centres, it would be really interesting to see what would have happened, but hindsight is a great thing, as I've said.

One of the barriers is that the health sector has its very set way of working. It's almost like the education side has to integrate health into it. I think Ted is right. There needs to be some kind of directive or a further look at how things have worked to date and why the health sector does not feel that it can be involved. I have anecdotal information from health professionals who say that they're so crippled by the targets they've got that working on somebody else's targets is a little too much for them.

The way we've been working with local authorities is to say that when they work with the health sector, they have to be able to make clear how what they're doing will help the health sector to meet their targets. People need to be able to see what they're getting for the work that they're doing and the obligations that they've got to deliver what they have. There's not a great deal of altruism out there in that sense. I think there are pressures on different professionals to deliver different targets. Somehow, those need to be brought together. I'm not quite sure how, but that needs to be looked at.

 

Q46 Mr. Pelling: Are there any potential short, medium or long-term economies for the public purse from getting the two sides to work well together?

Professor Siraj-Blatchford: I think there are. Ted's hit on part of it. We need some kind of training together, but not initial training. The research shows that people need their professional identity-they need to be able to say, "I'm a doctor," "I'm a teacher," "I'm a social worker"-but at the same time, they need to learn what each other is doing and then take responsibility for some of that with their families and children.

One example would be that we have one of the lowest European rates for MMR vaccination. A key person in a children's centre who has responsibility for 10 children should really know whether their children have been vaccinated or not. The job of vaccinating is the GP's or the hospital's, but if you've got inter-agency thinking rather than simply a surface with different people on it, you would find out from the parents what had happened and why they had not had their child inoculated, and provide them with the information, including where they could get it done.

At which point does the integrated work happen? Does it have to have a health professional there for it to happen, or is it something bigger? If we got that bigger picture, children's centres would be amazing if we had individuals who got into integrated thinking but didn't feel they had to do the job. Then you've got the real advocate there for the family and the child, whether it's for education, health or care.

 

Q47 Mr. Stuart: Isn't the original idea of children's centres as service hubs where children under five and their families could receive seamless integrated services and support or access to services within pram-pushing distance essentially an inner-city urban concept, and does that concept really make sense in less densely populated areas such as the one I represent?

Professor Melhuish: It clearly has to be adapted for rural areas. You're quite right that the model as originally developed fits fairly readily within a concentrated urban area but does not fit easily within a rural area. A radical rethink needs to be thought about for rural areas. I don't think the Government have really come to grips with that.

Chairman: We have a lot of rural and coastal poverty.

Mr. Stuart: We do indeed.

 

Q48 Mr. Chaytor: Going back to the question of conflicts with the targets, if the evidence of many years is so overwhelming that integration and multi-agency approaches-across the public services, not just in children's services-deliver better outcomes, why is it the perception from either health professionals or the local authority side that integration is going to lessen the chance of them meeting their targets? Surely the evidence should suggest that integration would increase the chance of them meeting their targets. Could you give us any example of particular targets that people have raised with you as being problematic in this area?

Professor Melhuish: It is a question of what you mean by targets. If we are talking about best long-term outcomes for children, that's not what the targets are primarily about.

Mr. Chaytor: No, it's the individual performance indicators for general practitioners, nurses or local authority staff. Perhaps you could give the Committee a flavour of targets that people have expressed concern about.

Professor Siraj-Blatchford: I can't think of any specific examples at the moment, but I shall pluck one out of the air, from London, to do with the 87% of children who are inoculated against MMR. That would be a target, presumably, for health as well.

It is one thing to say that integrated working is a good thing and for everybody to accept it, and another thing to do it. Between the two, something is needed for it to happen, because if I am a teacher, a doctor or a playgroup worker, that's where my identity and my brain are. On a day-to-day working basis, the research shows that people need workplace learning to happen. So there needs to be some kind of training in the workplace that makes all these things explicit so that people discuss them, talk about them and learn how to do them. Just putting people together doesn't mean they know how to integrate.

 

Q49 Mr. Chaytor: If we take a common performance indicator, such as the one to reduce the numbers of low birth weight children, why isn't it self-evident to health professionals that more work with parents on diet, tobacco and alcohol is part of that?

Professor Siraj-Blatchford: Well, I don't know. That's a really good question. Part of it is to do with, maybe, lack of trust that another sector could help. Maybe there is still a belief that if you're a health professional you're best placed to do that. I think we've got to let go a little of wanting to do things ourselves, but that is what people know. In social care, social work and education, we are getting better at it, but still, with the health professionals there is a difficulty. But many centres are doing it well.

 

Q50 Chairman: I know we're coming to the end of our time, but isn't it frustrating? I always regarded the whole Sure Start programme, and children's centres, as the best sort of programme. It seemed to be based on evidence. In the early days of the Committee, when I had just started being Chair, I was always asking, "Is this evidence-based?" With Sure Start they said, "Yes. The service has been done. This is where you intervene-early years." It all seemed a glorious path.

Some of you say it's only been two years, but you know it's been Sure Start. It's changed, but it's the same programme in different shapes, with different funding and different responsibilities. You all come over as pessimistic about what's been achieved. Is that a wrong interpretation, as a group of researchers?

Professor Melhuish: I think Sure Start has evolved for the better over the past 10 years.

Chairman: It is evolving positively.

Professor Melhuish: Positively, yes.

 

Q51 Chairman: But you are torn, Ted. One minute you said health was the problem and then you wanted to give the funding through health.

Professor Melhuish: Sorry?

Chairman: Didn't you say it would have been better if the money had come through health?

Professor Melhuish: No, I didn't say that.

Chairman: Who said it?

Professor Siraj-Blatchford: I said it would be interesting had the funding been given to health.

Chairman: I beg you pardon, Ted, you didn't say that.

Professor Siraj-Blatchford: I think a great deal has been achieved. I think we're just even more ambitious to see some of the vision realised. It's been a very short period of time since its inception.

 

Q52 Chairman: Some of my constituents would say, "A lot of money and a lot of time." Ted said two years is a long time in a child's life, and this sector has been given a lot of money. A lot of my constituents say, "Why haven't they achieved more? Why are they so diffident about the achievements?"

Dr. Whalley: I think we have achieved an enormous amount in some places, but it is not a universal thing yet. We have professionals who are all trying to make each other's targets shared targets in Corby. People are working in a very strong and committed way not to let any child through the net in terms of safeguarding. We have teams of staff working across children's centres in ways we've never had before. We have children's centres that are prepared to share funding in ways we've never had before. Professionals are seeing each other's strengths, but that does take time.

The way we engage with all the other agencies is by making sure that their work is central to our work. Parents and children get fed up with being seen as though just a bit of them is of interest to a different agency. They want to be seen as whole people, but it requires professionals to work differently and that doesn't happen overnight, Barry.

You will see places where things have really shifted and moved forward and we have a vision for the future, but we have to learn from best practice and the professionals have to be given time to share best practice across centres and build up this critical dimension in their work whereby they can face up to what they're not doing very well and celebrate what they are doing rather well, without everything changing again. Children's centres need to be given a chance.

 

Q53 Chairman: Teresa, you've had quite a long chance and now the money's running out. Is that true?

Teresa Smith: The money is running out?

Chairman: Isn't it?

Teresa Smith: For children's centres?

Chairman: Yes.

Teresa Smith: Surely you are better, or the Committee is probably better placed-

Chairman: No, in some of the evidence you've given us as academics, you're predicting the money's running out. Are you arguing that there should be-

Teresa Smith: I don't think there was anything in which I said that.

Professor Melhuish: The money per child across the whole Sure Start programme is a lot less now than it was at the beginning of the programme. That's clearly true.

 

Q54 Chairman: You think there should be a higher budget for this?

Professor Melhuish: If you are to fulfil the full ambitions of the Sure Start programme, there has to be more money. You cannot roll out 3,500 children's centres across the whole country at the level of funding that is currently being planned.

 

Q55 Chairman: Perhaps, to take Graham's point, you close down the ones that aren't all singing and dancing or aren't in the right place.

Professor Siraj-Blatchford: It does seem a waste of resource, doesn't it?

Chairman: So you'd have fewer?

Professor Siraj-Blatchford: I'd have fewer, and I'd have higher quality and expand at a slower pace.

Chairman: Teresa, would you have fewer?

Mr. Pelling: Taxpayers are paying tax and getting no service. It's the same over and over again, isn't it?

Mr. Timpson: Graham wasn't suggesting that any close.

Chairman: Let's get this on the record. You weren't saying that, Graham?

Mr. Stuart: I think it was Iram who said it and I was questioning whether the others agreed that it would be better to have fewer properly funded than more improperly funded.

Chairman: This has been a very good session. We very much value the long time we have kept you here. Will you stay in touch with the Committee? There are a lot of things that we should have asked you but probably didn't, and probably a lot of things that you could have said to us that you didn't get a chance to say. We see this as a dialogue until we write the report. Is that all right? Thank you very much. If my cold has made me slightly irritable tonight, forgive me.