Appendix
Introduction
The Government welcomes the opportunity to respond
to the Children, Schools and Families Committee (now the Education
Select Committee) Report on Sure Start Children's Centres, published
on 29 March 2010. The report was timely and provided a wealth
of evidence that has been, and continues to be, helpful in developing
the Government's approach to early years.
The Government recognises the importance of children's
centres and believes they have huge potential as they bring together
services in new and innovative ways. The network of children centres
is critical to our wider programme for children and families across
Government.
The Spending Review signalled a radical new approach,
a power shift between central and local government—ensuring
local communities have a greater say in the issues that affect
them. Directing funding through the new Early Intervention Grant
will give Local Authorities (LAs) greater flexibility to make
funding decisions based upon the needs of their communities. We
have ensured there is enough money in the Early Intervention Grant
to maintain the existing network of Sure Start Children's Centres,
accessible to all but identifying and supporting the most vulnerable
and disadvantaged families. Important new investment through Department
of Health budgets to provide 4,200 extra health visitors, working
alongside outreach and family support workers, will enable stronger
links with local health services.
Going forward, our vision for children's centres
is to intervene early to support the needs of the most vulnerable
and disadvantaged children and their families, whilst recognising
the value of retaining a national network of children's centres
accessible to all families in the wider community. We want children's
centre leaders and staff to use their professional judgement and
expertise to provide services that go beyond the current core
offer to deliver outcomes more effectively, particularly for vulnerable
groups. Government will enable this by working with local authorities
to encourage engagement with the Big Society; enabling organisations
with a track record of effectively supporting families to get
much more involved (through the Localism Bill); greater use of
evidence-based programmes and practices to improve outcomes; greater
local transparency about what funds are spent on; and, payment
by results to reward those LAs and centres which do it well.
Our approach is guided by the principles of freedom,
responsibility and fairness. We are committed to devolving power
to local government, communities and citizens. Children's centres
have the potential to become the cornerstone of the Big Society—bringing
together voluntary, community and neighbourhood groups who work
together to initiate change and strengthen families and communities.
These changes must be led locally as local communities know what
works best for them.
There are a number of reviews across Government that
should inform future direction at national and local level. Frank
Field's Independent Review of Poverty and Life Chances, published
on 3rd December, has highlighted the importance of investing in
the early years. And Graham Allen's Review of Early Intervention
will report on models of best practice around early intervention
and how such models could best be funded (due to report in January
and May 2011); and Dame Clare Tickell's Review of Early Years
Foundation Stage (due to report in March 2011) is looking at how
best to support young children's development and learning and
their safety and welfare.
Responses to each of the Committee's recommendations
are set out below.
Recommendation 1: The Sure Start programme as
a whole is one of the most innovative and ambitious Government
initiatives of the past two decades. We have heard almost no negative
comment about its intentions and principles; it has been solidly
based on evidence that the early years are when the greatest difference
can be made to a child's life chances, and in many areas it has
successfully cut through the silos that so often bedevil public
service delivery. Children's Centres are a substantial investment
with a sound rationale, and it is vital that this investment is
allowed to bear fruit over the long term.
The Government is aware of the innovative practice
underway in many Sure Start Children's Centres. This is supported
by the National Evaluation of Sure Start (NESS) which provides
a good evidence base from which to develop children's centres
further. Frank Field's Independent Review of Poverty and Life
Chances published on 3rd December recognises the pivotal role
children's centres have in reaching out effectively and improving
the outcomes of the most vulnerable and disadvantaged children.
We are aware that Durham University published a report
recently which suggested that Government investment in Sure Start
had not delivered improvements in early language and numeracy
development. We do not share that view—the 2010 Foundation
Stage Profile results showed that the proportion of young children
achieving a good level of development had increased by 4 percentage
points compared to 2009, and the gap between the lowest achieving
20% and the rest has narrowed by 1.2 percentage points.
Children's centres form part of the landscape delivering these
improving outcomes. The data in the Durham report only goes up
to 2008—the year in which the Early Years Foundation
Stage was introduced.
We have ensured there is enough money in the EIG
to maintain the existing network of children's centres, accessible
to all but identifying and supporting the most vulnerable and
disadvantaged families. In order to meet effectively the needs
of the most vulnerable and disadvantaged children and their families,
we are introducing a sharp and focused period of reform to re-focus
support on the families who most require it, through greater use
of evidence based programmes to improve outcomes. We also want
to see much greater involvement of voluntary and community sector
providers, including encouraging local authorities to contract
out more of their services. We will also reward those local authorities
and providers which do well, including piloting approaches to
payment by results. Children's centre leaders and local authorities
have a crucial role in the development of the reform programme
and we are working closely with the sector as we develop and reform
children's centres going forward.
Recommendation 2: We believe that the many, varied
and interconnected ways in which Children's Centres can influence
the lives of children and their families constitute a strength,
rather than a weakness, in the programme. We do not consider that
fostering wider benefits for families and the community necessarily
undermines a Children's Centre's primary focus on children; rather,
it is a welcome recognition that children's ability to flourish
is profoundly affected by their immediate environment.
The Government agrees that children's centres have
a vital role to play in fostering family and community support.
Children's centres have huge potential as hubs of the Big Society—many
are already supporting community groups and enabling peer led
support. We want to enable local areas to consider, in consultation
with their communities, what other services can be based in children's
centres—for example relationship support.
Recommendation 3: Putting the holistic ideals
of Children's Centres into practice is a challenging aim, and
it demands vigilance over the quality of individual services and
interventions so that none are neglected. For the programme to
work to its full potential, therefore, services must be evidence-based
and practitioners highly skilled. This is nowhere more true than
in the early education and care provision, and we welcome the
Minister's statement that this element of Children's Centres'
work should have "primacy". As in all types of educational
provision, the vision and commitment of Centre leaders is decisive
to their effectiveness.
The Government agrees with the recommendation—high
quality provision leads to better outcomes for children and families.
Research evidence shows that it is the quality of support which
makes the difference for children's outcomes, particularly for
disadvantaged children. That is why, where children's centres
are providing early education and care, it should be led by either
an Early Years Professional or a Qualified Teacher to ensure quality
and provide expert input to the activities and services on offer.
Through reform to the accountability framework, we
want to incentivise the use of evidence based early interventions.
Many of the best children's centres already draw on evidence based
approaches and programmes—and review their practice and
impact regularly. There is much to be learnt from programmes
such as the Family Nurse Partnership. However, the Government
is aware that best practice is not yet common practice in all
children's centres. All centres and local areas will want to review
their services in light of the Graham Allen review to make sure
they are providing the most effective early intervention and securing
best value for money. Children's centre leaders have a key leadership
role in assessing the needs of their local communities and working
with others to plan services which meet them in an integrated
way.
Children's centre leaders, along with other leaders
in education, need to have the freedom and space to develop and
evaluate their own practice and to build services that their local
community want and need. Going forward, the National College for
Leadership of Schools and Children's Services (National College)
will support children's centre leaders to drive sector-led improvement
of children's centres, as set out in the Schools White Paper,
the Importance of Teaching, published on 24 November 2010.
This approach complements Government plans to enable
public sector employees, through the creation of mutuals, to have
much greater involvement in the running of public services. The
mutuals programme, led by the Cabinet Office, seeks to enfranchise
and empower frontline professionals as a key method of improving
quality in local services.
Recommendation 4: The reduction of child poverty
must be at the forefront of the thinking of Children's Centres
leaders and practitioners. The element of the core offer relating
to the services of Jobcentre Plus would, in our view, be more
effectively expressed as a commitment to support families' economic
wellbeing. This would encompass not only Jobcentre Plus input
but also skills and training opportunities, and a range of advice
aimed at helping families achieve financial independence.
Releasing children from the poverty trap to unleash
their potential is critical in creating a fair society. To build
a fairer and more mobile society, the Spending Review introduces
a new fairness premium—worth £7.2 billion in total
over the Spending Review period—to support the poorest in
the early years and at every stage of their education. The fairness
premium will give the poorest children a better start in life—stretching
from the age of two to the age of twenty.
The Government appreciates that there are a number
of factors which can support good outcomes, such as the provision
of a nurturing home environment. As well as having a direct impact
on a family's economic wellbeing, there is a link between parental
employment and improved wider outcomes in children's development.
The Government's approach to tackling child poverty acknowledges
the key role that children's centres can play in improving children's
life chances through the provision of services which support both
families' economic wellbeing and their wider emotional development.
This entails children's centres working to build parents' capability
in many areas, thus ensuring their children's readiness for school.
This contribution is also recognised in Frank Field's independent
Review of Poverty and Life Chances, published on 3rd December
2010. We welcome the report's emphasis on the critical early years
of a child's life, and we are considering the detail of its recommendations
in relation to children's centres.
Many of the best children's centres already offer
a wide range of activities that contribute to families' economic
wellbeing. This includes links with Jobcentre Plus, but also a
range of other ways in which children's centres encourage
families to improve their skills, employment prospects and financial
situation—for example, through local skills and training
providers (especially those who are already engaged in the delivery
of centrally funded local family learning programmes), voluntary
organisations and volunteering, debt advice and other services,
depending on the needs of their communities. The Work Focused
Services in Children's Centres pilot is testing out the impact
of placing dedicated full-time Jobcentre Plus personal advisers
in children's centres. Interim findings[2]
have indicated that the pilot is starting to address customers'
needs in a more holistic way, as work-focused services begin to
embed themselves within the children's centres and within their
network of partners. Most case study areas have started to deliver
personalised, flexible and often intensive support for customers
in order to meet their needs and respond to their circumstances.
The final evaluation will be published in summer 2011.
Recommendation 5: It is not clear how the Government
expects Children's Centres to square the circle of providing the
highest-quality integrated care and education in the most disadvantaged
parts of the country on a self-financing basis. Neither the quality
of the education nor the accessibility of the care should be compromised;
we urge the Government instead to consider formalising and increasing
the degree of subsidy that in effect already exists for these
settings. This would have to be done with due consideration for
the impact on local childcare markets.
The Government is committed to increasing the focus
of children's centres on the most vulnerable and disadvantaged
families in their communities. Local areas are best placed to
assess their communities' needs and local demand for
early education and care. In the past, children's centres in the
most disadvantaged areas were required to provide full day care,
i.e. 10 hours a day, 5 days a week, for 48 weeks a year. However,
sector representatives have consistently told us that in some
areas, when demand for full day care is low, money intended for
other Sure Start services—like family support and outreach
to vulnerable families—is subsidising childcare provision. In
order to give children's centres the flexibility they need
to use their money to intervene early and reach the most vulnerable
families, we have removed the overly prescriptive requirement
for children's centres in the most disadvantaged areas to provide
full day care where there is no demand.
The Government is committed to high quality early
education and care as it makes a difference in the long term to
both social justice and social mobility. Local authorities remain
responsible for ensuring that there is sufficient high-quality early
education and care across the whole of their community, and some
children's centres will continue to provide full day care depending
on levels of demand—but the Government believes that local
areas should have greater flexibility in deciding how best to
make enough high-quality places available for the needs of
their community.
However, we do still expect children's centres
in the most disadvantaged areas to continue to provide early education and
care as part of their integrated support for families, including
free nursery education for 2, 3, and 4-year-olds and additional
hours where there is demand.
Centres should make sure that disadvantaged families
get priority when these places are allocated. Where children's centres
in disadvantaged areas are providing sessional care, it should
still be led by either an Early Years Professional or a Qualified
Teacher, to provide skilled leadership and ensure high quality.
Recommendation 6: The involvement of early years
qualified teachers is essential to the ambitions of Children's
Centres to provide the highest quality early years experiences.
We urge the Department to collect information as soon as possible
about the number of qualified teachers employed in Children's
Centres that offer integrated education and care, and the nature
of their roles. It is essential that practice in Children's Centres
reflects the lessons of the EPPE research; the requirement for
early years qualified teacher posts should be increased to achieve
this if necessary.
It is crucial that children's centres in disadvantaged
areas continue to offer high-quality early education and care to
support vulnerable and disadvantaged families. However, since
we have removed the requirement for children's centres in disadvantaged
areas to provide full day care, we do not want to be as prescriptive
as the previous Government in expecting them to employ both a Qualified Teacher
and an Early Years Professional. Therefore, we
have removed this requirement.
We know that it is the quality of support that makes
the biggest difference for children's development, so we still
expect there to be at least one Early Years Professional or Qualified
Teacher. However, we trust professionals to use their local knowledge
and professional judgment to decide what level of graduate support
they need in their own centres. We want decisions to be made
locally on the precise mix of skills required and not impose duplication
of roles which may be unnecessary or wasteful in some circumstances.
We hope that children's centres will want to play a leadership
role across the early years sector in their area. Emerging findings
from the Graduate Leader Fund evaluation show that Early Years
Professionals have a positive impact on young children's learning,
as EPPE has shown for qualified teachers.
We are currently considering the type of information
that should be collected on children's centres going forward.
Recommendation 7: A greater degree of clarity
and detail in the strand of the core offer relating to outreach
and family support would be welcome. Children's Centres should
have a precise idea of what they mean by outreach and family support,
as expressed in the outcomes they are aiming for and manifested
in a range of activities which have a clear rationale and theoretical
basis.
We recognise the important role children's centre
outreach and family support plays in reaching the most vulnerable
and disadvantaged families in greatest need, particularly when
it uses evidence based, early intervention approaches. This is
often most effective locally when outreach workers work alongside
health visitors, social workers and other early years professionals.
With this in mind, we are working closely with the Department
of Health to define an ongoing role for outreach within the context
of a wider Sure Start Health Team, which takes into account the
broad range of issues which outreach workers deal with. We have
been learning from those children's centres and local authorities
who have already demonstrated good practice in doing this. Many
areas have set up multidisciplinary teams which offer good integrated
approaches for children and families, clear supervision, good
information sharing and professional development for outreach
and other support workers. Important new investment through Department
of Health budgets to provide 4,200 extra health visitors, working
alongside outreach and family support workers, will enable stronger
links with local health services.
Recommendation 8: We do not consider that it would
be helpful at this stage in Children's Centres' development to
require them to extend their formal remit beyond the 0-5 age group,
although we advise the Government to recognise and evaluate the
impact of well established Centres that have developed their services
in this way. Children's Centres are, however, beginning to provide
an excellent model for multi-agency working across professional
boundaries that services for other age groups should seek to emulate.
We encourage the Government to exploit the expertise and experience
of Children's Centres leaders and practitioners in the development
of youth services and extended services in schools in particular.
The Spending Review secured sufficient funding in
the system to retain the network of Sure Start Children's Centres.
But local authorities and children's centres will need to think
innovatively about how resources are used to reach those families
in greatest need. This includes identifying the potential for
other services to be based in children's centres (for example,
relationship support) and working up the age range, where it makes
sense locally. Whilst the primary focus remains quality integrated
services for young children and their families, we are keen to
think of them as centres for children and families. Ultimately,
it is for local authorities, with their local communities, to
plan and deliver services that most meet their needs.
Children's centres have a crucial role to play in
supporting cross-Government priorities, for example, children's
centres play an important role in early intervention which supports
Home Office priorities in preventing negative outcomes such as
youth crime. We agree that the multi-agency approach that children's
centres exemplify is one that could be adopted or adapted for
other areas of public services. We also recognise the existing
good practice in youth services. Around half of children's centres
are located on school sites (and some are led by schools) which
provides opportunities to make more effective use of assets and
to link with other services, e.g. through locality models working
across the age range. For example, having outreach teams delivering
services to families using both the children's centre and the
school; supporting transition into school; sharing space and equipment;
or helping to promote access to extended services provision. The
recent Schools White Paper set out the expectation that schools
will work together with voluntary and statutory agencies and business
to create an environment where every child can learn, and can
experience new and challenging opportunities through extended
services and where school buildings and expertise are contributing
to building strong families and communities.
The National College for Leadership of Schools and
Children's Services will support children's centre leaders to
drive sector-led improvement through the Children's Centre Leaders
Network which is a professional learning network providing opportunities
for leaders to improve practice, share experience and develop
expertise.
Recommendation 9: Expansion of the Children's
Centres programme to all communities has been necessary to ensure
that all children and families in need of help can get it. It
would be a backwards step to consider restricting access again
only to those living in areas which are generally categorised
as disadvantaged. We consider that resourcing Children's Centres
outside the most disadvantaged areas at a lower level represents
at present a regrettable but necessary compromise between focusing
on concentrated deprivation and making access available to all
vulnerable children.
We agree we want to retain the network. That is why
the Spending Review means there is enough funding to maintain
the network of children's centres—accessible to all families,
but focused on the most vulnerable and disadvantaged families.
Under the Apprenticeships, Skills and Children's Learning Act
2009, local authorities (LAs) have a statutory duty to ensure
sufficient provision of children's centres to meet local need
and consult on any changes to children's centre provision. Funding
is heavily weighted towards disadvantaged areas and this is continuing
in the Early Intervention Grant.
By retaining a universal presence in their communities,
children's centres will be non-stigmatising places to go to access
services. Children's centres also play an important role in encouraging
take-up of free entitlement to early education. We encourage local
authorities and children's centres to target resources on evidence-based
programmes and practice for the most vulnerable and disadvantaged
families, and to think innovatively about income generation—for
example, charging families who are able to pay for other activities,
like baby yoga or community cafes or other services that parents
have requested (many children's centres already do this effectively,
and we encourage others to learn from them).
Recommendation 10: However, we are concerned that
simply placing services called 'Children's Centres' in all communities
does not necessarily guarantee that all families will benefit
from the Sure Start model of integrated working. We recommend
that the Government assess the extent to which Phase Three Centres
are able to replicate meaningfully the most salient and valuable
elements of the approach of successful Phase One and other long-established
Centres. Vulnerable children living in Phase Three areas are not
necessarily less needy than those in the 30% most disadvantaged
areas, and we seek evidence that the benefits of integrated early
childhood services are available also to them through these different
models of delivery.
We agree with the Select Committee's conclusion that
the most vulnerable and disadvantaged families don't necessarily
live in disadvantaged areas. One-third of the most deprived children
under five live outside the most deprived areas[3].
That is why outreach plays a crucial role in ensuring that those
families who need support and live in more affluent areas access
services, particularly since they can be even more isolated than
similar families in disadvantaged areas. Health visitors have
a universal role in seeing all new born babies and their families
and can refer them to children's centres when they need support,
which is why we are expanding them. In retaining a network of
children's centres and fulfilling their statutory duties, it is
up to local authorities to ensure that local children's centre
provision is responsive to these families. Through reform to the
accountability framework, local authorities and children's centre
providers will be paid in part by the results they achieve for
families in greatest need. We encourage local authorities to keep
thinking creatively about how best to pool resources and integrate
services in a way that makes sense for families who use them.
We are working closely with sixteen local areas which will be
piloting community budgets in relation to families with complex
needs. These areas are doing important work in going beyond traditional
boundaries between public services to redesign them around the
needs of local families. These first community budgets will be
run from April 2011. All places may be able to operate these approaches
from 2013-14.
Recommendation 11: Many Sure Start Local Programmes
successfully fostered community ownership and partnership, in
some cases re-casting the relationship between professionals and
service users. The Government properly encourages Children's Centres
to involve parents and carers in planning, delivery and governance.
However, too much of the guidance is couched in language that
implies a traditional division between service provider and community,
with the former having a duty to consult and take advice. Identification
of best practice in community involvement rather than consultation,
and spreading this best practice to all Centres, should be priority
areas of action for the Children's Centres programme.
The Government agrees with this recommendation. The
Government wants to give citizens, communities and local government
the power and information they need to come together, solve the
problems they face and build the Britain they want. We are moving
away from the current presumption of state control towards a presumption
of community action.
Children's centres have the potential to become the
cornerstone of the Big Society— bringing together voluntary,
community organisations, charities and social enterprises who
then work together to initiate change and strengthen both families
and communities. The original Sure Start Local Programmes were
built on the principle of community involvement. Many children's
centres continue to have excellent approaches to fostering community
ownership and partnership: for example, a recent publication by
the Pen Green Children and Families Research Centre in
Corby identified effective ways of engaging communities in
children's centres. We agree with the Select Committee's
recommendation that more can be done to identify and spread this
best practice.
We want to see much greater involvement of voluntary
and community sector providers, including through more commissioning
by local authorities. We will make use of opportunities to free
up the market, such as the Localism Bill which will give the voluntary
and community sector, local authority employees and parish councils
the right to challenge local authorities where they believe they
could run services, including children's centres services, differently
or better.
The Department for Education is working closely with
the Cabinet Office on the Government's plans to enable mutuals,
co-operatives, charities and social enterprises to have much greater
involvement in the running of public services, so that more children's
centres can adopt these models where this would be beneficial
for their users and communities. Forming engaging partnerships
with communities is at the heart of our Public Service Reform
agenda. Children's Centres are an area in which empowered
professionals, including within mutuals, can be better placed
to provide the responsiveness and community engagement that can
take services to the next level. The Public Service Reform White
Paper, which will be published in early 2011, will set out more
detail on this area.
Recommendation 12: The expansion of Children's
Centres has been an ambitious programme with laudable aims. We
support the Government's goal of universal coverage, but the speed
of the rollout has posed serious problems in some local authorities
in terms of buildings, staffing and community engagement which
could have been ameliorated by a more measured approach. As well
as evaluating the impact of Children's Centres services, the Department
should undertake an evaluation of the rollout process, so that
lessons can be learned for the future.
The Government agrees that the roll out of children's
centres has been ambitious. As part of the reform programme,
and in a constrained financial climate, we wish to concentrate
funding on increasing the focus on those families in greatest
need, rather than undertaking a separate evaluation of the rollout
process at this time. The Department for Education's contracts
to support local authority implementation of their children's
centre programmes end in March 2011. Rather than commissioning
a separate evaluation of the rollout it is our intention to use
the current Sure Start evaluations, National Evaluation of Sure
Start (NESS) and Evaluation of Children's Centres in England (ECCE),
to help frame implementation. We will also be considering the
learning from our current implementation partners to inform future
practice.
Recommendation 13: The network that is now in
place must be considered work still in progress. Expansion should
not just be about numbers of Centres; service quality, staff skills,
team and partnership working and Centres' relationship with the
community must all be monitored for continuing improvement. The
Department contracted with a national delivery partner, Together
for Children, to help local authorities reach their numerical
targets; it must now turn its attention to how local authorities
can be helped to raise quality throughout their Children's Centres.
We agree with the Select Committee's recommendation
that going forward the attention must be on quality and improvement.
Research shows us that high quality settings make a significant
difference to child outcomes. The evaluation of the two year pilot
of free childcare showed that the impact of provision on child
outcomes was negligible except where settings were high quality.[4]
Together for Children's (TfC) remaining work this
year is focussed on enabling local authorities to ensure the sustainability
and quality of local children's centres, with a particular focus
on better reaching the most vulnerable and disadvantaged families
and improving value for money through better evidencing of costs
and outcomes. TfC's contract ends in March 2011, as part of the
Government's approach to placing greater trust in front line professionals
and a sector-led approach to improvement support. Going forward,
the National College will have a key role in supporting and empowering
children's centre leaders to drive the reform programme.
Recommendation 14: Pressure on the public purse
could conceivably come to bear on Children's Centres in two main
ways: a retreat to a smaller number of Centres, or a pruning of
the range of services delivered by them. We consider that either
course of action would undermine the programme to an unacceptable
degree and jeopardise the long-term gains from early intervention.
Local authorities are now responsible in law for providing sufficient
Children's Centres for their community; we would not wish authorities
to be bequeathed an underfunded statutory duty.
We have ensured there is enough money in the Early
Intervention Grant to maintain the existing network of Sure Start
Children's Centres. However, it will require local authorities
and children's centres to work innovatively in order to use their
resources to maximum effect to help those most vulnerable and
disadvantaged families, and to make savings; this may include
thinking innovatively about income generation (for example, charging
those who can afford to pay for certain activities and additional
services).
Through reform to the accountability framework, local
authorities and children's centre providers will be paid in part
by the results they achieve for families in greatest need. We
will work closely with representatives from the early years sector
when developing this and other aspects of the reform programme.
The statutory duties on local authorities introduced
as part of the Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning
Act 2009 remain, including the duty on local authorities to ensure
sufficient provision of children's centres to meet local need,
so far as is reasonably practicable and the duty on local authorities
to consult before establishing, closing or making a significant
change to a children's centre.
Recommendation 15: We recommend that the Government
investigate the need for a qualification specific to Children's
Centre outreach work, based on the experiences of long-standing
Centres with a track record of success in engaging vulnerable
families. This need not replace entirely the variety of qualifications
which outreach workers currently hold, but it could supplement
them by spreading best practice and defining the outreach role
more sharply in relation to the roles of other professionals.
There are many good examples of children's centres
engaging vulnerable and disadvantaged families and it is important
that others learn from this best practice. Ofsted inspection reports
reflect how centres are working to reach/work with the most
vulnerable and disadvantaged families. Empowering professionals
to do their job is a key strand of our reform programme. We expect
everyone who works in children's centres to draw upon evidence
based approaches to working with the most disadvantaged and vulnerable
families. Identifying and spreading good practice in the use of
evidence based early intervention programmes, through a sector-led
approach, will form part of our discussions going forward.
We do not accept the recommendation to develop a
new qualification for outreach workers as we move towards the
sector-led approach for delivering early intervention programmes,
as described above. We expect outreach workers to work closely
alongside other professionals to develop their skills. In future,
LAs and CCs will need to make their own judgements about which
training to commission to best meet the needs of their staff.
In addition to this, we have launched a
new programme to turn around the lives of families
with multiple problems which includes testing and sharing
effective practice and new approaches. Manchester is developing
a cost benefit analysis model looking at their early years and
better life outcomes pilots; and other community budget areas
are also using evidence-based approaches to working in an integrated
way with families with multiple problems. We will seek to learn
lessons from their experiences which can be shared with other
areas.
Recommendation 16: The Government must investigate
ways in which information captured locally about how successfully
Children's Centres are reaching the most vulnerable can be given
a more robust basis, such as by requiring standardised data sets
to be made available by the responsible agencies, and can be aggregated
to produce a nationwide picture.
The Government is considering what data is most helpful
to collect and publish nationally so that everyone can hold children's
centre services to account. We will carefully balance this objective
alongside our commitment to promoting the devolution of power
to local government and community groups, who play an important
role in enabling and sustaining strong children's centres, and
reducing unnecessary data burdens. Partners have been encouraged
to share information and data with children's centres. It
is encouraging that a number of local authorities already make
statistical data available to their local children's centres (such
as population, deprivation, homelessness, demographic and ethnicity
data).
Recommendation 17: In order to evaluate the cost-effectiveness
and value for money of Children's Centres nationally, the Government
must make more effort to work out the totality of funding that
is supporting Centres, including resources from the Departments
of Health and for Work and Pensions. It is unacceptable that such
basic information remains apparently unknown.
Whilst at present a significant amount of children's
centre funding goes to local authorities through the Sure Start,
Early Years and Childcare Grant (and from April 2011, through
the Early Intervention Grant), health and employment services
funding for children's centres is decided at a local level between
the Local Authority, Primary Care Trust and Jobcentre Plus. This
provides local areas with freedom and flexibility to agree the
resources and services that are needed to meet the needs
of their communities. This means that there are no national ring-fenced
specific health and employment budgets for services delivered
through children's centres. In addition, health and employment
services are often delivered via a service level agreement or
memorandum of understanding and not through the direct provision
of funding to centres. It is important that value for money is
demonstrated locally—local authorities are responsible for
delivering children's centres and the centres deliver a wide range
of tailored services. Multi-agency and integrated working is vitally
important to ensure outcomes are delivered cost-effectively. We
will also look at how we can further support centres to calculate
and demonstrate the value of their services, as part of our work
to ensure that providers are paid in part by results they achieve.
Recommendation 18: We recommend that the Government
commission research into the ramifications of population mobility
for the delivery and impact of early childhood services including
Children's Centres. We also recommend that the Government issue
guidance on how Centres in areas with highly mobile populations
can undertake effective evaluation of their services.
The Government recognises that population mobility
can present a challenge for children's centres and local authorities
when planning, providing and measuring the impact of services.
We believe it is important that children's centres are able to self-evaluate
their services in ways that are robust. This should include
assessing how effective they are in reaching out to all families,
especially those who may be less likely to use children's centres
(such as transient families). They should also be able to demonstrate
how their services support improved outcomes for all families,
especially those who are most disadvantaged.
We recognise that professionals working in children's
centres have huge experience in reaching out to families in their
communities. They should, therefore, be in the best position to
share good practice in engaging with transient families such as
service families, families of offenders, or gypsy and traveller
families. We want to support local authorities, where appropriate,
to share best practice on how children's centres can measure their
impact on such groups, as well as identify and support them. We
will be considering this issue as part of the reform programme.
We want to empower the workforce to make decisions
based upon their professional expertise, local knowledge, self
evaluation, evidence based programmes and practice and sharing
good practice. In light of this approach, we do not accept that
there is a need for a national research exercise about the ramifications
of population mobility or to issue more guidance to children's
centres at this time.
Recommendation 19: We recommend that the Department
assess the need for training Children's Centre staff and leaders
in the techniques and mindset they will need in order to become
'practitioner-researchers'. There is huge potential for Children's
Centres to be hubs of workforce learning and continuous improvement,
and we are concerned by reports that the good work of Early Excellence
Centres in this respect has not been mainstreamed within Children's
Centres.
Children's centre leaders, along with other leaders
in education, need to have the freedom and space to develop and
evaluate their own practice and to build services that their local
community want and need. The Children's Centre Leaders' Network,
and National Professional Qualification for Integrated Centre
Leaders (NPQICL), enables children's centre leaders to build their
leadership skills and spread good practice both within their setting
and with other leaders. We agree that children's centres have
expertise in partnership working that others can learn from.
We want to look further at how children's centres
can be supported to take on more of a community leadership role
—building, for example, on what the best children's centres
are already doing to support childminder networks. As the National
College continues to train leaders of children's centres, we will
be working closely with them to ensure that future training empowers
children's centre leaders to develop and exercise their leadership
skills.
Recommendation 20: Children's Centres have the
potential to transform children's services by leadership and by
example. We recommend that the Government recognise these effects
when assessing the full impact of the programme.
The Government agrees that children's centre leaders
have a transformational role to play in their local communities,
including children's services. We will work closely with
the National College to ensure that future training supports centre
leaders to lead local reform, including effective use of evidence
based programmes and practices. In addition, Ofsted inspections
of children's centres include judgements on the quality of leadership
which recognise the crucial role leaders have to play in achieving
outcomes for children and their families.
Recommendation 21: In order to fulfil their potential
for improving children's lives, Children's Centres with proven
expertise in early learning need to have the time, skills, resources
and remit to promote quality learning in other early years settings
and in the home. We recommend that supporting other settings should
be an aspect of these Centres' work which is reflected in the
core offer, and against which they are assessed.
We agree that children's centre leaders are well
placed to promote high quality early education and to work pro-actively
with specialists and other providers in their communities who
are already delivering successful family learning programmes.
The leadership of children's centres leaders will be crucial in
improving the quality and take-up of free entitlement to early
education. We will work closely with the National College to ensure
that future workforce development for children's centres leaders
reflects these requirements.
Recommendation 22: It is essential that Children's
Centres are given time to prove their worth. Some Centres are
not open yet and the majority of those that are open have been
in place for less than four years. It would be catastrophic if
Children's Centres were not afforded long-term policy stability
and security of funding while evaluation is ongoing.
The Government remains committed to children's centres.
Funding for the most vulnerable children and families is to be
streamlined into a new Early Intervention Grant. The Government
is committed to investment and reform in early intervention at
a time of financial constraint. Against the background of greater
flexibility to decide priorities locally, there are key areas
of early intervention where the Government is ensuring that the
overall Grant provides support. This includes investment in children's
centres and building local authority capacity to meet the commitment
to provide high quality early education to the most disadvantaged
2-year-olds.
Recommendation 23: We consider that it would be
unwise to remove the ring-fence around Children's Centres funding
in the short or medium term; putting Centres at the mercy of local
vicissitudes would risk radically different models and levels
of service developing across the country, with differences out
of proportion to the variation in community needs.
The Spending Review signalled a radical new approach,
a power shift between central and local government—ensuring
local communities have a greater say in the issues that affect
them. The Government is committed to trusting professionals and
creating local flexibility. Greater freedom at local level to
pool and align funding, will help local authorities and partners
to achieve better results. That is why we are radically reducing
the number of ring-fenced grants to local authorities for education
and children's services. It is right that local authorities should
have greater autonomy and flexibility to respond to local need.
From April 2011, Sure Start funding will be part
of a new Early Intervention Grant (EIG). This grant has been created
to bring together funding for a number of early intervention and
preventative services, including children's centres, families
with multiple problems, and targeted support for young people.
It will be worth around £2bn by the end of the period. EIG
is not ring-fenced, giving local authorities the flexibility to
respond to local needs and drive reform, while supporting a focus
on early intervention across the age range.
The inclusion of Sure Start funding in this new grant
reflects the crucial role that children's centres play in ensuring
that families have access to early intervention when they need
it, to tackle issues early and prevent costly problems emerging
later on. High quality early years provision makes the biggest
difference. The network of children's centres provides the foundation
for stronger, early joined-up working, offering universal services
for all families and targeted services focused on the most vulnerable
and disadvantaged families. It is vital to maintain and capitalise
on the network, while driving reforms to improve efficiency and
focus services on the most disadvantaged.
It is important that the Sure Start network becomes
more efficient: we are already seeing improvements as local authorities
"cluster" children's centres to streamline management
costs; develop stronger local partnership arrangements with health;
and develop innovative local approaches to income generation.
Local authorities continue to have a statutory duty
to provide sufficient children's centres to meet local need, as
far as is reasonably practicable. Greater local transparency
of data, with payment by results, will increase local accountability
for Sure Start funding. We will be piloting approaches to payment
by results with a number of local authorities as part of the Early
Intervention Grant, to ensure the right incentives are introduced
to focus children's centres on effective early intervention.
Recommendation 24: Local authorities clearly require
more reassurance about future funding than they have so far received.
Uncertainty in this regard is hampering long term planning and
constructive voluntary sector involvement.
The local government finance settlement on 13 December
2010 gave local authorities indicative allocations for
the Early Intervention Grant for 2011-12 and 2012-13. This will
give local areas the certainty to plan ahead for the next two
years, and allocations for later years will be made in due course.
The new Early Intervention Grant (EIG) will provide
a substantial new funding stream, with new flexibility, for early
intervention and preventative services. It is not ring-fenced,
bringing significantly greater freedom at local level, to respond
to local needs and drive reform, while supporting a focus on early
intervention in the early years and up through the age range.
We have additionally ensured there is enough money
in the EIG to maintain the existing network of Sure Start Children's
Centres, accessible to all but identifying and supporting families
in greatest need. Local authorities continue to have duties under
the Childcare Act 2006 to consult before opening, closing or significantly
changing children's centres and to secure sufficient provision
to meet local need. Important new investment through Department
of Health budgets to provide 4,200 extra health visitors, working
alongside outreach and family support workers, will enable stronger
links with local health services.
Recommendation 25: We welcome the Minister's assurance
that issuing guidance about information sharing between health
professionals and others is a priority for the Department. We
recommend that it contain a clear statement that new births data
in particular must be shared with Children's Centres.
Sharing information is key in ensuring that all children
and families are protected and supported, particularly the most
vulnerable. A leaflet on information sharing between health professionals
and those working in children's centres was published in March
2010 and was submitted as evidence to the committee. The Government
will look to build on this in developing the health offer in children's
centres. Midwives record all new births via the child health system.
This information can then be used by health visitors working with
those children, including those working in and with children's
centres. We expect professionals to share information where they
need to, seeking the permission as appropriate of parents and
carers in the process. At the same time, professionals will share
information on the expected numbers of births to allow local authorities
and centres to plan services. In rare circumstances, parents or
carers may be concerned about proposed information sharing and
health professionals may be uncertain how to proceed. The Department
of Health published guidance in November 2010 to assist NHS staff
in making what can be difficult decisions on whether information
sharing can be justified in the public interest.
Following the vision set out in the White Paper Equity
and Excellence: Liberating the NHS many of the functions of
Primary Care Trusts (PCTs) will be transferred to GP Consortia.
We propose that the existing duties to cooperate with children's
services authorities in making arrangements to improve children's
health and wellbeing will pass from PCTs to GP Consortia and Local
Authorities (LAs). Such arrangements could include the sharing
of information.
Recommendation 26: It is unacceptable that GPs
are able to categorise co-ordination with other services for children's
well-being as an optional, 'spare time' activity. The Secretaries
of State for Children, Schools and Families and Health must urgently
follow through on the good intentions expressed in the joint child
health strategy, published in 2009, to ensure that GPs play a
full, active role in collaborative services for children and families,
and in Children's Centres in particular.
The Government recognises the importance of all partners
working together. Equity and Excellence: Liberating the NHS
set out our vision for the future of the NHS. We want to ensure
that decision making is as close as possible to individuals and
for that reason we are devolving power for commissioning to local
consortia of GP practices. In Liberating the NHS: Legislative
framework and next steps, we have noted that whilst forthcoming
legislation will introduce a number of duties of partnership,
the strength of the new arrangements will draw primarily upon
leadership and behaviours demonstrated by leaders of GP consortia
working together with patient groups, local authorities and other
health and care professionals. Alongside the existing duty to
cooperate between NHS bodies and local authorities, the Government
will place a duty on relevant GP consortia and local authorities
to participate in the work of the health and wellbeing boards
by requiring them to be members. The Department for Education
and Department of Health are discussing what else can be done
to promote effective partnerships between GP practices and children's
centres. Health visitors will have a key role in promoting effective
partnerships.
Healthy Lives, Healthy People outlines
a new approach to public health, shifting power to local communities.
It notes that in local government there will be new opportunities
to develop integrated local strategies between public health services,
children's services and the NHS, aligning outcomes and resources.
The increased number of health visitors will work with children's
centres and GPs and will lead and deliver the Healthy Child Programme,
alongside the evidence based Family Nurse Partnership programme.
Achieving equity and excellence for children:
How liberating the NHS will help us meet the needs of children
and young people began a dialogue about
how to ensure high-quality services for children and young people.
The right to register with any GP practice could make an important
difference to families. Under the new arrangements, families will
have the opportunity to choose with which practice to register.
Recommendation 27: We believe that it was a backwards
step to end formal Department of Health responsibility for the
Sure Start programme at ministerial level, a situation which has
carried over to Children's Centres. This is clearly not the only
reason why local health services are not consistently involved
in Children's Centres either strategically or operationally—there
are many practical and professional reasons why collaboration
is difficult. Nonetheless, the Government should lead from the
front by establishing joint DCSF and Department of Health responsibility
for Children's Centres. The first task of the Ministers who take
on this role should be ensuring that Children's Centres are prominently
and consistently reflected in both Departments' policy priorities
and performance frameworks.
Ministers work together across Departments on a range
of issues. Ministers in the Department for Education and the Department
of Health are working together closely on our work to strengthen
support for children and families. Both Departments sit on the
Prime Minister's Childhood and Families Taskforce; the Public
Health, Social Justice and Child Poverty Sub Committees and the
Inter-Ministerial Group on Violence against Women and Children.
Both Departments have developed and published complementary business
plans:
- the Department for Education
commits to retain a national network of Sure Start Children's
Centres with a core universal offer, while also ensuring that
they deliver proven early intervention programmes to support families
in the greatest need; and
- the Department of Health complements this by
committing to recruit an additional 4,200 extra health visitors
by 2015 who will deliver the universal Healthy Child Programme
to all families, working closely with children's centres and their
staff.
Recruiting 4,200 new health visitors and doubling
the number of families reached through the Family Nurse Partnership
by 2015 will be taken forward in partnership with children's centres,
other early years services, and local authorities as well as other
NHS services including maternity services.
Recommendation 28: Health visitors have an immensely
valuable role to play in co-ordinating health provision at Children's
Centres and in maintaining links to other health professionals,
especially GPs. It is vital that health visitors in all parts
of the country are fully bound in to Children's Centres to allow
Centres to reach their full potential as hubs for all services
for children under five.
The service vision for health visiting in England
which was published in October and the Health Visitor Implementation
Plan, which will be published shortly, illustrate how we envisage
health visitors and children's centres working together in the
coming years. It will be for health visitors and their partners
locally to determine which mix of settings to use to ensure they
best meet the needs of their local populations.
Recommendation 29: The Government's default position
that the shape of services delivered through Children's Centres
should be determined locally is welcome. However, where research
and pilot projects give clear indications of the features of effective
services—such as the type of Jobcentre Plus involvement
that gets the best results—local negotiations should be
backed up by a clear expectation nationally that best practice
should become common practice.
The Government is committed to increasing the involvement
of organisations with a track record of supporting families and
to ensure that providers are paid in part by the results they
achieve. Working closely with the sector and, drawing on Graham
Allen's Review of Early Intervention and evaluations such as the
Work Focused Services in Children's Centres Pilot, we intend to
make available evidence of the most effective programmes and practices
to improve outcomes.
The Work Focused Services pilot is testing out the
impact of placing dedicated full-time Jobcentre Plus personal
advisers in children's centres. Interim findings have indicated
that the pilot is starting to address customers' needs in a more
holistic way, as work-focused services begin to embed themselves
within the children's centres and within their network of partners.
A final evaluation will be published in summer 2011.
The Graham Allen Review of Early Intervention will
report on models of best practice around early intervention and
how such models could best be disseminated and supported (and
the institutional arrangements for supporting them); and, new
and innovative funding mechanisms, including non government funding,
which will ensure the long term stability and funding of early
intervention programmes. The Review will report by end January
2011 on the first area and provide an interim report on the second.
A final report on funding will be produced by May 2011.
Local areas and children's centres can then make
evidence based decisions on the types of programmes and practices
they should offer to improve outcomes for their local communities.
We are exploring how to introduce payment by results as part of
the Early Intervention Grant (including for children's centres). We
will promote transparency by working with the sector to measure
the key outcomes and incentivise reform and effectiveness through
payment of local authorities and providers by results, working
with a number of authorities to develop a fair and effective methodology.
Greater local transparency of data, with payment by results, will
increase local accountability for Sure Start funding and ensure
funding goes to services which have proven effectiveness.
We will be consulting on data reporting changes so
that local authority expenditure on children's centres would be
published from 2011-12, including expenditure on evidence based
early intervention services delivered through children's centres.
Recommendation 30: Children's Trusts are still
young organisations. This Committee and its successors will take
a keen interest in how they develop, particularly whether they
prove successful at improving the consistency of partnership working
with schools, Jobcentre Plus and Primary Care Trusts. The Government
should consider ways in which Children's Trusts can be used as
a mechanism for ensuring that all partners take ownership of Children's
Centres as a core activity of their own organisation.
The Government believes that the core principle of
local agencies co-operating in a shared commitment through Children's
Trusts to improve the lives of children, young people and families—enshrined
by the overarching 'duty to co-operate' (section 10 Children Act
2004)—is sensible and should remain. It is right that local
authorities should continue to lead these partnership arrangements
and that certain key partners should be required to co-operate.
In addition the Department of Health has recently consulted on
proposals for local statutory health and wellbeing boards, which
will bring together the key NHS, public health, adult social care
and children's services leaders in each local authority area.
These boards are designed to establish greater strategic coherence
and improve joint working significantly. They will be able to
establish a shared local view about the needs of the community
and support joint commissioning of NHS, social care, children's
services and public health in order to meet the needs of the whole
local population.
The Government intends to simplify the Children's
Trust system and remove the additional and unnecessary prescription
brought in by the Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning
Act 2009. We have already withdrawn the statutory guidance on
Children's Trusts; and revoked the Children and Young People's
Plan Regulations 2010.
This means there is now no requirement for Children's
Trust Boards to produce a Children and Young People's Plan. Local
partnerships are free to publish their own strategic plan in a
way that best reflects local circumstances and to develop innovative
solutions to integrated working between partners. Professionals
working together with children, young people and families, for
example integrating Jobcentre Plus advisory services into children's
centres, will decide what works best in meeting children's needs.
The Government is also planning in the forthcoming
Education Bill (subject to Parliamentary approval) to remove schools,
non-maintained special schools, Academies and FE colleges from
the list of 'relevant partners' under the statutory 'duty to co-operate'.
This is intended to enable schools and colleges to choose to continue
to engage through the local Children's Trust co-operation arrangements
in ways that are appropriate and proportionate to their circumstances,
size and capacity.
The Government intends (subject to Parliamentary
approval) to remove the requirement for local areas to have a
Children's Trust Board and for Job Centre Plus to be a 'relevant
partner' under a formal 'duty to co-operate' at the first available
legislative opportunity. Together, these reforms will return the
Children's Trust arrangements set up under the Children Act 2004
closer to its original position—giving a lead role to local
authorities in setting up partnership arrangements but allowing
local flexibility in how these are structured and organised.
Recommendation 31: Children's Centres can benefit
greatly from the skills, expertise and distinctive approach of
voluntary sector organisations. We are concerned to hear that
in some cases, organisations have felt excluded either from opportunities
to run Centres on behalf of local authorities, or opportunities
to contribute to the range of services on offer. We recommend
that the Government consider making it compulsory for Children's
Centre advisory boards to include local voluntary and community
sector representation. This would aim to ensure that Children's
Centres give these organisations a platform for their services
rather than competing with them.
The Government is committed to increasing the involvement
of organisations with a track record of supporting families and
to ensure that providers are paid in part by the results they
achieve. Local authorities are already expected to consult with
and to consider using the private, voluntary and independent sectors
to run services within children's centres, as well as the overall
management of centres. However, we intend to make it easier for
these organisations to get involved in running children's centre
services.
Through the Government's Localism Bill, we will introduce
a right for communities and local authority employees to challenge
local authorities where they believe they could provide services
differently or better. This will enable them to submit an expression
of interest (EOI) in running a service, which local authorities
must consider and, where an EOI is accepted, run a procurement
exercise for the service in which they can participate. Through
this right, we hope to see more voluntary and community organisations
and groups of local authority employees coming forward to challenge
their local authorities to increase the diversity of children's
centre provision in their area. The Government is also working
closely with the voluntary sector to understand better some of
the practical barriers they face in bidding to run publicly-funded
services, and to identify solutions to these. The Public Services
Reform White Paper next year will set out more detail on this.
We agree that the role of the voluntary and community
sectors in helping to shape services and set direction is vital
and that representation on children's centre advisory boards is
a helpful way of doing this. The Childcare Act 2006 (as
amended in 2009) requires local authorities to have advisory boards
in place for all children's centres, and to have regard to statutory
guidance when considering membership of such boards. Among
other things, the statutory guidance currently says that local
authorities should consider including a number of different people
or organisations as possible advisory board members, including
local community groups.
2 Marangozo, Rand Stevens, H (2010) Work-focused services
in children's centres pilot: Interim report: DWP Research report
677
Back
3
Defined by reference to the Lower Super Output Areas in the Index
of Multiple Deprivation 2007 Back
4
Early Education Pilot for two year old children: Evaluation National
Centre for Social Research 200, ref DCSF RR 134 Back
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