Session 2013-14
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Education Committee - Minutes of EvidenceHC 364
Oral Evidence
Taken before the Education Committee
on Wednesday 6 March 2013
Members present:
Mr Graham Stuart (Chair)
Bill Esterson
Pat Glass
Ian Mearns
Chris Skidmore
Mr David Ward
Craig Whittaker
________________
Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses: Angela Prodger, Deputy Head of Centre, Pen Green Centre for Children and Families, Councillor Bob Scott, Chair of Governors, Pen Green Centre for Children and Families, Christine Whelan, Head of Centre, Croyland Children’s Centre & Nursery School, and Ellen Wallace, Principle of the Woodnewton Academy Trust, gave evidence.
Q117 Chair: Good afternoon and thank you very much for coming and giving evidence to us today. As a Select Committee, we frequently go out and have seminars, meetings and visits all over the country, but this is only the second time we have taken formal evidence in a venue outside of London; the last time was in the Guildhall in York. It is a pleasure to be here at this extraordinary place that does very fine work. Thank you very much for coming.
The context for our inquiry into children’s centres is the twoyearold offer, an initiative from the Government, which provides 15 hours a week for the most disadvantaged 40% of children in the country. It is going to cost more than £750 million a year by the time it is implemented. Effectively, that is being provided for out of a slightly expanded Early Intervention Grant. The point is that we have a highly constrained budget with a very specific provision being put in place by Government. Was that the best use of £745 million or whatever it is per year? Is it going to lead to better outcomes for young people? Bob, you are a budget holder so you should start.
Cllr Scott: Is it the best use of money? There is obviously a dire need there in terms of that group. It is how you use the money that is really important and what areas you put that money into as a centre. As a budget holder, we see a number of problems with the funding that is available on that. The funding, for instance, will give us a shortfall in this centre of £100,000 in this current year with the numbers of twoyearolds extra that we will be taking on mixed within our centre. It does give us a lot of problems. It is an area that we do want to work with. It is an area we have strongly advocated but we are going to have great problems meeting that effectively within the budget constraints.
Christine Whelan: I would agree with that. My understanding is that the funding for the twoyear entitlement provision came from within the Early Intervention Grant. Whilst understanding the budgetary constraints, I think it is disappointing that it was not "additional to". I also think that the level of funding that we are looking at for two-year-olds is going to cause us considerable problems. If we want to work with the most disadvantaged two-year-olds, and we certainly do, all the evidence from things like the EPPE study does back up the fact that it really does need to be very high quality. There needs to be highquality staffing in order to make a real impact on the children. This is a significant concern that we also share.
Q118 Chair: It is pretty hard to see that it would be scrapped, but would it be better if did not exist and the funding was given to local authorities to spend and to provide the outcomes that they best saw fit, meeting local need, rather than having this very specific provision for two-year-olds?
Cllr Scott: That, in itself, creates other problems. This is because, for instance, the children’s centres, by and large, certainly this centre, have seen cuts. Last year, we received a 4% cut in our children’s centre funding; we are receiving a 10% cut in the financial year we are just about to embark upon; the proposal is to have a further 16% cut the following year; and a further 14% cut the year after, which totals a 44% cut. That goes to the very fabric of any organisation. How can you operate effectively with cuts at that sort of level? The council has not decided whether they are going to enact those last two, but they have enacted the first two that they put forward; so there is every possibility that they will enact the second two. That will put us in a position where we will have to contract our services according to the amount of money we have, when we know that the dire need is there and is increasingly there.
Q119 Chair: My question, Bob, is about whether the twoyearold offer is creating a "cuckoo in the nest": it is squeezing out spending in other areas and leading, perhaps, to the cuts you are talking about. Would it be better if it did not exist? At which point, it is at least conceivable, not necessarily the case but conceivable, that you would not be suffering those cuts. You would be spending additional money because there is, overall, a bigger budget. It is just that more than the addition is being spent on the twoyearold offer, which means existing services are being squeezed. This is my understanding of the maths.
Cllr Scott: You asked about putting it into the county council area, and we have seen what happens when you take away the ringfencing. That is what could happen. That is the point I am making, Chair.
Ellen Wallace: That would be my concern. If it were ringfenced and you knew it was going to be spent on two-year-olds then fair enough, but actually the local authority will make a decision about how it will spend its money and therefore they may choose not to invest in two-year-olds, so I would agree with Bob.
Q120 Chair: Are they not obliged to invest in two-year-olds? The twoyearold offer is something they have to do, is it not?
Ellen Wallace: They don’t do it.
Angela Prodger: It is important we do invest in two-year-olds. Early intervention is critical. There has been a rapid expansion of the two-year-old programme, alongside the proposed changes to ratios; those things are pretty frightening. Also, what we are finding is that the funding we are currently going to receive for our two-year-olds is actually less than what we are receiving for threeyear olds.
The ratios are already significantly different and there is an expectation, with the rollout of the twoyearold offer, that we will be providing family support. That is not an expectation for the threeyear-olds, so we will find ourselves in a fairly difficult financial situation. However, we have always been deeply committed to working with two-year-olds in a history of 30 years.
Chair: Thank you. We have quite a lot to get through in a short period of time, so I will ask for short questions and succinct answers as well, as you have already amply and ably demonstrated.
Q121 Mr Ward: I will go back to the core purpose of children’s centres. What do you see as being the core purpose and does it alter from the Government’s definition of that?
Angela Prodger: I agree that we should be a community hub with services for all, with some targeted intervention, that being targeted services and specialist services. I believe that communities should be informing services and driving them through, rather than us making all the decisions about what we believe families need.
Ellen Wallace: It is about improving outcomes for children and families, community and the sense of belonging, and the local community driving within the children’s centre, and meeting the needs of parents who are able to define their own needs moving forward.
Q122 Mr Ward: In terms of the Government’s new core purpose, does it present you with any particular challenges at all or do you just take it on board?
Cllr Scott: It offers challenges to us: one of them I outlined earlier, in terms of the funding challenges. Regarding the ethos in the centre here, we have been very fortunate that our parents drive everything we do. That is the strength. We will get involved; we will use it as effectively as we can and we will be directed by what our parents and our professionals tell us we need to do.
Q123 Mr Ward: Has there been any impact on your childcare places?
Cllr Scott: The impact has been in terms of the mix. The mix has been altered and that alters our ability to fund it effectively because you have more need, which Angela will probably speak on. There is more need for children at the younger end than there is for children at the higher end. Angela could enlarge upon that point.
Angela Prodger: I have already touched upon it. Basically, when we have our two year olds coming in and using the services, there is an expectation that we offer the family support services. As an integrated centre we have always offered highquality education with care and family support to families where that was necessary, but the money that has been made available for the two-year-olds is not honouring the work that is expected to be done.
Christine Whelan: We are beginning to worry that we have to choose some services over other services. In that case, the difficult decision would be offering your twoyear place or your family support and not both when you know it is both that makes a big difference.
Q124 Mr Ward: Unison suggested that it was a retrograde step to remove the requirement to have a qualified teacher linked to every children’s centre. Do you agree with that?
Christine Whelan: Yes, I do, really strongly. I really welcome the stated core purpose of improving outcomes for young children. I believe most strongly that we should not lose focus on improving those outcomes and promoting children’s learning and development. As I have already stated it really needs to be highquality staffing, which will make the difference.
Angela Prodger: It also needs to be highquality provision.
Q125 Chair: So you think the qualified teacher issue is a retrograde step. Do you all agree with Unison then?
Ellen Wallace: Yes.
Cllr Scott: Yes. One of our strengths here has been that our staff are trained up to a fairly high level and they are able to deal with things as they are and do not have to go back and forwards to people all the time, which is time-wasting and costly.
Q126 Bill Esterson: The national evaluation of Sure Start suggests that improving children’s outcomes has shown a variable level of success, in particular with language development. Is that something that you would agree with and is it important?
Christine Whelan: I would agree with it most strongly. I believe that the promotion of children’s language development is really critical to improving their success within their later academic careers and also their ability to communicate effectively as individuals. We are certainly seeing within our centre, when we are working with the most disadvantaged families, that children’s language development has shown a significant delay. It is a very important area.
Q127 Bill Esterson: Does everybody agree with that?
Ellen Wallace: Absolutely; I do.
Q128 Bill Esterson: In terms of school readiness, Angela, how closely do you work with schools on school readiness and thinking about the importance of language?
Angela Prodger: We have very strong links with schools. We feed into 15 schools. What we have used here and evolved over 30 years is a very robust, seamless assessment process called Making Children’s Learning Visible. Schools are now engaging in that process too and so are able to share a dialogue and assessment where we are talking the same language. That assessment is deeply committed to the engagement of parents. Parents are part of that. We are building up that advocacy role for parents alongside sharing the assessment. It is bringing parents, nursery staff and school together to share in assessment.
Q129 Ian Mearns: I was thinking about this from the earlier conversation that we had. That model, as you said Angela, has been developed over 15 years. Confidence has been built up with local schools in terms of sharing that common framework for assessment, so schools in this area will readily accept the evidence presented to them about each individual child. How suited to roll-out is that, though? How long would it take to roll out that model on a much broader scale, so that schools would readily accept the information passed to them about an individual child? That is crucially important.
Angela Prodger: That is already rolled out and there are several schools in the town already using it. The early years teaching centre programme and our locality group have been meeting, and we have meetings planned to share those assessments and look at roll-out right across the town. We all care about outcomes for children. We are not interested in just the children in our reach; we are interested in the outcomes for all children in town. Through the locality and the early years teaching centres, we are working with local people at PVI-private, voluntary and independent sector-nurseries and childminders to look at improving outcomes for children and how we demonstrate that we have achieved those outcomes.
Ellen Wallace: It provides commonality of language and meaning. On a purely simplistic level, as a headteacher, when I get the MCLV data and I look at the graphs, I can see instantly where children are making progress and moving forward. That has a huge appeal because it is very quick and easy to look at and I am not wading through lots of other bits of data. It works well. In terms of roll-out, I do not think that is going to be a huge issue.
Q130 Ian Mearns: I am thinking about the fact that Pen Green is regarded as a national centre of excellence; if we are trying to roll out what we have learned from Pen Green across a national framework, how long is it going to be before headteachers in schools are commonly going to accept the data that are passed to them from the early years centre and children’s centres, without doing their own baseline assessment of each and every individual child?
Ellen Wallace: I think that is the beauty of this system, because it is schools talking with private providers, for example, and having belief in the integrity of the data that you are being presented with because you understand them, you are talking the same language; and you know what it means, as opposed to, "Oh, we will do our own baseline because we do not trust them." It is a coming together of the private with the public sector. Would you agree?
Christine Whelan: I would agree. I was just speculating, to answer your question, the Every Child a Talker scheme was rolled out a couple of years ago and that was national. I am suggesting that could be an alternative model. If your question is about how quickly it might be rolled out, given that there is underlying expertise in one scheme already, there is something that could be developed there. That could be done within a couple of years, I would suggest.
Q131 Pat Glass: Can you tell me what measures you currently use to demonstrate improved outcomes, what changes you would like to see to that and whether you have the data?
Christine Whelan: That is a good question. Since we were just talking about Every Child a Talker, that is one of the measures we use, given our stated belief in the primacy of understanding children’s language development. We also use Making Children’s Learning Visible. There is a Development Matters framework for the development of children under five. Are we talking about the outcomes for young children? Yes.
Angela Prodger: I would just reiterate that Making Children’s Learning Visible is a fantastic tool: it is datarich, evidencebased and gives us the hard evidence for children. That starts for children when they come in at nine months. We are able to track children over a long period of time and continue into schools. We also use our PICL-Parents’ Involvement with Children’s Learning-selfevaluation tool. We are able use some of those measures for where parents see themselves: what was their start point and where do they see themselves at the end of either one academic year, or however often we choose to use that? We are measuring those outcomes all the time.
Q132 Pat Glass: How useful is the Early Years Foundation Stage? Can you demonstrate any links between the work of the children’s centre and that?
Angela Prodger: The Making Children’s Learning Visible system is based on the Development Matters statement; it is taken directly from the statement. That is only part of how we work with children and parents, however. There are other measures and things that we use. We are looking at children’s wellbeing, their levels of involvement and the work of Laevers and schemas and things, looking at what it is that children innately want to do: what is their intrinsic motivation? I will be looking at those, but those are not so easily rolled out and accepted by schools, necessarily. The tool that we have is my understanding of EYFS to share across the foundation stage.
Q133 Chair: Do you have any thoughts on that? The context for children’s centres is that most of the research had suggested rather less progress, so far, between 2001 and 2008 for instance-there are data coming in all the time-than one might have hoped. As we know, we started off talking about money; we are in a time of austerity, and whether we like it or not, with limited resource, if early years spending does not show demonstrable improvements for children in readiness for school and thus lifelong academic achievement, then budgets risk further scrutiny when political fashions change.
Ellen Wallace: The five children we have tracked, whom we know have been in through our children’s centre, through the nursery and are now in year 3, are all performing at the agerelated expectation. It is only five children, but we would like to say that the children’s centre’s work has had an impact on them in terms of progress. What I am interested in seeing is what happens to those children at 11 in terms of Key Stage 2 outcomes. Can you say you notice that there is a difference for those children, who have access to things like stories, songs and rhymes and other such groups within the children’s centre before entering into nursery?
Christine Whelan: May I just reflect on some of the information that was included in the information you gave us, which was that, of 3,500 children’s centres, some 2,000 do not have any early education provision provided within them. Again, the EPPE Research is really saying firmly that very good provision in integrated centres, where there is early education provision on site, has been demonstrated to have a real impact. I am advocating very strongly here for integrated provision, where you do have early education and where, I would suggest, we are able to maintain a real focus on children’s development. That would be my viewpoint
Q134 Chair: In 2009, Corby was 4% below the national average-this is early education in transition to school information that we have been given-48% compared to 52% of the national average on EYFS. In 2012 that gap had widened to 8%: 56% compared to 64% national average.
Christine Whelan: I am not quite sure which figures you are looking at. I am aware of the figures for the early years profile which, in Northamptonshire, is the end of reception. On my tracking Northamptonshire has been outperforming the national data.
Q135 Chair: The data we have are specifically on Corby. It does show that there has been an improvement, with a score of 56% in 2012 compared to 48% in 2009, but it looks like the national average has increased by more. At 56%, Corby is still below the Northamptonshire average of 64% and the national average of 64%. It looks like a specific issue around Corby.
Angela Prodger: I do not want to specifically start labelling children and families, but obviously through Making Children’s Learning Visible I have been able to look at cohort data and to look at some of the trends. What I have found is no different to national data. The boys who are living with ongoing complexity are not doing quite so well. We have more and more children referred to us with quite specific needs, especially Special Educational Needs. Last year, we had eight children with statements in nursery, which is a very high number in early years provision, which is not a designated provision. Then we have more children at Early Years Action Plus, so at the higher end of need. We have seen a very significant rise in children for whom English is not their first language: 30% of our children last year did not have English as their first language, many of whom will start nursery with little or no English. This year we had 17 different languages spoken in the nursery. In the three terms that we have to work with the children, when their free entitlement kicks in, it is a very a short space of time to move some of those outcomes. However, all children do make good progress and our Ofsted has demonstrated that.
Q136 Craig Whittaker: Christine mentioned earlier that there needs to be highquality staffing to have an impact on children. I notice you have also written some teaching qualifications on pedagogy and leadership as well. Can I ask you, what should the qualifications be to become a children’s centre leader and how should the training for those leaders be further developed and better supported?
Christine Whelan: There is an existing qualification for children’s centre leaders in the National Professional Qualification in Integrated Centre Leadership-it is not snappy, is it? I would say, strongly, that it needs to be at the same level as a withineducation headteacher. I noted in Naomi Eisenstadt’s submission to your Committee she talked about the issues of leadership within centres, and without a strong pedagogical leadership there is sometimes a difficulty for centre staff in gaining support from other professional colleagues. I would say that it would need to be at the same level as headteacher. The complexity of a children’s centre being that predominantly, we are working in three big areas-health, education, and social care-it may be that someone will come to centre leadership from each one of those routes, but the level at which they need to be qualified needs to be at that kind of level.
Q137 Craig Whittaker: "It needs to change," is what you are saying?
Christine Whelan: Some of us are already headteachers but I would say that it is most important. I cannot overstate the importance of really strong leadership in children’s services.
Q138 Craig Whittaker: Would you say that strong leadership comes from extraordinary individuals who are the exception rather than the rule, currently?
Christine Whelan: That seems a very sensitive question to answer.
Craig Whittaker: I have asked a very sensitive question so I expect a very sensitive answer.
Christine Whelan: I know there are some very exceptional leaders in children’s centres.
Craig Whittaker: So "no", then?
Christine Whelan: You will have to repeat your question, I am sorry.
Q139 Craig Whittaker: I get your point. Does anybody have a different view?
Angela Prodger: I would agree with Christine that leadership is key in our children’s centres. There is a real need for knowledge and expertise in working with children and families, and multiagency working, as well as good leadership. I have recently been awarded the certificate in NPQICL, as Chris was outlining, and knew about it when the roll out was here at Pen Green. I feel that the qualification has been watered down, and I would be saying, "Let’s not water it down," because the time spent meeting and sharing with those leaders is important.
We can do the theory-we could do that ourselves-but to spend time together really thinking and reflecting on practice and the leadership issues that arise were vital for me. I got much more out of my shared leadership learning groups than I did attending days to be told theory.
Q140 Chair: Just to get to the bottom of this "diluting," in what way has it been diluted? What needs to change? What would a recommendation from us look like that would suggest a way of fixing it?
Angela Prodger: There were definitely more taught days and more comingtogether days when the programme first began. I think I had to do 20 days. There just did not seem to be enough time to do the reflection and to spend time on it; it was just, "We have 40 minutes to spend on this; we have an hour to do that." I would be saying, "Allow more time." The roles these people are taking on as a children’s centre lead are very crucial and complex and there is a lot to understand. I had been in a leadership role for some time-I was not a new leader.
Q141 Craig Whittaker: Do you want to put some thought around that and perhaps drop that to us in written form?
Angela Prodger: Yes.
Q142 Bill Esterson: You seem to be saying that CPD and practical workbased learning is key to this.
Angela Prodger: Visits to other settings were really inspirational and valuable, because I know what the children’s centre at Pen Green looks like but I would not necessarily know what another children’s centre looks like.
Q143 Bill Esterson: This is about the status that comes from being qualified and the credibility that comes with it, enabling you to be effective. Does that apply for the whole work force? Do you see a similar issue there that needs to be addressed? We were having that conversation before. Can you just spell that out?
Angela Prodger: It is vital that all staff have access to relevant professional development opportunities, highquality training and regular supervision, which is about the challenge and the rigour, given that you are working with children and families every day-how we make sure we are offering the best possible service and really thinking about what the outcomes are for children and families.
Q144 Craig Whittaker: Are you saying that that does not happen now? Because a lot of people would complain that it does not.
Angela Prodger: I am not saying that it does not happen here, but I am sure there are settings where certainly-I know that this is true for some settings-staff are unable to access CPD or go on to further training due to funding. This is something we have invested in heavily.
Ellen Wallace: We are hugely fortunate in Corby because Pen Green is on our doorstep. You would be foolish not to take advantage of the training that is going on here.
Q145 Craig Whittaker: Is it fairly safe to say that there is a strong link between quality and qualifications of staff?
Ellen Wallace: Yes.
Angela Prodger: Yes.
Cllr Scott: I think we have gained enormously as a centre in terms of our policy towards education for our staff. We have learned from people such as Angela going on courses, and that has been applied and tied into our research development. It benefits us and the area enormously. We would certainly argue that centre leaders should be qualified to the types of levels that we wish them to be qualified here. That is very difficult in some areas because of the size of the centres and things like that, but there is nothing stopping those that sponsor the children’s centres-whether it be the local authorities or whatever-putting in the service level agreements that that has to be the case.
Ellen Wallace: I would just like to add that when we opened our children’s centre and started working, the vast majority of our family workers were NVQ3s and the complexities of the cases and families they were supporting were beyond that qualification.
Q146 Craig Whittaker: I was going to say, is that enough?
Ellen Wallace: No. A considerable number of our staff have now done BA degrees and there are five doing the Masters currently. The impact that that has in terms of research on us as a setting is enormous. It is huge, because there is a reflective conversation and dialogue that takes place.
Christine Whelan: There is an additional complexity when you are trying to work in a multiagency way. Not only do you need to have your knowledge and background from your own professional heritage-whatever that is-it is also the negotiation that you have to do and the understanding you have to develop of working with people from outside your discipline, because, if you do not come together well, you do not get the outcomes.
Q147 Craig Whittaker: Let me ask you, finally, about the Government’s proposals on ratios around the early years settings. I know Angela said earlier, and previous panel discussions we have had have expressed-I do not think "horror" is quite the right word, but it is bordering on that. Are you therefore saying that you are not professional enough to have the autonomy to decide for yourselves what ratio levels you want to set?
Christine Whelan: It is a chicken and egg question. You have to talk about qualifications.
Craig Whittaker: I will be the chicken.
Chair: Sadly, we have not got time for this.
Craig Whittaker: I was being flippant. Sorry Christine, I cut you off.
Christine Whelan: It is going to very much depend on the level of the qualification.
Craig Whittaker: You are the professionals.
Christine Whelan: If you are saying, "Do I feel confident?", I can speak for myself: yes, I would be confident
Angela Prodger: Yes, we are professionals and we have already made that decision within our nursery; -we have teachers, we are a local authority nursery school, we choose to work on a 1:8 basis with our children, but actually there is a financial element to our decision on ratio that would be more favourable to children.
Q148 Craig Whittaker: So you are professional enough to do it then?
Angela Prodger: I am absolutely professional enough to do it.
Ellen Wallace: Absolutely, but I run an Academy so autonomy is absolutely what I like.
Q149 Ian Mearns: Separate from this, we are doing an inquiry into governance in schools. What I want to ask about is parental involvement and governance, to a certain extent. How closely involved are parents in the running of your centres and what benefits does this bring?
Christine Whelan: I was reflecting on this as I was coming along in the car; maybe there are different levels. We certainly have parents involved at governor level, advisory board level and also getting involved in volunteering and delivering some of the services. It is at lots of different levels. That would seem to me an absolute necessity because there needs to be as many possible ways for people to be involved within the centre.
Q150 Chair: Why is that?
Christine Whelan: It is about building community cohesion. It is about building the community’s possibilities to direct the centre in the way it wants to. It is about building, hopefully, respect for the centre.
Angela Prodger: I would agree with Christine. It is volunteerism, using governors, it is parents informing and driving services through through forums and dialogue etc. It is about community capacity building. Actually, if we are a community hub, we should be doing things to ensure that we are engaging our community.
Ellen Wallace: It is about having a sense of place and belonging; a place that they can go to and drive. There are tensions and schools find it quite difficult because we have to give up some of the power, but that is no bad thing. It is about parent voice and being able to listen to really engage and have a conversation with parents about what fits the needs of this local community. It is very exciting when that happens.
Q151 Ian Mearns: Different localities have very different population bases. Some localities struggle with getting parents, in particular, to take on the strategically important role of governance. Have you had any particular problem with that and how have you overcome those problems?
Cllr Scott: We have not had a particular problem, no. For instance, on our board of governors, we have six parent governors as part of a board of 20.
Q152 Ian Mearns: Do you have elections?
Chair: You have a board of 20? That is big.
Cllr Scott: There are elections for those; there is always a contest for those positions. We have one, currently. The nominations closed on Friday and we have the election taking place over the next two weeks. I was exceptionally pleased with the last three governors that we had from the parent group that came on board; their knowledge was already very good about the centre because of the involvement they have had with the centre. The other governors that we have are from myriad backgrounds. We have different political parties involved.
Q153 Ian Mearns: You have political parties for parent governors?
Cllr Scott: Not for parent governors; for governance as a whole.
Ian Mearns: I thought, "That is pretty hotly contested, isn’t it?"
Chair: My money is on UKIP.
Cllr Scott: We do not have UKIP, no.
Q154 Ian Mearns: Therefore, do you feel as though the parents you have on board the governing body are representative of the parent body as a whole, or do you have more emphasis on particular groups than others?
Christine Whelan: You are always questioning, working and trying to make sure that you involve as many parents as possible. For some parents it is a huge leap and a huge question of confidence; you do not get that level of involvement overnight. You work at it and you keep working at it.
Ellen Wallace: It is our job to make sure that it does not feel like an impossible task. Certainly, in one of the settings where I work it is difficult to recruit parents to the governing body, but that is for historical reasons. That is about doing some work, getting out there, talking to parents and saying, "Your voice is important." If you come from a climate where parent voice has not been listened to and the only way they have ever been able to get anything done is by shouting, then you have to change the culture and say, "Actually, we need you to come in and talk to us."
Q155 Ian Mearns: Have you done anything in particular to increase the involvement in running the centre of fathers, disadvantaged families, families with children with SEN, or families with children who have particular disabilities-not just at governance level but in terms of getting them involved as volunteers?
Ellen Wallace: The appointment of men as family workers had made and is making a difference. We have men leading our dads and children’s group, which meets on a Saturday. We know that because one of things fathers have said to us is, "I really do not want to come into this because it is all women." I do not blame them, actually. Also, in terms of working with families with special rights, we have actually made facilities available throughout the year and in the evening-for example FACT, which is a group that meets to support families with Asperger’s-so that their support group is there. That is the conversation that we have-"Well, this is going on as well"-within in the centre.
Q156 Ian Mearns: Does anyone have a particular problem in recruiting positive male role models for an early years setting?
Ellen Wallace: At Woodnewton, we have always had men-I say "always," but probably for the last 15 years. In fact, the deputy before one was an early years specialist who was a man. We have a reputation for men coming to work with us. We do not have many, but we have them and it does make an impact.
Christine Whelan: As the early years sector is so predominately female, we always have to be aware-
Ian Mearns: We have found this in the Netherlands and in Denmark as well.
Christine Whelan: Yes, and it is about status and pay and all the other things we have talked about before. We have to be particular aware that we have to make special efforts because it does not feel like a very-
Q157 Ian Mearns: Have you done anything particularly special in helping to train governors and parents to become further involved? Have you done anything particularly innovative or special in terms of training?
Cllr Scott: One of our governors has a disabled child; she specialises in that area. She is an advocate for families and is currently looking at ways and means to get funding for a particular family. We do have a fairly strong involvement on that side. With regards to fathers, it is more difficult to get them involved. We have always had them, but it is still difficult and we would like a lot more. It is a very difficult area to crack.
Angela Prodger: Governors are always invited to our team-building sessions and our professional development opportunities. I did a piece of System Leadership Training, on which I worked very closely with the governors, and we came back and did a shared piece of work within the centre. We are really trying to help them engage and make them feel part of the services-not just attending meetings and talking and listening to their views-and value their expertise, really.
Q158 Ian Mearns: Angela, you said you recently did the NPQICL; was there anything about working with governors within that?
Angela Prodger: Yes, I did and, yes, there was.
Ellen Wallace: I also think there should be short-term, fixed-term governors’ sub-committees so that they have a brief. Otherwise, sub-committees can go on for ever. Who wants to sit on a curriculum committee, for example, that is still knocking it out?
Ian Mearns: We do.
Ellen Wallace: Yes, but if you are there with a fixedterm purpose with a goal at the end and so on and so forth, that makes it much more attractive to governors because they think, "That is 18 months of doing this and then we will have come out with something at the end."
Q159 Chair: I suppose it also depends how long the meetings are as well. How long did your last meeting take, Bob?
Cllr Scott: Too long.
Chair: How long is that, roughly?
Cllr Scott: The last meeting was a finance meeting and actually it ran on time. It took an hour and a half, I think.
Q160 Chair: What about the last full governors meeting with all 20 of you?
Cllr Scott: The last full governors meeting took two and a half hours.
Ian Mearns: That is not bad.
Chair: I used to be on the Conservative Party Board. It would go on for five hours. Torture would have been easier.
Ian Mearns: You deserved it.
Chair: I would have done the torture, I imagine.
Q161 Bill Esterson: On to Ofsted: can you tell us what your experience of Ofsted inspections is like? Were those inspections helpful?
Ellen Wallace: Yes. I am a bit of an expert on Ofsted. I have clocked up 13 over the last 18 months in various ways. Are they helpful? When they are led by HMI, they are extremely helpful. They can be variable when they are not HMI. Sometimes you receive what appears to be conflicting advice-and I use the word "advice" advisedly.
I will give you an example. Three years ago, an Ofsted inspector challenged us around our use of learning stories that we sent home because they had photographs in them and I could not absolutely prove that there would not be a paedophile at home looking at a photograph of a child. It was a really tough argument, because I could not demonstrate that. Three years later, an Ofsted inspector comes along and says, "Wonderful. Aren’t they fabulous? You do send them home, don’t you?" "Absolutely; of course." I find that a little challenging to get my head around. In general, yes, I do find Ofsted inspections helpful.
Angela Prodger: I would agree they are helpful and, like Ellen, I think there needs to be some consistency. We have had two Ofsteds, one in November and one in January, and we were a pilot for children’s centre inspections. With the nursery school inspection, when they rang to agree their time and things, they wanted 12 lesson plans for the nursery provision. Well, if they had a good understanding of early years they would have known that we did not have 12 lesson plans to hand over; we would be working on an individualised curriculum. There are sometimes things like that that are quite frustrating.
Bill Esterson: A lack of understanding of the setting.
Angela Prodger: But like with Ellen, the HMI one was a really robust and rigorous process: appropriate and meaningful.
Ellen Wallace: They are worth listening to, HMI. They just are. You know that they know what they’re talking about.
Cllr Scott: We had quite a session with them and I thought it was very useful. They really reinforced our SEF. From the point of view of governors, that is good because it gives us an indication that our staff are putting things down truthfully and heading in the right direction. It also gives us material that we can plan in future
Q162 Pat Glass: We have heard, as a Committee, witnesses arguing for targeted intervention within the universal service. At a time of austerity when money is tight, is that the right approach or should we be moving towards more targeted services?
Christine Whelan: I would say that it is critical that targeted services do happen but are embedded within universal services.
Ellen Wallace: Universal services bring parents in. Parents come to universal dropin because they feel comfortable; they know the setting; and through that you can signpost and direct. If you are going to have targeted services then we need to be really careful that groups meet the needs of the parents within them. You could say, "Let us have baby massage as a targeted group," but it may not be the most appropriate group for that parent. You have to be careful. I am an advocate for universal services because it does not matter who you are, people will come and use them. It is a really useful way of getting in parents, particularly some of the disadvantaged families.
Q163 Pat Glass: One of the criticism of children’s centres is that the most needy children and families-the families they were established to meet the needs of-simply dipped underneath. How do you know what you do not know? How do you find out who those families are?
Ellen Wallace: It will happen through datasharing. We have to get better and sharper at sharing our data between health, social care and children’s centres. One of the things that we are doing tomorrow is meeting and talking around targeted prevention and that sharing of data because you are right: what you do not know, you do not know. However, you are also sometimes conscious that other agencies are working with families that you do not know about.
Q164 Pat Glass: One of those key agencies is the health visitors. Are they sharing that data? They know who these people are: are they sharing it with you?
Cllr Scott: They have been much better at it in recent times than previously. We now get data every six weeks.
Q165 Chair: Any idea why they have become better?
Cllr Scott: Discussions took place; it took some ninth months to a year to get over the issue of the Data Protection Act. This issue of data collection seems to crop up all the time. We should be sharing that information; not at my level-certainly, I do not want that involvement-but practitioners at a lower level certainly require it. We need that data so that people do not get under the radar.
Q166 Pat Glass: How much is professional status still getting in the way of integrated working? We have been told about some workers in early years settings contacting other professionals and they do not get called back because they are not on the same level. You have to consult the paediatrician at the top, then the EP, then the teacher and then everybody else underneath. Is that still getting in the way of integrated working?
Angela Prodger: As a fully integrated centre we have invested in multiagency working, so it is not about us trying to do one another’s jobs. It is about understanding professional heritage and what skill bases each of us has, and really trying to work together. We have invested in health visitors coming into the centre. Again, we invite them to join us on professional opportunities, training and those kinds of things. It should not be based on relationships, as often happens, because then children will be missed because you do not have a relationship with someone who is there. As Ellen said, we need to get better at sharing data and really trying to work together in the best interests of children and families.
Q167 Chair: People would have said that 20 years ago. So what is going to make it more likely? The trouble is that you have good practice and you can see where it works, and so the rules do not need to be changed because they do it brilliantly in place x. But in 90% of everywhere else they do not, so you sit there thinking, "What can we do at system level to make it more likely?"
Ellen Wallace: When we appointed a social worker, we found it was easier to get access to information than it was previously. We have had a social worker in place since 2007. One of the pay-offs of that is certainly in terms of other members of staff, who have learned to be a lot more assertive. Some of it is about being really assertive and not accepting "no" for an answer. Early years workers have to be grown ups, really. We have to stop looking down on early years workers because they work with little children, and recognise them as professionals having equal status with other professionals.
Q168 Pat Glass: Would you agree with the proposal that children’s centres should have a named social worker?
Ellen Wallace: Personally, having now got two in two settings, I just think it is invaluable. I would not want to be without it, given the impact it has. They are preventative so they do everything up to and including the point of referral, and then we will attend conferences. It is complex, but it has had an enormous impact for us, without a doubt-the robustness and the degree of safety that we didn’t have previously around some of the complex families with whom we are working and supporting.
Christine Whelan: Can I make a distinction, though, between your social worker in post and a named social worker?
Ellen Wallace: Yes, do.
Christine Whelan: You would need to have a stronger definition around, "named social worker." A social worker could be named as a social worker for 20 centres. That would not be as effective as somebody who is a social worker embedded in your centre. You would want to clarify that.
Chair: Our time, sadly, is pretty much up, but David you had questions on the impact of funding cuts.
Q169 Mr Ward: We touched on this earlier, but let’s have just one more go. We are assured by the Secretary of State that there has been an increase from £2.2 billion to £2.5 billion for early intervention funding. You spoke earlier about the impact on you. Do you have any final contributions regarding funding and the likelihood that this will have an impact on what you have to offer?
Chair: What would the main impact of cuts be?
Cllr Scott: The main impact of cuts will be a diminution of the service offered.
Q170 Chair: In what particular ways?
Ellen Wallace: It will affect staffing.
Q171 Chair: Will it affect the numbers?
Cllr Scott: Yes.
Q172 Chair: Will it affect the quality?
Cllr Scott: Quality will certainly suffer and there will be less ability to carry out the sorts of functions we believe we should be carrying out, in integrating as much as we can and making it as seamless as possible.
Q173 Mr Ward: For the record, do you have any comments on payment by results?
Cllr Scott: It works in industry; I don’t think it works with people.
Chair: Thank you very much for giving evidence to us this afternoon. If you have any further points-we did not cover all the ground that we wanted to -particularly along the line of recommendations, things you think you would like to see in our report, then please do write to us. We would very much welcome hearing from you.
Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses: Alex Hopkins, Director of Children, Customers, and Education, Northamptonshire County Council, Diane Dinch, Local Clinical Team Facilitator, Corby and Kettering Health Visiting Teams, Maggie McKay, Senior Coordinator, HomeStart Corby, and Nicki Price, Chief Officer, Corby, Commissioning Group, Willowbrook Health Centre, gave evidence.
Chair: Thank you very much for joining us today. You have all had the benefits of hearing the first session so we will be even more punchy and effective in our remaining few minutes. In light of that, I will hand straight over to Craig to start us off.
Q174 Craig Whittaker: I will not ask what services you deliver in partnership, which is what I was going to ask; can I ask what service gaps you have as a result of not working fully in partnership?
Alex Hopkins: The first thing just to say is that we have 50 children’s centre in this county and there are not 50 Pen Greens. I can drive you 10 miles over the hill to a town called Oundle. You will find a children’s centre there: it is a room attached to the local library. What the children’s centres do is very different; that is very important. At somewhere like Corby, where you have a fully integrated model like you have here, a lot of work has been done on filling those gaps.
In other places, particularly at phase two-and more the phase three centres-that is work to be done. Driving down the A45 to Irthlingborough, there is a children’s centre there that has just started doing contact visits with parents whose children are in care. Rather than the traditional model, where they have to go to the social services office to be stared at, and everything else, they are doing it in an environment where there are parents and children. There will be little gaps all over the place but they need to be filled in from a local level: ground up rather than top down.
Q175 Craig Whittaker: Let me just change my question slightly then. How much duplication of provision do you have?
Alex Hopkins: Can you be more specific?
Craig Whittaker: Speaking of partnerships, one of the key things about fully integrated working is that you get seamless-as we have seen here-provision. The alternative is gaps in and duplication of provision. I understand what you are saying about little pockets and gaps around the place, but how much duplication do you have in your system in your borough?
Chair: The question is about overprovision rather than underprovision in certain areas.
Alex Hopkins: There is definite duplication where different agencies are asked to do the same thing from a different angle. There is the much used example of teenage pregnancy. The NHS had one set of targets and local authorities had another. There are those kinds of examples. With the panel you were talking to previously, what you will see is that there are overlaps that are really important. There are really important overlaps between early years, nursery school provision, into primary. It is that duplication, that overlap, if you like, that you want. Our issue is where we have mandated targets or focus from different departments down to different agents on the ground.
Q176 Craig Whittaker: Alex, let me try it from a different angle. We have heard from Bob previously that there will be cuts of 4%, 10%, 16% and 14%, I think it was. He said that it was a total of 44%. Actually, he quoted 37.6% cuts over that five-year period. How much is overprovision in the county costing? How much could you save if you got that bit right?
Alex Hopkins: We can do the money bit now if that is easier, because that is what that takes. The 4% and the 10% cuts are happening this year, absolutely. In terms of future years, the decisions have not yet been made as to where the axe will fall if those amounts of money need to be taken out. I will not be making that decision; my political master will be.
There is a more fundamental point in terms of the last question you asked, about the overall funding envelope around children’s centres. Whilst the overall envelope has gone up, where the money is has made a huge difference. If I could just illustrate that: we had a reduction in the Early Intervention Grant of about £6 million and this moved over into the dedicated schools grant. The rules about how I can spend that money-because it is DSG-are much, much tighter. I cannot spend it on children’s centres. Rather than passporting a £6 million cut into children’s centres, a political decision-of £1 million-was taken to minimise that. I don’t want you to get caught up on this idea of the overall envelope; where the money is is very, very important.
Q177 Craig Whittaker: What I was trying to get at, though, was, by your own admission, this centre here is not replicated around the borough. Therefore, that would indicate that you have gaps in provision and duplication of provision.
Alex Hopkins: No, not at all. Corby is one community and this is a large county.
Q178 Craig Whittaker: No, but you said you had pockets of gaps in provision and, by your own admission, you also said there would be some overprovision as well. What I am trying to establish is how much this overprovision is costing the borough.
Alex Hopkins: If the question is, "Do you need 50 centre managers for 50 children’s centres?", then that, quite rightly, is the kind of thing that needs to be looked at because you do not need the same level of management input for provision like this as you do with the oneroom example over the hill that I put to you. The point is that the communities within the county are very different, so what they need in terms of a children’s centre-what type of provision they need, how that interrelates within everything else-is different. There is no single answer.
Q179 Ian Mearns: Alex, to follow up, Craig, I have to say, as a councillor of 27 years before getting this job, I hate it when professional officers at a very high level tell us about the decisions that will be made by "our political masters", because I do know how it works. The professional officers within the local authority will be doing some strategic planning and modelling, given a number of different scenarios. You will be doing some planning based on those basic scenarios and then making recommendations to your political masters about exactly how they are going to do it. What strategic modelling has the local authority done between yourself and the Director of Finance in terms of the funding scenarios for the forthcoming years? You have must have done some plans.
Alex Hopkins: Yes, we have done plenty. We have considered it right across the piece in terms of a whole range of services, whether they are statutory or nonstatutory. What has been put in front of you in terms of 14% and 16% is the worst possible case scenario for children’s centres, if all those reductions were loaded only on the children’s centre budget and nowhere else.
Q180 Ian Mearns: What is the most likely scenario?
Alex Hopkins: It will be spread and I think there are other nonstatutory services that are more likely to bear the brunt of that.
Q181 Ian Mearns: Therefore, not 14% or 16%, but more likely a cut of lesser dimensions or no cut at all?
Alex Hopkins: I am not going to speculate on percentages but given children’s centres’ statutory base, it would be highly likely that the cuts were going to fall on nonstatutory services.
Q182 Craig Whittaker: Can I ask you what evidence you have seen that integrated services have a greater impact on child and family outcomes? Do integrated services also offer better value for money?
Chair: Let us start with health: how does health feel about these integrated centres?
Diane Dinch: Integrated working is pivotal to the local community, certainly from a health point of view. In Corby, we have a very long tradition of working with the children’s centres. Obviously Pen Green has been established for a long time. We have had the other three centres that have been built and have grown up over the last six, seven years. Without them, the outcomes for children would have been considerably worse.
To go back to your universal provision question: as health visitors, when you identify a family we have the luxury of being able to access absolutely all of the children who are born in the county-hopefully, as long as we catch them-and then make the initial assessment and move them on. Without the family support provision and the HomeStart provision in the town, some of the integrated working would not have been able to take place. Within health, we have been constrained by our own parameters that have been put in place over the last few years. We do not have the ability to do that oneonone work that we had done before. We need that oneonone work done somewhere and the children’s centres are ideal-and the voluntary agencies; it is not just children’s centres.
Q183 Chair: And Nicki, what do you think? I mean you are a health visitor and health visitor team so integration in the community is second nature to you. What about CCGs?
Nicki Price: CCGs interestingly do not directly commission any services from children’s centres. So, health visiting responsibility has gone to the National Commissioning Board, so we will become a statutory body on 1 April. There is extensive work we need to do with CCGs around children’s centres. First of all, understanding what they actually deliver in the communities. We have significant challenges within health, particularly around some of the lifestyle issues; we are dealing with the blunt end of that. If we do not start to crack some of those issues with families and youngsters, the investment we are having to place into services when patients become poorly is significant.
Maggie McKay: The benefit of integrated working for us at HomeStart is that families have a choice: families can use the services that are available to them in all the children’s centres across the town and create something for themselves that meets their needs.
Q184 Craig Whittaker: What are the barriers to integrated working with children’s centres?
Nicki Price: For us it is an understanding thing, so investing some time to understand what services are being delivered and how we can support partnership working with our other commissioned services to make sure that those different things are happening. It is a little bit early. It is an untapped resource. We have to commission services that are fit for purpose for our community. We have extensive health inequalities in Corby. It is one of our key roles. I would expect us to be working with the children’s centres going forward, but it is just trying to understand what the quick wins are in that.
Q185 Ian Mearns: Within the current Children and Families Bill, there is a proposal that health are going to have to co-operate a lot more, with regard to a statutory duty to co-operate, with things like the delivery of Education, Health And Care Plans. How do you think that will impact on the way you integrate services between the children’s centres, the local authority and health?
Nicki Price: I am not quite sure how to answer that one.
Alex Hopkins: For me, this is a massive step forward.
Ian Mearns: That is the answer I would expect from you.
Chair: It is also the right answer.
Alex Hopkins: We are the only ones around the table who can then be forced by a tribunal to deal with any of those needs; that is the education bit. It should be across all three that there is that statutory duty.
Q186 Pat Glass: Would you support a statutory duty for social care as well, given that it is your responsibility and you have to cough up?
Alex Hopkins: There is something about balance. If it is an Education, Health and Care Plan, and there are two statutory responsibilities and one missing, it seems a bit unbalanced, does it not?
Pat Glass: We are on the Bill Committee and we will definitely be putting that amendment forward.
Q187 Mr Ward: Just to tease out again the identification of need: we have been given an example of the poor state of children’s teeth. How would something like that be identified as need? Going back again to the whole issue of integration, how would that all fit together with working with centres such as Pen Green?
Nicki Price: I could attempt to answer that question but dental healthcare is actually commissioned by the National Commissioning Board and not by Clinical Commissioning Groups.
Q188 Mr Ward: The question is about the identification of need and the sharing of information. What is the process for all that?
Diane Dinch: Certainly within this town, we have our own assessment strategies which we do for families anyway, so risk assessment and needs identification strategies that we use where they help. That would flag up individually with children what we need to put in place to try to mitigate some of those poor behaviours that lead to things like dental caries.
We also try to work collaboratively with the centres to make sure that the health promotion that is required for those specific subjects goes on within centres. We have bi-monthly meetings with the centre leads, discussing those kinds of situations where we try to do joint overall working and approaches just to education, if nothing else.
Dental access in this town is pretty difficult, either because we do not have a dentist available who will take the patients on, or because the families do not understand what you are trying to say to them, whether English is not their first language or there are literacy problems or whatever. Those conversations that we have with our agency partners, such as HomeStart and the big children’s centres, often have more effect on families because they have better access as they are working with them on a daytoday basis. It is about relationship building. It is about making sure that we signpost them in the right direction to the right people that can have that effect. You asked about barriers before, and part of the problem is that there is a fundamental misunderstanding amongst some parts of the community about what children’s centres are for, and this misinterpretation of why people go there. We have a lot of work to do so that they know why they are coming and what the children centres do.
Q189 Chair: We touched on the datasharing issue a bit earlier. What are the barriers to you all being able to share the information that you have in order to allow the kind of joined-up services that we have been talking about?
Mr Ward: What we are looking for is the system. I mentioned the word "process", but is it systemised in terms of gathering and sharing of information?
Diane Dinch: We have a system in place, and Bob alluded to it earlier on. It is much better than it used to be. Essentially, what we tried to put in place with NCC was an information-sharing protocol. When we go out and see children that need us, we get them to sign a consent form that says, essentially, that we can give the children’s centre the information, which is their name, date of birth, and address. That is it. Because of the process, that was as much as we were allowed to share. It all concerns information governance legislation. It is a barrier. We want to give more than that. We are quite frustrated that we cannot share even a telephone number, which does constrain the ability to contact them. The information-sharing issue is definitely there. The problems come from the red tape, if you like.
Mr Ward: We are looking for recommendations.
Diane Dinch: Get rid of the red tape. Parents are more prone to agree to share information than the red tape would allow for. If we went straight to parents and said, "Are you happy even for us to fill in the registration forms for the children’s centres?", I think a good majority of the parents would say, "Yes." But our governance procedures will not allow us to do that.
Q190 Pat Glass: Is it your governance procedures or is it the legislation?
Diane Dinch: I am not sure.
Q191 Pat Glass: Well, would you be able to find out and let us know? To be fair, health professionals always say this, and yet Government will tell us it is not in the legislation anywhere. If you can come back and say, "If you just got rid of that…", then we at least could recommend it.
Diane Dinch: I can give it a go.
Pat Glass: Just write to us
Nicki Price: Where you have informed consent, where you are working on a onetoone basis, it is always significantly easier to hand data across. Where you are looking at that on larger scale population base and you want to be able to pass information across, it becomes a little bit more difficult, unless you want it completely anonymised. Even within health, we struggle to pass information across health organisations due to information governance. To pass health information from health out into some organisations then becomes very difficult.
Diane Dinch: Practitioners struggle because, individually, there is accountability. If your guidelines are vague, it leaves you feeling quite insecure and therefore you err on the side of caution.
Q192 Ian Mearns: Chair, I am not convinced that there isn’t an awful lot of corporate mythology about all of this stuff within a whole range of organisations. Unfortunately, that corporate mythology gets right the way from the top, right the way to the bottom. I really do think that health professionals need to go back and absolutely check what they are and are not allowed to share on this stuff.
Nicki Price: I know that significant work has been done in health within Northamptonshire, which has gone right up to the GMC, around our ability to share health. From a commissioning point of view, we want to access more information that is in GP systems; there is a whole wealth of information within GP systems that I am sure would be beneficial to a number of partner organisation, but we have been prohibited from that because of legislation. We have taken legal advice on that matter as well.
Chair: The Government will sometimes say, "You should share information but we will give you no legal indemnity if you do so."
Q193 Pat Glass: We have talked a lot today about the changing purpose of children’s centres and the increasing focus on targeted services. Maggie, can I ask you, do you welcome that, given that many of the families that we are talking about are families that you would be dealing with? Do your families actually understand and know about the children’s centres, and are they reluctant to come?
Maggie McKay: There are two answers to that. There are the families that know about children’s centres and will dive in, swim through all the services and take what they can for themselves and their children. Then there are families that would probably need a little bit more support to access: maybe they have lost a little bit of confidence around mental health issues and probably had a little bit of post-natal depression. They have lost confidence in themselves. You might need to go along with them to those services. Some families, through previous bad experience, maybe with statutory agencies, might just say, "No, I do not want to do that." They might not fully understand the benefits of these services to themselves and their children.
However, I would say that in Corby, in general, my understanding of the families is that I am fairly sure that they all know that the children’s centres exist. They probably have an understanding of what goes on in those children’s centres, and most families would go and find what they need from each children’s centre. Some families go around every children’s centre, using a different group every day. With regards to the families whom we want to use the children’s centres at HomeStart, or to come out, we would probably do a little bit of work with them at home first, build up their confidence and then speak with the other children’s centres and inform them about what they have to offer, so that volunteers can then assist those families to use those services.
Q194 Pat Glass: Is your general view of this, "Oh great, my families will get better access to children’s centres like Pen Green," or is it, "Oh no, if we take away the universal element of it or it is lessened, there is even more stigma and they will not come"?
Maggie McKay: I am a big advocate of universal services. I totally believe that, at any given time, at any point in anybody’s family life, things can go wrong. Things could be quite happy, bobbling along, then, all of a sudden, somebody could lose their job, the family could fall into poverty; and then all of the angst around that. I think keeping those universal services open to everybody-to not have those universal services will mean that people will miss out.
Q195 Pat Glass: Just very quickly to Alex, what are you doing now to work with children’s centres to prepare them for the changed role of more targeted services?
Alex Hopkins: We have spent a lot of time on this. We have brought the children’s centre managers from around the county together. We have been doing a lot of work on targeted prevention. This is the area between social care and universal services, if you like. We are looking to put targeted prevention resource -people, whatever it might be-into the centres, so bolstering, if you like, the early help or intervention.
I still think there is a debate to be had, though, about the assumption that the core purpose would be the same for all, say, 50 children’s centres in this part of the country because, again, the communities they serve are different. There are instances where the socioeconomic impact is less of an issue: on things such as maternal mental health, parent- infant attachment. On the answer to the question about the balance between universal and targeted, the move from childcare to early intervention must be different in different places.
Q196 Chair: How well do your services work in the rural areas? The room on the side of a library does not sound like the most inspiring centre but I suppose it depends on the quality of people who occupy it.
Alex Hopkins: Using that example, they do a lot of outreach work. They are dealing with families that are dotted all over the place. I was in our most northerly primary school earlier this week, in a place called EastonontheHill, which is another half an hour from here heading north. The staff from that children’s centre go up there and work and do outreach. It is just a different model. You can justify the large physical resource where you have the concentration of both population and need, but it is a different model in rural areas.
Q197 Chair: We talk about the universal and targeting and reaching the hardtoreach. What penetration will there be in, say, the top two deciles of high income? When we talk about "universal" and everyone using it, do the children of barristers and industrial barons come into contact with children’s centres? How wide is the social range genuinely reached by children’s centres?
Alex Hopkins: Yes, if it is the sort of "yummy mummy X5 Range Rover" question-
Chair: The yummy mummy X5 Range Rover question?
Alex Hopkins: That is how we talk about it.
Chair: That is how your imagination works, Alex.
Alex Hopkins: There is a lot of challenge around that, doing baby massage and all that kind of thing. In some parts of the county-
Craig Whittaker: They do it here. We have seen it in action today.
Bill Esterson: We have heard about it, anyway.
Alex Hopkins: Yes, but in some parts of the county it is absolutely used by those people. To go back to what I said before, for some of the services people need to access the support they need, it is not about the socioeconomics. Things like maternal mental health, attachment issues, postnatal depression cut right across that. There is a need for people to access that kind of provision. The question for me is what that then looks like, because it needs to look different depending on where you are. But absolutely, people like that access services.
Q198 Pat Glass: So, it is universal access rather than universal use?
Alex Hopkins: Yes.
Q199 Chair: But your point in answer to my question, though, was that people from every socioeconomic group do get involved; they may be smaller in number, but there is penetration.
Alex Hopkins: Yes, absolutely.
Q200 Bill Esterson: Alex, you started to answer this question earlier and you drew back from it. Is what you have just been saying an argument for fewer children’s centres with more resources, but put in the areas of greatest need? You then have the outreach for everything else. Is that the logic of what you have just been saying?
Alex Hopkins: What you have just described is Sure Start. That is pretty close to what Sure Start was, was it not? It was focusing on the areas of greatest need and focusing the resources in there. It was incredibly targeted: "This ward, that ward, and that ward; these populations." The point is that we are not starting with a blank sheet of paper; you can have the far more integrated, holistic-whatever you want to call it-provision like you have here, where you have the greatest need, but in areas where you have less need you can have something different. I do not think it is an "all or nothing".
Q201 Bill Esterson: So it is not one or the other?
Alex Hopkins: No. I think there is a debate to be had in certain parts of the country for charging for some of the services that are delivered out of children’s centres.
Maggie McKay: My thinking is that if you are closing some children’s centres in order to make other children’s centres more focused, there are always going to be those families that would need support and practical means, in transport terms, to access children’s centres.
Also, my fear-and this is my own opinion-is that those centres will then come extremely busy, which may be quite offputting for a family who have one or two children and may be experiencing a bit of low mood. Coming into a children’s centre that is quite busy could be quite a big thing for a family to achieve in itself. I am not sure where the answer lies, but I would definitely see that there would be a risk to the families if things were closed and the services were more compacted. I think that that would be a problem.
Q202 Mr Ward: Just some thoughts from you on the levels of qualifications of the key work force. Do you have any views on whether children’s centre staff are adequately qualified and trained for their role? What is your experience? No one is listening; it is only us here.
Nicki Price: I am not that close to children’s centres so I would not be able to answer that question.
Diane Dinch: We work obviously alongside family support workers and early years workers. In my experience, especially in the centres in Corby, they do offer quite a prolific educational process. We have integrated that, and we have had joint educational sessions and training that either they have done and we have benefited from, or conversely that we have done and they have benefited from. The educational standard in Corby is very high.
I truly believe that they need to be qualified to a significant level to be able to manage some of the complexities that we work with. Even with regards to fundamental issues such as maternal mental health, you cannot support somebody with an enduring low mood without the necessary education to understand how to recognise it and to recognise if it is improving or getting worse. Pivotal to that is the impact upon the infant’s wellbeing. The level of education they get here, obviously, with the research centre, is impressive. But you cannot just offer it once and leave them to it: it has to be built on. You need that scaffolding around the staff, as well as the children and families.
Q203 Mr Ward: Alex, can I just ask you about the Croyland Children’s Centre’s Ofsted report? It was critical of the support given by the local authority to governors, specifically on training and data. Has there been a response to that from the local authority?
Alex Hopkins: Yes; you made me do my homework because it predates me. I had to speak to my predecessor on the phone, because it is obviously a very specific question. Following those comments, bespoke training in that issue was done for each of the children’s centres, but also training for school governors where a children’s centre is integrated. Where an Ofsted report identifies the need for additional support, we will have someone sit as part of that advisory body in terms of supporting them and challenging them.
It is important to point out that there is a balance between how much money is retained centrally and how much is spent in the centres on the frontline work. A conscious decision was made to retain as little as possible centrally, as we have done with schools in the county, and as much as we can in the centres. This means that the central support available is not going to be as big as it could be otherwise, but there is the belief that the money is best spent at the front end and not held back.
Q204 Mr Ward: My final question is: as commissioners of the services, are you satisfied that you have enough influence over the running of the children’s centres?
Maggie McKay: I would say that all children’s centres are equally committed to families across the town. If we ever have any suggestions or anything we want to input into those children’s centres, they would definitely welcome hearing from us and looking at that in terms of the support for families and children, because that is their priority. In terms of HomeStart, we have representation from each of the children’s centres in Corby on our board and that helps us with keeping communication lines open. We are constantly seeking to build on and improve that as well. It is nowhere near completion but it is definitely going in the right direction.
Alex Hopkins: At the risk of being boring and repeating the point, the question needs to be, "How does it work together from the ground up and not from the top down?" There used to be an assumption that by mandating certain things-even at a county level-we get the best outcomes locally. I just do not think that is right. In the places where we have had the greatest success, it has been about how people have worked together locally. So, the "how", because all of our children’s centres are commissioned, is left for the professionals to work out locally. We are just clear on what we want in terms of outcomes and all the rest of it.
Nicki Price: I cannot comment from a commissioning point of view but as a major partner going forward, we need to do some significant work with children’s centres to identify what the opportunities are.
Diane Dinch: From a health visiting point of view, we have a member of our staff who sits on the advisory board of all four of the centres. We are invited. If we lost that contact-it is always the children’s centre that is coming back to us to ask us and make sure that we attend.
Q205 Ian Mearns: This is really aimed at Alex. Northamptonshire is obviously a very diverse county with a total of 50 centres around the patch. You have stated that the different centres do very different things; there is only one Pen Green. What can the Sure Start centres use to demonstrate improved outcomes for children, which together build towards the strategic aim of the authority? What can individual children’s centres do to demonstrate that that vision is being delivered clearly?
Alex Hopkins: There are a couple of bits to this. The first bit is the big outcomes. Educational attainment, all the way through, is relevant, because if you have children’s centres doing what they are doing, nursery schools, primary schools, secondary schools, everyone contributes to that and you cannot lose sight of those big ones-education, health and social. That is really difficult to do at a children’s centre level because you are dealing with years and years and years.
On measuring contact with identified families and percentage of reach, it would be really helpful-this echoes some of the Ofsted conversation we had previously-if we had a bit more clarity, or the bits of the system worked together. In order to be an outstanding children’s centre, according to Ofsted, you need to be working with 80% of the families within your reach, but actually, if you want to be focused in terms of targeting, then those two things will be different. Those two things seem at odds to me. There are more examples of the performance regimes that children’s centres are subject to potentially working at odds with each other.
If you look at educational attainment at county level-you quoted the Corby figures, but at a Northamptonshire level-the early years results, if you like, have steadily improved over the last few years. It has to be a mix of those big macro things, but also the inputs and the things you want children’s centres to be doing in order to work with the right families.
Q206 Ian Mearns: Are you doing any comparative longitudinal studies? You have said that there are quite different things going on in different places; therefore, if one of your main guiding principles is on educational outcomes down the line, are you doing any comparative longitudinal studies to evaluate that properly?
Alex Hopkins: We have been looking all the way through because something interesting happens in this county. At Early Years Foundation stage, our children are above the national average. As they go though their educational career they converge with the national average. By the time they get to GCSE, they are below the national average. That is very significant. We have been doing some work on that, tracking back, looking at the data to try to understand what is going on.
There is some very interesting stuff happening around the population in this part of the country. There has been a 456% increase in the east European population in Corby over the last 10 years.
Ian Mearns: But if it was only four families that would be about 16 families.
Alex Hopkins: I am sure that colleagues who know Corby well know that the only Serbian Orthodox Church in the country is just over the road.
Ian Mearns: That has been there a long time.
Alex Hopkins: That is because you had a large east European population that worked in the steel industry. You have the only 100% EAL primary in the country in Peterborough .up the road. You have a massively changing population as well. It is looking at those factors together to try to work out what is happening. It has to be tracking back, using the historical data but overlaying the population stuff on top of it.
Q207 Ian Mearns: That sounds like a major challenge, but are you saying that the authority has the analysis of that in hand to make sure that, by the time the kids reach 16, the GCSE results are not below the national average?
Alex Hopkins: Yes.
Q208 Pat Glass: What is your 16-plus participation rate?
Alex Hopkins: Off of the top of my head, I cannot tell you.
Q209 Chair: Alex, what would you like to see? Investment in early years is significant now, and yet the big studies, so far, are not showing a major change in school readiness-to use that particular term-and, generally speaking, improvement in outcomes, particularly for the most disadvantaged children, has not been as significant as we all hoped when we started out. There have been a number of years of that kind of investment and expanded investment; have you any reflections on that? What do you think needs to be in place in order to ensure that we really do create a more socially just society in which being born poor does not mean that you end up with poor education?
Alex Hopkins: As you all know, there are no silver bullets when it comes to working with children, particularly around education, social development and all the rest of it. I think that the search for one in terms of children’s centres and early years and all the rest of it is not where the energy is best put-looking at what works well and not then trying to industrialise it and spread it across the entire country, but rather saying, "It works well here because they have had the freedom to do this, that and the other, and they have worked in this particular way," and using that as a learning tool, rather than legislating for this, legislating for that. I do think a different approach is what is called for.
In terms of the studies that ask the question about effectiveness, one of the issues we have is that where the Sure Start projects were originally and where our more integrated children’s centres are now are where you have had three generations, longterm unemployed and you have had huge social and educational issues. They are not turned around in five, six, seven years; they are turned round in the much longer term. You should, however, be able to see the initial impacts of what you are doing. Thinking of the panel before, if you cannot see in reception children that are school-ready, children who are able, coming in ready to learn and able to interact with other small children, and they have been through the children’s centre system, then we do have a problem
Q210 Chair: Do we have that problem?
Alex Hopkins: From what I have seen in the country, no. I can take you to any number of primary schools; you can talk to the reception teachers and they will be able to tell you which children had early years and which children did not.
Q211 Bill Esterson: Is there something that happens later on in the school system here that is different from other parts of the country, say at 11 plus?
Alex Hopkins: That is what I am trying to understand. Certainly in Northampton, which is the largest urban area in the country, there were a high number of very poorly performing secondary schools.
Q212 Craig Whittaker: Did you say earlier that you didn’t think that children’s centres were the right way forward? Was that what you said?
Alex Hopkins: No.
Craig Whittaker: No, okay. I must have misheard what you said.
Q213 Chair: A final point on the alignment between outcomes required in health and outcomes in the world of education and local authorities etc. Is there anything that needs to be done to change those alignments so that you can work more effectively together, so you are not sitting round with people of good will before finding that the actual requirements on you send you on differing trends?
Diane Dinch: At the moment, we have very hard figures that we can run to on obesity rates, dental care-as you talked about before-and achievement rates in terms of exam results etc. It is those intangible quality outcomes that are not necessarily defined very well and they are not put together. We have our quality outcomes that we try to measure. Education have their quality outcomes that they try to measure but we never have that joint conversation where you decide what they should be.
For example, when Ofsted comes we come to support the Ofsted review and we know they have health outcomes that they need to meet but we do not necessarily take part in arranging how they meet those health outcomes, if that makes sense. Those conversations should definitely be happening. There is definitely something about the joining of health-not just doing early years but making our services 0 to 19; trying to look at the overall outcome for children, so that it is not just about prebirth upwards until five, and then it stops and changes. It needs to be a seamless health provision for children until they reach adulthood.
Q214 Ian Mearns: In order to better integrate the seamlessness in that case, would you welcome shared accountability measures between health and education?
Diane Dinch: Yes.
Nicki Price: Some of the linkages that have not been there in the past will start to happen as the result of the formation of health and wellbeing boards. Going forward, we will start to see some of that joinedup thinking at strategic level; it is how that then starts to filter down into the daytoday work. We have the public health departments in local authorities, so I am sure that that will start to bridge some of those gaps as well.
Q215 Chair: That was going to be my final, final question. Do you think that local authorities having public health responsibilities should contribute to better integration and understanding between the world of the local authority and the world of health?
Nicki Price: I would hope so.
Alex Hopkins: I was just going to say on the shared outcomes point that if you were to ask somebody out on the street about shared measures in health, they would probably want shared measures for Corby. There is an element of déjà vu here, because the Local Area Agreement project of whenever it was that looked at a target by place-okay, it became overbureaucratic and all the rest of it, but the simple premise there, that you talk about the key outcomes you want to achieve in a particular place, is quite obvious.
Ian Mearns: Yes, but you don’t need 150 performance indicators.
Alex Hopkins: No; you need about five, max.
Chair: Excellent. Thank you very much for giving evidence to us this afternoon; and thank you very much to the other witnesses as well, and to Corby.