Education CommitteeWritten evidence submitted by Save the Children

Save the Children believes that it is unacceptable that the learning and development of children living in poverty is often stunted before they even set foot in school. We believe that no child should endure poverty and no child’s life chances should be shaped by the accident of birth. Policy and practice must shield children from the effects of deprivation by preventing problems and inequalities before they occur (rather than seeking to solve or redress them after they have taken hold). Save the Children believes that Sure Start Children’s Centres have a crucial part to play in ensuring that children from disadvantaged backgrounds have the very best start in life.

While the brain continues to grow during adolescence1, it is from the pre-natal period, up until five years of age, that it undergoes the most rapid growth2. Evidence shows a) substantial developmental inequalities emerge during these critical early years and b) these early indicators of skills and abilities can often reliably predict outcomes right into adulthood3. In other words children’s life chances are limited by poverty and deprivation before they even properly settle into primary education.

1. Core Purpose

Save the Children supports the core purpose of Sure Start—”to improve outcomes for young children and their families, with a particular focus on the most disadvantaged, so children are equipped for life and ready for school, no matter what their background or family circumstances”4.

However, we strongly urge that access to Sure Start remains universal. 4Children argues that there are a number of risks if Sure Start Children’s Centres are restricted to low income families:

Stigmatising those families who use children’s centres.

Vulnerable families who are living in poverty, but not in official “areas of deprivation”, falling through the net.

Preventing parents from accessing help for problems that are not related to income, such as breast feeding and post natal depression.

Denying children and families the social mobility benefits of interacting with children from a diverse range of social backgrounds5.

We also know from our FAST programme that adopting a voluntary access or universal approach improves recruitment and retention rates with low income and isolated families in particular.

Whilst we support a universal approach, we believe that Sure Start should remain a core service provider for low income families, providing high-quality services and care for children and families who are most in need.

2. Funding

Save the Children is concerned about the removal of the ring fence funding for Sure Start children’s centres, and believe that this is a serious threat to the viability of the early years infrastructure. We are extremely concerned about recent reports regarding further cuts to the Early Intervention Grant (EIG) and the devastating impact this would have on early intervention services and children’s centres6.

We were supportive in 2010 of the move to combine a range of previously separate funding streams as one Early Intervention Grant. However, removing all control over the funding of children’s centres risks diversion from children’s services into other areas perhaps suffering more severe cuts.

Without sufficient funding, there is concern that while children’s centres may not actually be closing, staff numbers have had to be cut, staff time is therefore stretched, and this in turn means a reduction of the services that centres are able to offer.

There is a danger in children’s centre managers having to be responsible for “clusters” of children’s centres. This leads to difficulties in that individual knowing what is happening in each centre, or what the local needs are in that particular area.

Further to this, as better qualified staff are given the task of running a number of centres, less qualified staff are left on their own to do the front line work with families.

The fundamental question should not be how many children’s centres do we need, but what is a sensible service for families and young children depending on the complex needs for family support and childcare, making best use of the investment in children’s centres.

3. Evidence-Based Early Intervention

Save the Children would like to see a broader remit for children’s centres as commissioners of area-wide early years support, coordinators of prenatal and antenatal care and providers of birth registration and community outreach services.

Evidence-based early intervention ensures that high-quality programmes benefit children and families and represent good value for money.

We would like to see an increase in the number of parent support programmes that are focused on children’s education. The main focus of most evidence-based programmes is on helping parents to develop parenting styles that support positive behavioural development in their children. Their origins were typically in concerns about children’s behaviour and the relationship with less effective parenting styles.

This support is clearly necessary and important, but it needs to be available to more parents and combined with interventions that have a broader reach if we are to improve the life chances of all children affected by deprivation.

In its 2011 response to the government’s child poverty strategy consultation, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation argues that “tackling child poverty and the rich-poor attainment gap requires significant changes to the outcomes of around 20% of the population- not just the bottom 5%” (Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 2011, p.3). It says we must act to “expand the evidence for broader groups”.

Role of government

Government has a responsibility to set the right strategic direction. Evidence-based early intervention currently is not the norm, and therefore changes need to occur.

We believe the Government’s role should be to set the strategic direction. This means a.) supporting the Early Intervention Foundation (EIF) so that a repository of best practice can be made available to local authorities and children’s centre management so that they can commission from endorsed lists of programmes, and b.) creating a financial incentive for local authorities and children’s centres to commission and implement evidence-based programmes and practice from within existing funds.

At the moment, the incentive is for local authorities and children’s centres not to divest from historical ways of working that are unlikely to involve evidence-based early intervention. Financial incentives could relate to a higher proportion of funding being given via the existing EIG to local authorities that implement EIF endorsed programmes in future.

As mentioned above, we are aware of proposals to take away the EIG ring-fence. We would like to see a proportion of it to be allocated in future to implementing evidence-based programmes. Local authorities would only be able to access this proportion of funding (relevant to local need) to implement these programmes. This could encourage the change we need to see happen and ensure that future spend does not get sucked into only covering existing statutory duties.

We do not believe that the Government’s role should be to determine which programmes local authorities can select from. It should be the role of an independent EIF to suggest particular programmes. Local authorities would then select evidence-based programmes which relate to their context. This financial incentive could help to solve one of the main barriers to implementation at scale7.

In terms of payment-by-results, over time if the market matures, local authorities could and should reap dividends from improving outcomes via more effective evidence-based practice as per agreed early intervention investment contracts between the private sector, local and central government.

Role of local authorities

Ensuring that senior management within local authorities buy into evidence-based programmes and promote an under-pinning prevention philosophy. This could mean agreeing to re-position resources to focus on evidence-based programmes rather than historical ways of working.

More efficient and effective local commissioning practice based on cyclical re-investment in services that achieve expected outcomes and social return on investment. For example, new funding vehicles, such as social impact bonds, that are able to frontload investment in skilling-up local workforces in evidence-based programming.

Firm commitment to fidelity and quality assurance mechanisms of evidence-based programmes, such as, supervision and evaluation, so that any temptation to change models locally to reduce expense is resisted.

Shared standards of evidence need to become part of core business for local commissioners. Standards of evidence are a much needed tool that would enable the identifying and disseminating of best practice, alongside, smarter commissioning and more sustainable planning. In this way, every local authority could have access to a common language and collective vision on which programmes are most likely to deliver the best outcomes for children and families, as well as, a decent social return on investment both individually and as part of a pipeline of services. While this kind of guidance would clearly promote interventions with the most robust evidence of impact, commissioners would still be able to select from a range of high quality programmes so that any intervention will serve their area’s specific needs.

Role of children’s centre management

To prioritise training for staff in evidence-based programmes and child development.

To imbed a prevention philosophy focussed on outcomes and high retention rates rather than red tape and outputs.

Focus on partnerships with health and education to ensure that families receive a joined-up service focussed on children’s on-going development.

Focus resource into identifying best practice via evaluation and into manualising it so that others can replicate. Not every programme could or should be an evidence-based programme as these tend to produce specific outcomes and have very limited reach. Centres need to strive to adopting evidence-based programmes where appropriate, but at the same time to evaluating on-going work and innovations in order to decide what to continue investing in or divesting from. By identifying, quantifying and training best practice, centres can implement a strategic approach that encompasses EBP and programmes more adapted to the local context and families’ needs.

Role of practitioners (in centres and outreach)

There is a need to imbed a culture of monitoring and evaluation. While we want to remove unnecessary bureaucracy, we should collectively emphasise that evaluation is core practice.

Save the Children has experience of training a number of Families and Schools Together (FAST) teams, who are made up of local parents, school, health and early years professionals, and other local authority staff and community leaders. Anecdotally, we have found that there is sometimes a resistance to adopt evidence-based practice at the start, as it challenges ingrained ways of working.

4. Defining and Measuring Good Practice

Good practice can be defined by the achievement of positive outcomes and high retention rates, particularly of low income and isolated families. Therefore all delivery needs to be monitored and evaluated in order to understand which practice areas are most effective at improving outcomes, as well as being measured using standardised measures so that attribution can be proven.

We need to enable wider implementation of evidence-based family and parenting programmes, where appropriate. But, the biggest change in family and parenting support in terms of reach and outcomes would come from supporting commissioners to fund and practitioners to implement evidence-based practice.

This is because evidence-based programmes have been designed for specific target groups on the whole and will not necessarily be suitable for population-wide delivery. However, normalising evidence-based practice within children’s centres and through outreach, ie recognition and manualisation of, as well as adherence to, the fidelity of core practice components that lead to predictable outcomes and the use of monitoring and evaluation to continuously improve practice, will lead to true early intervention at scale and improved life chances for many more children.

Save the Children’s Scotland Office recently commissioned a piece of research called “Thrive at Five”, which sought to produce a Child Development Measure that compares the development of children from different socio-economic backgrounds8.

The Child Development Measure is a holistic, population level instrument that gauges the development of children across a range of indicators at around the time they start primary school.

It reveals that children born into poverty are twice as likely as other children to face developmental difficulties when they enter formal schooling, severely damaging their future educational achievement and life chances.

This large disparity is evident across all developmental areas included in the Measure—physical wellbeing, emotional wellbeing, social skills, cognitive development and communication.

The instrument is an example of the type of comprehensive measure of child development that is required to guide and monitor the various early years policy and legislative initiatives currently being pursued. The findings of the Child Development Measure reinforce the need to provide additional support in the early years for children in poverty9.

We are also supportive of the Tickell Review’s recommendations to slim down the EYFS and to provide parents with a formal summary of their child’s development, alongside the health visitor check at age two, to help identify any early problems or special educational needs.

We also agree with the recommendation that a greater emphasis should be placed on making sure that children have the basic social, emotional communication and language skills they need to learn and thrive at school—like being able to make friends and listen effectively (The Strengths & Difficulties Questionnaire is the most well-known measure for socio-emotional and The British Ability Scale works for Language).

The main barrier is not agreeing which measures to use as there is broad agreement on the three themes (as referred to in the Tickell’s Review) and internationally recognised indicators, but there is a need to incentivise and enable the statutory workforce to administer the age two developmental checks as there has been understandable resistance from an already stretched health visitor workforce.

5. Integrated Services

We strongly welcome the emphasis on children’s centres to work in an integrated way with other services. We believe that the key to tackling child poverty and improving children’s outcomes is for all agencies engaged with children and families from disadvantaged backgrounds to work in a holistic way to tackle the often multi-layered causes and effects of poverty.

We would like to see this integrated approach to working go even further and for local authorities to include Children’s Centres within a larger community-based model of support to the most disadvantaged children and families within a community. Locally-driven partnerships could bring together early years settings, schools, health agencies, housing services, and family support providers to design and implement a pipeline of cradle to career supports so that every child can overcome disadvantage and realise their potential.

Indeed, as stated by Naomi Eisenstadt: “For particularly poor children, a combination of quality interventions with mothers and fathers around birth and for the first three years, combined with high-quality early education and encouragement towards employment, all need to be in place to have the maximum impact”10. There are pockets of best practice across the UK where such a package is being delivered, but this is not consistent everywhere.

Save the Children has recently published a new piece of research with the University of Manchester called “Developing children’s zones for England”. We wanted to find out what could be learnt from the incredibly successful Harlem Children’s Zone (HCZ) in New York. HCZ is a geographically based non-profit organisation. It currently serves around 100 blocks in Harlem which is predominately home to low-income black families. It offers them access to an interlocking network of education, health, family and social welfare services. These are not simply wrap-around services, but have been designed to create a “pipeline” of support for children from cradle to career.

Save the Children would like to see children’s zones piloted in England, and believe that Sure Start Children’s Centres would play a key role in this pipeline of support for children from deprived areas.

6. Engagement With Parents

Universal high-quality early education is key to improving the outcomes of children, particularly those from low-income backgrounds. However, in particular, involving parents in this process is also crucial in order to work towards creating a positive home learning environment. As stated in a Save the Children report published last year:

“The universal skills that parents need to be able to deploy to nurture their children with positive parenting are care, discipline and instruction. These elements are essential to the effective and loving upbringing of children. However, parents’ capabilities in relation to positive parenting are subject to their own circumstances and knowledge.11“

The Sutton Trust states that “identifying effective parenting programmes is crucial, given the prominent role that differences in parenting play in explaining cognitive gaps”12. Save the Children believes that parents are children’s primary teachers and nurturers, and, ultimately, their foremost prevention agents. There is a wealth of research that demonstrates the impact that parents can have on their child’s outcomes (Desforges 2003, Feinstein 2003). A recent study by Jane Waldfogel (2009) and colleagues suggested that half the gap between affluent and poorer households in the USA was explained by the home environment and quality parenting.

In particular, it is essential that guidance is acted upon, and that this is used as a way of enabling parents to have a real opportunity to be able to choose from proven and quality provision that truly suits their needs. Local authorities and Children’s Centres should examine ways of involving parents by giving them access to all accredited options as recommended by, for example, C4EO and Graham Allen’s reviews into Early Intervention, and for parents, local authorities and Children’s Centres to be able to discuss these from an evidence point of view, and a user-demand point of view.

Whilst there are a plethora of evidence-based parenting programmes that operate out of early years providers, there are few that support whole communities of parents to engage with and support their children’s early learning and development. Parents want the best for their children and they deserve support so that they can best support their early development.

Similarly very few programmes can claim to have high retention rates with low income and isolated families (Save the Children 2009) and few facilitate multi-agency working and integrated service approaches between statutory and service providers, parents and the local community. Further to this, when programmes are accredited by various arbiters, such as, governments or national bodies, this is based on outcomes data from various studies, such as randomised controlled trials. However, there are very few studies that actually measure how well programmes are able to engage and retain low income and isolated families in their service as one of the key criterion for success.

Save the Children believes that early years providers and professionals have a duty to implement programmes proven to really engage “parents as partners” in their children’s education. By this we mean, evidence-based programmes and practice proven to reduce family stress, to empower parents to create a stimulating home learning environment, to broker better home-school links, and, also to demonstrate positive impact on children’s educational achievement and behaviour.

December 2012