Education CommitteeLetter from Elizabeth Truss MP, Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Education and Childcare, Department for Education

At the Education Select Committee oral hearing on Tuesday 15 October on Foundation Years Sure Start Children’s Centres, I promised to write to the committee about the following points.

Early Language Development Programme (ELDP)

The Committee asked what has become of the scheme to refer children with low literacy and language skills to children’s centres and why the Department chose children’s centres for this type of scheme.

This Government built on the earlier Every Child a Talker (ECAT) initiative to help to create a skilled workforce and knowledgeable parents, to support communication development in the under 3s.

The Department funds the Early Language Development Programme (ELDP), now in its third year, which uses a train and cascade approach, with lead practitioners often based in children’s centres. It is led by children’s communication charity I CAN and is supported by Action for Children, the Preschool Learning Alliance, The Children’s Society, Elklan and the Office for Public Management.

To date the programme reports the following successes:

998 lead practitioners and training partners have been trained, creating a total of 501 local hubs of early language excellence.

The local hubs have been created across England in 119 out of 159 local authorities (75%) and 40% of local authorities engaged are in areas of deprivation.

The 998 lead practitioners have cascaded training to 9,316 local practitioners in supporting early language development.

97,104 parents and family members have been supported to date.

Childminder Agencies Trials (CMA)

The Committee asked for the name of the Sure Start Children’s Centre involved in the CMA trials. The Department currently has 20 organisations involved in these trials to help test and develop the scheme, and the details can be found at www.gov.uk/governmentlpolicies/improving-the-quality-and-range-of-educationand-childcare-from-birth-to-5-years/supporting-pages/childminder-agencies. The trials started in summer 2013 and will continue to 2014.

The trials will be testing the following areas:

how agencies can be set up by different organisations;

how agencies will recruit and work with childminders;

how agencies plan to deal with training, suitability and accountability of childminders;

different agency business models and which models are likely to be most effective;

how agencies might make the most of different funding streams, including the new childcare voucher system;

how agencies might work with Ofsted; and

how agencies might work as a part of a community childcare facility, linking with other organisations and working with parents.

The triallist about which the Committee specifically asked is the Lavender Children’s Centre in Mitcham.

Advisory Boards

The Committee wanted to know how the Department monitors the adherence of local authorities to the statutory guidance on setting up and maintaining advisory boards. As is the general rule in these situations, Government sets out clearly in legislation and guidance what is required of local authorities and expects them to meet their statutory duties.

The revised statutory guidance on Sure Start Children’s Centres states that local authorities have a legal duty to arrange for each of their children’s centres to have an advisory board. The advisory board is to advise and help.those responsible for running the centre and should encourage parents to play an active role in improving the children’s centre’s performance. Local authorities should ensure all advisory boards have written terms of reference that set out the roles and responsibilities of each of its board members, and, further, the statutory guidance gives examples of the potential breadth of membership that might be useful for local authorities to call upon. We do not prescribe to local authorities what the make-up of their advisory boards should be: it is for local authorities to ensure that the membership of these boards appropriately reflects the communities they serve.

As I mentioned to the Committee when I was with you, the Department relies upon Ofsted to consider the make-up of centres’ advisory boards as part of the inspection process. My understanding is that the Department has not received any complaints about the make-up of advisory boards.

Funding Scrutiny

The Committee also referred to the monitoring of the levels of funding made available to local authorities through DCLG’s Business Rates Retention Scheme to fund their early intervention programmes, including children’s centres. The Committee will be aware of the financial accountability regime to which local authority spending is subject, as weH as the level of scrutiny which Parliament gives in this area. In addition, detailed information about planned and actual expenditure by local authorities in specific priority areas is made available to Departments annually through the Section 251 returns, which local authorities are required to submit.

Parental Involvement in Children’s Centres

I undertook to provide the Committee with details of work to encourage greater parental involvement in children’s centres. Over the past year, the Department has been funding a one-year programme of support to encourage groups of parents, families and community members to get involved in children’s centres. In May 2012, the Department invited expressions of interest from parents and community groups interested in working with the Department to develop their own community management models for children’s centres -either on their own or in partnership with children’s centre staff.

Following a competitive tendering exercise, the Department contracted with the national children’s charity, 4Children, to:

provide advice and support to a small number of groups on a range of issues to help them overcome initial barriers and get projects off the ground;

broker relationships between groups and local authority/children’s centre staff and other professionals to build viable approaches that could work locally; and

identify and share good practice on a national basis.

4Children supported ten groups between October 2012 and September 2013. Each group had a dedicated business provider who delivered a tailored package of support depending on the individual needs of the group. Support included specialist training in areas such as governance and business management tailored to the needs of individual groups. The Office of Public Management (OPM) has been asked to carry out an independent evaluation of the project and their final evaluation report will be published by the end of this year. I will make sure the Committee gets a copy of this report.

Registration of Births in Children’s Centres

The Committee also asked about my thoughts of registration of births in children’s centres. I am aware of the useful work that has been done on this in a number of local authorities, and my officials provided support to the investigative research on this that the All Party Parliamentary Group on Sure Start published in their report in July this year. I strongly support the drive to enable parents to register their child’s birth at their local children’s centre, where it makes sense locally for the service to be offered in this way. I have spoken to the Chair of the APPG, Andrea Leadsom, on this issue already and, as I said to the Committee, I will arrange a meeting with David Simmonds to discuss this issue further. My office is in the process of organising this and I will let you know the outcome of that meeting.

I look forward to the findings of your report.

November 2013