Foundation Years - Sure Start Children's Centres

Written evidence submitted by The Children’s Society

Introduction

The Children’s Society supports over 48,000 children and young people every year through our children’s centres and specialist services. We believe in achieving a better childhood for every child but have a particular focus on vulnerable and disadvantaged children. We seek to give a voice to children and young people and influence policy and practice so they have a better chance in life. This response is based on the work of The Children’s Society with children and families in 43 children’s centres across England.

1. The new Core Purpose of Sure Start children’s centres, how this has evolved and is different from the original design and purpose of Sure Start

The Department for Education (DfE) are moving away from a "core offer" which children’s centres must deliver, towards a core purpose, where outcomes are defined, and increased local flexibility is permitted in designing and delivering services to achieve those outcomes. The DfE have now begun to set out the core purpose of children’s centres, centred around child development and school readiness; parenting aspirations and parenting skills; and child and family health and life chances.

We welcome the introduction of a "core purpose" for Sure Start children’s centres, in order to provide increased focus on the desired outcomes of children’s centres, rather than just the specific outputs required to achieve this.

However, we are very concerned that reductions in the value of the Early Intervention Grant which funds children’s centre services, will undermine the ability of centres to achieve the very best outcomes for children.

The core purpose also reemphasises the focus of Sure Start on the most disadvantaged and reducing inequalities (see question 3).

2. The effectiveness and impact of Sure Start children’s centres to date, including the role of Ofsted inspections;

We support Ofsted inspections of children’s centres as an important part of the accountability framework for children’s centres. Our services often find that the inspections can be a useful tool for reflection, reviewing the services, celebrating successes and identifying areas for improvement.

We understand that Ofsted is in the process of revising the framework for inspection of children’s centres. Our children’s centres concerns around Ofsted inspections involve the high expectations inspectors have of the data and information children’s centres can provide. Information sharing at local authority level can be a particular problem with many of our centres reporting that they are not provided with key information like new birth data from their local health service. Another issue is that Ofsted has high expectations of the involvement of partner organisations in inspections. Our experience is that it can be difficult to get external partner organisations to be involved in inspections.

Recommendation: Local authorities should support further integrated working between children’s centres and partner organisations in order to enable more effective Ofsted inspections. See section 7 for suggestions for improvement to integrated working.

3. The range of services and activities provided at Sure Start children’s centres, and their desired outcomes, and whether/how these differ from family centres, early Sure Start local programmes and early years settings.

Children’s centres provide a range of services and activities that can be loosely divided into universal services that are open to all in their reach area, such as stay and play sessions, and more targeted services like family support aimed at supporting the most disadvantaged families [1] . The children’s centre core purpose re-emphasises the need for children’s centres to focus on supporting the most disadvantaged children and families.

The originally principle behind Sure Start Local Programmes was ‘progressive universalism’ involving providing universal interventions alongside targeted work to support the most disadvantaged. These Local Programmes were well funded and targeted at very deprived areas.

With the new core purpose and often less resources, our children’s centres report a greater pressure from local authorities to focus on services targeted at particular groups of disadvantaged families. Some have had to reduce universal provision.

The importance of universal services should not be underestimated as our practitioners report that they are what get families through the door, enable staff to build relationships with families and identify any issues/problems families may be facing before they reach crisis point. Children’s centres delivering purely targeted services risk losing focus on early intervention/ prevention, and becoming an extension of social care, or as one of our practitioners stated, a "poor relation to the original Sure Start dream".

Recommendation: We believe that children’s centres need to continue to be supported to provide a combination of universal services open to anyone within the centre’s reach area, and services targeted at the most vulnerable families.

4. The introduction of Payment By Results in Early Years settings [2]

The department for education are looking at introducing the use of Payment by Results (PBR) for Sure Start funding. The key aims of introducing PBR are

• Incentivise LAs and providers to reach families in greatest need, and improve their outcomes

• Improve local transparency and data quality to inform commissioners and support parental choice, and

• Longer term improvement of cost effectiveness so public money is focused on achieving results

DfE have proposed that a proportion of the budget for children’s centres is linked to PBR, and that even at low proportions of funding delivered in this way, this will encourage innovation and behaviour change in service delivery.

The DfE have established 27 pilots of PBR for Sure Start children’s centres. The aim is to establish a final set of measures so that PBR can be rolled out nationally in 2013/14.

We believe six principles must underpin the introduction of PBR in early years settings:

1. No children’s centre should find itself without enough funds to deliver their core purpose – incentives of additional funds should be used to encourage a focus on outcomes, targeting of the most disadvantaged, and fostering of innovative approaches to service delivery. However, a base budget must be at a minimum level, sufficient to achieve the core purpose, and to ensure that children and families retain access to key services.

2. Outcomes against which centres are assessed, and how these are measured, must be tailored to the circumstances of individual children’s centres – generic measures based on absolute performance, e.g. a particular Ofsted rating, risk a vicious circle with greater funding flowing to already highly performing centres, reinforcing the quality divide between centres.

3. PBR must be linked to improved outcomes for the most disadvantaged groups – outcomes which are not targeted at the most disadvantaged people could result in ‘cherry-picking’ of cheaper and easier to run services, which do not target support at the most disadvantaged people. However, for the reasons given in question 3 above, care also needs to be taken to ensure a balance with supporting Universal area based provision.

4. Children’s centres must be given support to ensure their data collection and evaluation techniques are robust enough to assess performance otherwise they will be unable to design outcomes or assess performance accurately and effectively, many centres may currently lack these methods and expertise. We are pleased that the government has announced support for the trial areas to support the introduction of PBR, and believe that this support should be extended to all areas following national roll out.

5. Sufficient time must be given between local pilots and national roll out, to ensure that the impact of the pilots can be properly evaluated. Evidence shows that for all services there is a relatively long time lag between changes in services and the emergence of a measurable impact on outcomes.

6. PBR arrangements should be flexible enough to respond to ongoing changes of circumstances which affect the ability of centre to meet PBR targets. Additionally, in assessing success at meeting targets, the process would benefit from an independent appeals process so that children’s centres can appeal findings regarding their success in reaching targets. For example, this could be done by peer review by a neighbouring authority.

5. How to increase the use of evidence-based early intervention in children’s centres

The most commonly available evidence based early interventions in children’s centres are parenting programmes which are widely used in The Children’s Society children’s centres. The main driver for the use of evidence based programmes is from local authorities, many of whom encourage the use of a particular evidence based parenting programme. For example one of our children’s centre’s local authority requires them to use an evidence based parenting programme as one of their key performance indicators.

However, there can be some practical issues that make it difficult for centres to run evidence based programmes. For example, some of these programmes require crèches as parents can only attend the course if free childcare is provided. Some of our children’s centres struggle to run crèches alongside their parenting programme as the staffing and additional costs of providing this childcare is an added strain on already tight budgets. Another issue is that finding staff capacity and training for the parenting programmes has become more difficult with less resources. Our children’s centre managers have reported that it is becoming increasingly difficult to provide evidence based early interventions like parenting programmes with what one of our practitioners has called a ‘skeleton staff’.

An increase in the use of evidence based early interventions requires sufficient funding to ensure there are adequate staff levels and training to provide evidence based early interventions in children’s centres and enable the running of crèches to support these interventions.

6. How to strengthen integrated working between health, social care and education as part of a multi-agency early help offer, including how to improve information-sharing and the proposal for children’s centres to have access to a "named social worker"

Integrated working should be at the heart of children’s centre practice as they have a positive impact on children’s outcomes and are welcomed by parents where this means they can access a range of support under one roof.

Integrated working can be over reliant on individual workers retaining personal links with different services. Such over reliance can make integrated working unsustainable and create problems when staff move on. In order to be sustainable, integrated working needs to be integrated into the centre’s strategy, with a strategic lead, to ensure that it is built into the core practice of the centre.

One key form of service integration is the sharing of information. This can currently be inconsistent between local authorities. We believe, in particular, that all children’s centres should have access to live birth data about children born within their reach area. This helps to ensure that all families can be approached by the centre from the very start of a child’s life to enable early engagement with services.

Recommendation: There should be an explicit requirement for local authorities to share live birth data with children’s centres in their area.

Integrated working between children’s centres and social services is crucial. We welcome proposals that all children’s centres should have a named social worker. However, this needs to be supported by a commitment to ensure that that social worker is meaningfully engaging with the centre they are attached to. Practitioners have reported that on some occasions children’s centres have had named social workers who do not regularly engage with the centre.

Recommendation: All children’s centres should have a named social worker with a clear commitment to maintaining regular contact with the children’s centre.

Recommendation: In order to maximise engagement with children’s centres amongst the most disadvantaged families, social workers should be committed to ensuring that, where the family consent, they are sharing details with their local children’s centre, of those families with children with children in need and child protection plans in place.

7. How to increase the involvement of families (especially fathers, disadvantaged families, minority ethnic groups and families of children with SEN and disabled children) in the running of children’s centres and in their regular activities

We support increasing the involvement of families in the running of children’s centres as this is essential to providing effective children’s centre services and ensuring centres are embedded in their local community.

Parents [3] face a number of barriers to getting involved in the running of children’s centres. Our children’s centre practitioners have found that some parents state that they do not have the time to get involved with work and other commitments taking priority. Our children’s centres support families to become involved in the running of their centre in wide a wide variety of ways from offering volunteer opportunities, consulting with parents about the services provided to having parents on advisory boards. Centres often find that providing support with childcare while parents are participating and in some cases providing support with travel costs is necessary to support involvement but can be challenging with tight budgetary constraints.

Recommendation: children’s centres should offer a variety of routes to engagement with governance, to ensure that parents have the flexibility to engage with governance on the level to which fits their individual needs.

Involving disadvantaged families and other targeted groups (including fathers, minority ethnic groups and families of children with SEN and disabled children) in the regular activities of children’s centres is also an important priority for our centres. We are currently undertaking research into the barriers disadvantaged families face in engaging with children’s centres.

Initial findings suggest a range of issues creating barriers to disadvantaged families accessing children’s centre services, for example:

· In some areas there is still a lack of awareness and understanding of what children’s centre are and they are not widely promoted by the local authority and partners organisations. This can make it difficult for particularly isolated disadvantaged families to know that these services are available to support them.

· Similarly children’s centres are not always able to access all the relevant data and information on the families in their reach area from their local authority or local partners like health. For example, some of our children’s centres do not always receive information on domestic violence incidents even if families in their reach area are involved.

· Practical issues such as the size and shape of a children’s centres reach area, make it difficult from families (particularly if they are living on a low income) to travel to the centres especially in rural areas with poor transport links.

Recommendation: Local authorities and partner organisations should provide children’s centres with sufficient data and information to ensure they are able to identify disadvantaged families in their area and provide effective outreach.

Recommendation: The government should consider encouraging local authorities to reassess the extent and shape of the reach areas of their children’s centres to ensure all families are able to access the services of the centre in their area. Local authorities should also ensure that they are supporting and promoting children’s centres with these disadvantaged families and raising awareness of their services.

Specific groups such as fathers, minority ethnic families and those with children with SEN and disabled children face specific difficulties particularly if they are also from a disadvantaged cohort.

· Fathers face barriers as children’s centres are often predominantly female environments with mainly female staff. It can also be difficult for working fathers (as well as working mothers) to attend when activities are during work hours. children’s centres must be able to adapt to the needs of fathers. For example, some children’s centres have had father volunteers specifically to encourage engagement with fathers.

· Minority ethnic families can also find children’s centres unwelcoming environments particularly if they face language barriers. The importance of integrating with the local community is essential to tackling these cultural/language barriers. Our children’s centres in Bradford have successfully worked with a local Eastern European migrant charity and have a number of staff and volunteers from South Asian backgrounds which helps to engage with families from these groups.

· Families with disabled children and children with SEN also can face barriers to engagement with children’s centres. These can include parental concerns about the safety and accessibility of centres; concerns about attitudes of staff and parents at the centre towards disabled children and a lack of appropriate staff training and development. Our children’s centres provide welcoming and accessible environments for children with additional needs and many run specific activities for these children and their families. We are also part of the Early Language Development Programme for identifying early signs of developmental delay and improving outcomes of children with SEN through providing the Every Child a Talker (ECAT) programme in our children’s centres.

Recommendation: children’s centres should respond to the needs of their local population particularly target groups like fathers, minority ethnic families and families with children with SEN and disabled children. These groups should be consulted with to establish their particular needs and how they would like to be engaged, and their children’s centre services to be provided.

December 2012