Foundation Years - Sure Start Children's Centres

Written evidence submitted by ATL

ATL, the education union, is an independent, registered trade union and professional association, representing approximately 160,000 teachers, head teachers, lecturers and support staff in maintained and independent nurseries, schools, sixth form, tertiary and further education colleges in the United Kingdom. AMiE is the trade union and professional association for leaders and managers in colleges and schools, and is a distinct section of ATL. We recognise the link between education policy and members' conditions of service.

ATL exists to help members, as their careers develop, through first rate research, advice, information and legal advice. Our evidence-based policy making enables us to campaign and negotiate locally and nationally.

ATL is affiliated to the Trades Union Congress (TUC), Irish Congress of Trade Unions (ICTU), European Trade Union Committee for Education (ETUCE) and Education International (EI). ATL is not affiliated to any political party and seeks to work constructively with all the main political parties.

ATL response

1. ATL strongly supports Sure Start Children’s Centres (SSCCs) as an important initiative to bring together high quality early education and childcare for the benefit of all children, and in particular those from disadvantaged backgrounds and those with complex needs. By privileging the needs of children in order to provide them with the best start in life, we also welcome SSCCs’ provision of related services to help families to support their children’s learning and development.

2. Children with three years of high quality (which ATL defines as integrated care and education, which privileges play, real-world learning and talk, rather than formal skills teaching) early years provision have been shown to be a year ahead in terms of cognitive and social skills by the time they start formal education. Research from the Effective Provision of Pre-school Education (EPPE) project [1] also indicates that the quality of provision is higher overall in early years settings that integrate early education and care. As the most effective early years provision and outcomes are still largely found in the state-maintained sector, we believe that the testimony to the strength of this sector establishes a clear rationale for well-resourced public services. [2]

3. ATL would welcome firm assurances from the Government that SSCCs will be fully supported to remain at the forefront in serving children in poverty. Local authorities in deprived areas have already had to make drastic reductions to their frontline children’s service provision due to a severe drop in their grant income. [3]

4. The Guardian has suggested, in an article on 9th October, that the Government intends to scrap the Early Intervention Grant in order to fund the extension of free education to two year-olds. We are already concerned about the impact of cuts on Sure Start provision and any further cuts are likely to put young children at increasing risk of disadvantage or poor outcomes.

5. ATL welcomes the ‘particular focus on the most disadvantaged families, in order to reduce inequalities...’, however we are concerned that this may result in SSCCs becoming more ‘ghettoised’ and viewed as places of stigma. The degree to which this is implemented may also result in less interaction between all elements of society. EPPE also showed that "disadvantaged children in particular can benefit significantly from good quality pre-school experiences, especially if they attend centres that cater for a mixture of children from different social backgrounds." [4]

6. The new core purpose also states that parents and carers ought to be involved in governance and volunteering. Whilst we welcome this and the accompanying financial transparency, we would question how parents and carers might be empowered and encouraged to do so and how busy working parents would have time to volunteer. There also appears to be a lack of focus on pre-natal attendance of SSCCs and interaction with Jobcentre Plus and other assistance, such as advice on financial support available through tax credits or employer-supported childcare voucher schemes for example.

7. We note that the Government intends to re-consider children’s centre inspection arrangements, and we would welcome a full and comprehensive public consultation on this issue. While the revised statutory guidance makes reference to inspections by Ofsted, ATL would like to receive further information on whether any health provision offered by SSCCs would also be inspected by Ofsted or whether there are alternative inspection arrangements for this aspect of provision. We believe that this needs to be reflected in the revised statutory guidance. [5]

8. ATL continues to maintain that setting out an inspection framework suitable for all children’s centres assumes that they are set up and managed in the same way across the country. It also appears to assume that a children’s centre manager is, or should be, responsible for all aspects of staffing, provision and outcomes in a similar way to a headteacher’s responsibilities with regard to a school. [6] We have reservations about these assumptions not only on the basis of the Government’s own priority, however questionable, of promoting a diversity of organisations to provide early childhood services, but also on the basis of children’s centres already delivering a joined-up offer consisting of a range of services in the locality.

9. As regards impact, the second NESS found positive results from the survey overall. The reach of these centres was good with 78% of parents and carers aware of their local centre and 45% having used or attended their centre. Furthermore the profile of users was very similar to the profile of respondents overall, suggesting that reach was good throughout the target population. There was no evidence of particular groups of parents or carers monopolising the centres. Equally, the results suggest that no sub-groups are being excluded from or failing to access the centres. Those who have used or attended their local centre were very happy with the services they had used. When considering all of the services they had used at the centre, 92% of users said they were satisfied (68% were very satisfied). Satisfaction levels were also very high with each of the individual services used. [7]

10. However, little research has been conducted on measurable outcomes, and the methodology of that which exists has been questioned. There is also little research on BME, SEN and other minority groups’ use of SSCCs, beyond ethnic composition of baseline surveys and monitoring data, although there was some mention of services as adult language courses, social meeting groups, and specific activities designed for BME groups. No outcome evaluations were reported either for these activities or for the work of outreach workers. [8]

11. The re are also concerns about the issue of staff appointments and roles and the dilemmas of hierarchy and status between minority ethnic staff and other staff , explored in the NESS Implementation Report. [9]

12. Love et al. (2002) identified key messages from the positive impact of Early Head Start in the USA on infants, toddlers and their families. [10] Findings were:

· Fully implementing the Head Start Programme Performance Standards resulted in stronger patterns of impact on children and parenting.

· Centre based programmes enhanced children's cognitive ability and by the age of 3 reduced negative aspects of social emotional behaviours.

· Home based programmes contributed to enhanced language development at 2 (but not at 3) and the quality of parent/child play interactions.

· A mixture of centre and home based programmes produced stronger impacts.

· Enrolling parents on programmes before their children were born was more likely to engage them in services.

· There was less impact on the highest risk families with young children.

13. ATL disagrees very strongly with Government proposals to reward local authorities, as commissioning bodies, and providers with payment by results (PbR). [11] Where joint-working has been shown to be the key to improved outcomes for the most vulnerable children, ATL believes that payment by results is likely to be divisive and disadvantages providers, particularly in the state-maintained sector, that serve hard-to-reach families and communities in the most challenging circumstances. We also fear that a PbR scheme would tend to create the wrong incentives and that many of the proposed measures, including parents’ aspirations, self-esteem and self-reported wellbeing cannot be determined, attributed and recorded in any consistent way for and across different providers. [12]

14. ATL is concerned that the emphasis on the role of Private, Voluntary and Independent (PVI) providers will not only lead to significant variations in ‘local offers’, a lack of transparency in determining local need and in supporting any families who ‘cross the border’, but within the parameters of this Government’s budget and the current economic climate, it is also highly likely to compromise quality at the expense of meeting the needs of the most vulnerable children. We strongly agree with the House of Commons Children, Schools and Families Committee’s Report on the Early Years Single Funding Formula (EYSFF) that the standards set by the state-maintained sector in early years provision "are there for others to follow, and they should not be put at risk by the implementation of the Single Funding Formula" nor by the removal of ring-fenced funding for SSCCs. [13]

15. ATL recommends that the revised statutory guidance makes explicit reference to the need to implement effective practice, and we welcome the APPG for Sure Start’s recommendation that local authority bodies should work with the Government and the voluntary sector to produce guidance to this effect which will be made available free of charge to local authorities. [14]

16. ATL does not believe in the concept of ‘school readiness’, instead we maintain that schools should be ready for children, not children ready for schools. In Scandinavia, for example, children don’t start school until the age of 6 or 7. Play-led pedagogy is far more suitable and enables children to develop curiosity about learning, without being strait-jacketed by prescriptive formality.

17. Colocation of services and strong support for and promotion of SSCCs would improve multi-agency working, as well as better sign-posting to relevant services. ATL believes that it is important for SSCCs to focus on the provision of services for children, ranging from early education, childcare and health to social care, and that this core purpose should be further strengthened and supported through effective inter-agency working. [15] This, in our view, is best achieved by building on existing public services provision through SSCCs, including giving local voluntary and community organisations a platform for their services within a state-maintained model as appropriate, rather than assuming that PVI providers should be a first choice for meeting local needs. [16]

18. The rising cost of childcare is of great concern to all families, but in particular to those headed by lone parents, those from BME communities, (whose rate of employment is 56.4%), and those with disabled children. This may have an impact on their usage of SSCCs.

19. Overall, there are significant variations in the levels of formal childcare usage among families from different ethnic groups. High childcare costs, a work-based entitlement to subsidies and variable levels of maternal employment are clearly important, as are high rates of lone parenthood among B lack African and Caribbean families, and the typically larger family size of many Southern Asian communities. T hese issues pose particular challenges to the Government’s current childcare strategy, especially given the relatively higher rates of economic and educational disadvantaged faced by children from BME families. [17]

20. Daycare Trust’s Ensuring Equality paper found that BME families want childcare that reflects and understands their culture. It also found that black families are more likely to use childcare because of economic reasons and require childcare at evenings and weekends due to work patterns. Asian families are more likely to use childcare for educational reasons, consequently free early-years provision is important for them. [18]

21. Their Listening to BME Families report highlighted the need for, "encouraging children’s centres and other childcare providers to create more innovative ways of engaging the local BME community and prioritise outreach; making base-line training in race equality and race/cultural awareness compulsory for all childcare training courses for all staff; conducting local recruitment campaigns to encourage BME groups to consider childcare as a career option…" . [19]

22. In Rotherham, one of six authorities invited to take part in a DCSF project to increase the take-up of childcare by BME families, six free childcare sessions were offered to parents in pilot areas. Parents who completed feedback forms stated that the sessions gave them the confidence to use childcare again, with 92% of respondents stating that they would use childcare again either to take up their child’s free early education place or to enable them to return to work.

23. The National Audit Office publication Sure Start Children’s Centres (December 2006) identified that outreach remained a particular challenge for programmes, specifically with regards to improving services for fathers, the parents of children with disabilities, and for ethnic minorities in areas with smaller minority populations. This observation has also been highlighted by Ofsted . [20]

24. ATL believes that SSCCs need to reach out to transient populations , train their staff in equality and diversity issues and be sensitive to competing claims from different minorities and to recruit from the local area and communities where possible. Activities need to be scheduled in a more inclusive way and employers should take childcare seriously as an issue, by allowing parents to work flexibly in order to attend sessions. Male carers need to be included more, so that they are not made to feel as if th ey are invading a women’s space, perhaps through sessions for male carers only. In some SSCCs, activities come to a halt in school holidays.

25. The Childcare and Early Years Survey of Parents 2010 [21] found that problems with finding flexible childcare were strongly associated with families with a child with SEN. According to the survey, 46% of these families accessed formal childcare and 52% of families with a child with health problems or a disability. It also found that formal childcare was accessed by 62% of Black Caribbean families, 39% of Black African families, 33% of Indian and Pakistani familes, and 24% of Bangladeshi families, which correlates with economic and cultural patterns found elsewhere.

26. A 2011 study by the Department for Education (DfE), found that private childcare providers often have limited experience of catering for vulnerable children and will require training to provide a high quality offer. [22]

27. The Government’s presumption against the extension of children’s centres is reflected in the changed role of local authorities (LAs), which are accountable for SSCCs under the Childcare Act 2006. The revised statutory guidance no longer contains any specific reference to LAs providing information and advice services for parents and prospective parents, which suggests an expectation that LAs will increasingly contract out the management of SSCCs. This means that SSCCs are initially responsible for ensuring that parents are given advice and support in accessing services that are not delivered on-site. With a greater diversity of providers, or providers managing children’s centres on behalf of the local authority, together with some LAs already lacking clarity about the offer for families in their areas, the quality of information and advice for parents and prospective parents will inevitably differ amongst providers. [23]

28. Research has shown that lack of knowledge about local early years provision, together with low awareness of the part-time free entitlement for three and four year olds, amongst the most vulnerable families is one of the most substantial barriers to accessing early education and childcare. [24] The revised statutory guidance needs to be explicit in its expectations around the role of LAs in providing information, advice and assistance to parents and prospective parents and of the local Families Information Service. This should specifically include that information, advice and assistance will cover childcare and other child-related services and facilities, and that LAs "should consider the needs of disadvantaged and hard-to-reach groups" when providing this assistance and support. [25]

29. The inquiries by the APPG for Sure Start have further established significant concerns with regard to the transparency in assessing the needs of communities and in consulting with parents and service users. LAs need to be supported through national statutory guidance in how to report the number of SSCCs in their area and the services they offer for families. The LA’s duty to consult when considering making significant changes to children’s centre provision in their area must also be strengthened to ensure that parents and prospective parents can make their views heard and influence any final decision made by the LA. [26]

30. In the interest of consistency of provision, ATL believes that the revised statutory guidance needs to define more specifically what constitutes a ‘significant’ change to the range and nature of services and how they are delivered rather than leaving this entirely to LAs to determine. We also agree that children’s centres should engage with their local communities in an on-going way rather than as a ‘one-off’ exercise prior to the implementation of any changes. [27]

Conclusion

ATL believes that the reduction of the Sure Start Children’s Centres statutory guidance, the lack of reference to any ‘best practice’ guidance and the lack of guidance on how parents and prospective parents can be better informed and involved by service providers in their children’s learning and development is presenting a considerable risk to the provision of high quality early childhood services for the most vulnerable and disadvantaged families. [28]

ATL believes that more needs to be done to recruit and train an Early Years workforce which reflects the communities they work in. Sure Start Children’s Centres ought to undertake more evaluation of the services offered and the take-up of services by BME families and families with a child with SEN, health problems or a disability. More multi-agency working is needed to encourage and signpost some BME communities to SSCCs, as well as extra financial support from the Government for those in poverty and low pay to access childcare.

We are extremely concerned that rather than acknowledging and building on the increasing evidence of the link between children’s centres’ high quality provision and better outcomes for children, the Government continues to assume that PVI providers are more effective at meeting the needs of the most vulnerable children and their families. As some LAs already struggle to determine and meet local need, we believe that an increase in the diversity of providers will only exacerbate this problem. Children’s centres which are accountable to the LA should be at the heart of the provision of early childhood services and give local voluntary and community organisations a platform for their services as appropriate.

Effective early intervention cannot be obtained on the cheap, and ATL calls on the Government to ensure that SSCCs will be fully supported to remain at the forefront in serving children in poverty.