Foundation Years - Sure Start Children's Centres

Written evidence submitted by Sheffield Children’s NHS Foundation Trust

1. The needs of the families within the Sure Start Children’s Centre’s are increasing as the economic climate impacts. As a result we are seeing damaging effect on poverty and lower social wellbeing, mental health of families is becoming one of the symptoms that Family Support workers are dealing with on a regular basis. This is a progressive cycle of depression that the communities in the Children’s Centre areas are struggling with on a daily basis. Generations of families are being effected by job loss, worklessness and reduced capacity to go out and earn money. Thus having sub-sequential impact on children’s and adults social and emotional well-being making it hard to motivate and offer aspirational guidance to adults and children.

If the parent no longer has to wake up in the morning to go off to work then there is no urgency to get the children to school. The families’ routines become irregular and normal patterns become hard to maintain. Whilst parents are preoccupied with coping, the children’s needs are not always the carer’s main priority.

The quality of work is not easy to maintain whilst increasing work load and capacity from ever decreasing budgets. Previously Sure Start Local Programmes were able to concentrate the budget into particular areas, supporting families faced with debt, housing crisis, unemployment, etc. and target work around these factors. The budget now only covers the staffing cost leaving little or no funding for additionality or creativity. Our partners in the local community are in exactly the same position and therefore being able to act responsively not reactively is becoming more difficult.

The complexity we face now is how we support many families through such difficult times when faced with job losses and cuts to our own services. The proviso that one worker can offer family support to a vast amount of families in crisis is unrealistic and also draining on the worker. There is no certainty on the Sure Start Children’s Centre’s and staff are feeling as demotivated and demoralised as some of the families they are trying to support. The constant deluge of short lived initiatives that are supposed to alleviate families problems are not long enough to support them out of the crisis and back onto an even keel, thus perpetuating the cycle of concern, involvement and patching up the cracks before the next serious issue to affect the family.

2. The Ofsted inspections in my opinion are a good measure of the effectiveness of the impact of Sure Start Children’s Centre’s but consistency is paramount to enable informed inspectors to make robust judgments and recommendations about Children’s Centre work. The local knowledge of trained professionals is often overlooked and can be key to understanding why certain priorities are not always achievable e.g. knowing that in an area with a transient population of Roma Slovak families hospital attendance will be higher as these families may well not be registered with a GP’s surgery and the cultural norm would be to present at A&E.

The percentage target representing the Ofsted grading is not conclusive in its evidence to say whether a Children’s Centre is outstanding or good. I feel that more evidence should be based on actual impact of services, case studies, progression pathways the actual ground work that makes the difference, quality rather than quantity.

December 2012