They think it’s all over

It will be years before the true impact of Sure Start on the lives
of children is known, but the initial indications are that it will
be among New Labour’s social policy success stories. Designed to
provide a range of social and health support to deprived families
with very young children, it has been generously funded, has got
through to some traditionally hard-to-reach families, and is often
highly regarded by those who use the service. It has a reputation
among users, not to mention a budget, that local authority services
can only dream of – and sometimes do.

But Sure Start is about to lose its cherished independence. Most of
its 524 local programmes will be “mainstreamed” within local
authorities next year, although programmes in 21 council areas will
go over this April. They will become part of the new network of
local authority-run children’s centres. In his spending review last
summer chancellor Gordon Brown promised 2,500 of these by 2008
before being trumped by the prime minister, who pledged 3,500 by
2010.

It has led to a heated debate between Norman Glass, Sure Start’s
creator, who claims the programme is being abolished in all but
name, and Naomi Eisenstadt, director of the Sure Start Unit, who
argues that the underlying principles will be retained despite the
changes. The evident uncertainties about Sure Start’s future are
shared by many of its local programme managers.

For many local managers the local authority takeover brings
opportunities and threats. It is an opportunity to forge close
alliances with the emerging children’s trusts and to be part of the
Every Child Matters agenda. But there are also worries about
council bureaucracy and priorities which have little to do with the
intensive preventive work that Sure Start is able to provide to
families.

“On balance the local authority takeover is a threat,” says John
Fowler, who manages the Sheerness Sure Start, which is part of the
first round of transfers taking place this April. He had an initial
meeting with Kent Council in early February, but he still has no
idea how much money he will have or what services he will be able
to provide.

“I know nothing about my budget and I’ve got five weeks to go,”
Fowler says. “The council isn’t prevaricating, it’s desperately
trying to get its act together. It’s very complicated for them too
– they don’t know the situation because the government hasn’t let
them know. And we’re right at the butt end of all this.”

It is an anxious time not only for him, but for his staff too. “My
staff are saying, hang on, if we might be losing the money, hadn’t
we better move on? If things remain unsettled and uncertain, I risk
losing a team it has taken three years to build up.”

Angela Graham, head of children’s policy and performance in Kent
social services, admits that the council is still in discussion
with the government, but says that it may simply “passport” the
money directly to the localities this year and mainstream them when
the children’s centres start work next year. She doesn’t know what
the funding will be; however, tough decisions lie ahead.

“Children’s centres will not be as generously funded as Sure Start
has been, so there will be a shortfall,” she says. “We’ll preserve
what works and discard what doesn’t – and funding will be a factor
in that.”

What Sure Start programmes most fear losing is their localised,
community-led spirit. Parents have had a major influence over how
money and resources are used, but councils may be wary of giving so
much power to communities. For example, social services departments
may want to target families that programmes had previously
overlooked.

Lynda Hassall, manager of Carlisle South Sure Start, thinks that
the programme’s preventive focus could be sidelined by the pressure
of statutory work. “Child protection is rightly seen to have the
priority in local authorities and is usually at the expense of
prevention,” she says. “Parental participation is crucial – one of
the tenets on which the whole Sure Start programme is based is that
it should be community-led with professional input. What really
worries me about local authorities is the lack of thinking about
involving parents.”

Fowler shares these concerns, pointing to cultural resistances in
both health and social services. “They are quite nervous about
community-led approaches. It’s about ceding power to
non-professionals – there’s a great deal of professional jealously,
a great distrust of the people.”

Not surprisingly Naomi Eisenstadt displays more optimism.
Performance targets and inspection frameworks will help ensure that
the local autonomy of programmes is maintained, she says, and that
parental involvement is more than tokenistic. She admits that
resources will be spread “slightly more thinly” as Sure Start
extends beyond its contentious geographical and age boundaries, but
the old model lacked inclusivity and was no longer sustainable.

“I’m proud of what we’ve achieved,” Eisenstadt says, “but if we
really believe in children’s trusts then we have to take some
risks. Why should councils interfere if the service is working at
neighbourhood level?

“There’s an arrogance in saying that only we can do it and nobody
else can. The thing that really depresses me is that all of a
sudden we are trying to defend an institution and forgetting about
the outcomes for children. The point of Sure Start was to break out
of institutional silos.”

Tensions in the relationship with child protection were plain to
see in the national evaluation of Sure Start published in January.
In a survey of social services professionals, the difficulty of
reconciling the demands of child protection and prevention was “by
far and away” the most important for them. Statutory responsibility
for child protection exerted a powerful influence on social
services involvement in Sure Start. As the evaluation puts it: “In
the most pessimistic cases this was seen as an entrenched problem,
which against their every best effort was almost impossible to
resolve.”

Angela Graham agrees that protection and prevention will be hard to
marry, despite years of “refocusing” that was designed to shift
social services resources from firefighting crises to early
intervention. She says that Kent is still thinking through the
relationship between child protection services and Sure Start,
adding that the council is “trying very hard” not to consider
switching resources to the former. But nor are resources likely to
move the other way, although she expects pressure from local
programmes to make up the shortfall in funding.

“One of the problems is that we’re not quite working with the same
kinds of families,” Graham says. “For example, they’re not working
particularly well with the hard-to-reach families who come into the
child protection system.

“They have done what local communities and parents want them to do,
but the sorts of families we work with are not the families who
join in with their local communities in running Sure Start. I hope
that we’ll be able to line up our approaches more
effectively.”

But Fowler thinks that the writing is on the wall for the clearly
demarcated deprived communities that have reaped the benefits of
Sure Start until now. “These communities have been depressed for so
long, they jolly well deserve to be spoilt. The glory days are
over.”

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