England’s <i>Sure Start</i> Pre-School Child Care Centres: Public Policy, Progress and Political Change

Abstract

Specialist child care centres focusing on urban areas in which significant numbers lived in poverty were part of policies to reduce chronic poverty and disadvantage, and associated negative behaviours and achievements in children and young people. They were initiated by the New Labour government in the late 1990s, and evolved in various ways as Sure Start centres, and Early Childhood Care Centres. Methodologically sophisticated evaluation has shown that these interventions have been partially successful in various ways, particularly with regard to preschool children's behaviour and adjustment, and parent-child interactions. When early interventions were linked to health programmes, and to teacher-led initiatives, the programmes were most successful. Nevertheless, the programmes failed to reach some 5 percent of those identified as most in need, for whom profound and chronic poverty was the cause of parental problems, and dysfunctional parent-child interactions. When programmes for such families were reduced because of changes in the manner and amount of funding, outcomes for the very poor families and their children were significantly worse. The Sure Start programmes were, in the final analysis, underfunded and subject to political change and interference, and hardly dented the chronic disadvantages imposed by England's system of class division.

The (in)credible fiscal prize: A critical examination of the discourse of evidence in early childhood intervention

“…The regime of truth in relation to the social and economic return on investment, the ‘fiscal prize’ of early intervention has been shaped by a number of experimental trials and longitudinal studies. The most prominent of these are the historical trio of the Perry Preschool study (Berrueta-Clement, 1984; Schweinhart et al, 1993), the Abecedarian experiment (Ramey and Campbell, 1991) and the Chicago Parent Program (Reynolds, 2002). These longitudinal studies were fundamental in shaping policy thinking around both evidence and cost–benefit analysis of early intervention.…”

“…Northern Ireland has twice the proportion of children living in poverty than is the case in Britain (Horgan, 2011), and those areas and neighbourhoods that experienced a high impact of conflict map closely to those of high child poverty (Fay et al, 1999;Horgan, 2011;McAlister et al, 2009). This context of high child poverty, as well as differences in local and national governance, meant that the Sure Start programme was sustained in Northern Ireland when public spending cuts under the Coalition and Conservative governments dismantled the programme in Britain (Duddy, 2019;Lewis, 2011;Sawyerr and Bagley, 2017). Of the 38 Sure Start partnerships in Northern Ireland, 26% are governed by Health and Social Care Trusts and 74% by community and voluntary sector led bodies.…”