Crucial and conservative: why it is time for a SureStart 'parent premium'

Max Wind-Cowie and Jonty Olliff-Cooper call on Michael Gove to announce a SureStart parent premium to encourage SureStart Centres to ensure all children have a fair start in life.

As the Conservative Party looms ever closer to victory, and to Government, attention is shifting to what will be for the chop when they get there.  In part this is down to reality; there’s less money and more debt now than ever before.  In part it is also due to perception – Labour’s ‘Tory cuts’ narrative may not have been an overwhelming success but it has played to what many believe they know about Conservative governments.

Either way, now is the time to start thinking about how the Conservatives should set about sorting out the public finances and, along with an array of other scare stories, it has been suggested by the Taxpayer’s Alliance and the Institute for Directors that Sure Start’s head should be on the block.

Let’s get something straight – sometimes state intervention is necessary.  That doesn’t mean ignoring the fact that some people work harder or are simply better equipped for success.  What it means is taking steps to ensure that disadvantage doesn’t become entrenched, inherited from one generation to the next, so that the children of the poor are condemned to poverty themselves.

However, as progressive conservatives we believe that the way to get to a smaller state which intervenes less in our lives overall is to intervene vigorously early on to make sure everyone has a fair start in life.  We believe that intervening early, to improve the chances of children when they are young, is not only fairer but also reduces the overall level of intervention by the state across a person’s lifetime.

Moreover, acting early is enormously cheaper for the Exchequer.  It is depressingly clear that some people are near doomed to underachievement and poverty from their first breath.  Back in 1997, that was what SureStart was all about.  The scheme was build on the latest research in the mid-1990s on brain plasticity, which suggested that a child’s part in life was already near set by the time they reach their first day of school.  Health, IQ, language, motor skills and concentration could all be influenced in these crucial early years for the rest of a child’s adult life.  So, for progressive conservatives, the principle and aims of SureStart are absolutely vital.  And yet.....

No conservative could be happy with SureStart as it is.  Whilst we seek to protect its principles, the practice leaves a great deal to be desired.  There is little evidence of what the £6.5 billion that SureStart will have cost by 2011 has delivered, for

Britain

’s most disadvantaged children.  What’s more, the National Audit Office has heavily criticised SureStart for failing to live up to the very purpose for which it was created, saying that it ‘does not do enough to reach the most vulnerable’ and that many Centres have ‘weak cost control’.  Even the scheme’s creator came out against it.  Whilst progressive conservatives endorse the desire to support disadvantaged children, and to improve their life-chances, we can never endorse a scheme which fails to reach them or provide value for money (especially not in the current fiscal climate).

So what’s the solution?  How do we reform SureStart in a way that reinvigorates it with its original purpose, pushes it into the communities it was set-up to serve and delivers real returns for the taxpayer?  We believe the solution is a profoundly conservative one: to extend Michael Gove’s radical and exciting shake up of secondary schools to early years provision too.

Today we are calling on Michael Gove to announce a SureStart ‘Parent Premium’.

As the NAO cuttingly pointed out, at the moment SureStart is not working because few SureStart Centres reach the families it is supposed to help.  There is no differential, in terms of funding, for the kinds of children that the Centres work with.  Thus we have a great deal of yummy mummies doing yoga classes with their beaming babies, whilst struggling mothers are left out in the cold.  As conservatives we understand that, when it comes to service provision, money does the talking.  The incentives structures of an organisation tell one a lot about what it values.  SureStart is funded almost regardless of what activities Centres put on, or who attends them.  Little wonder, then, that SureStart settles for the mums who are keen, engaged and easy to involve over those who are difficult, suspicious and desperate.  If they’re both worth the same to a Centre then why go out and really try?

Far better to weight the funding that Centres receive in favour of the children this programme was built to serve.  An incoming conservative government should incentivise SureStart Centres themselves to seek out and include the most deprived families, to break the cycle of inherited disadvantage in our broken society, and make certain that every child gets a fair start in life.  Crucially, a parent premium need not cost more.  By reducing the funding attached to more affluent, and more able, we can provide the additional resource for the premium.

The Progressive Conservativism Project at Demos is about to embark on a project to model a SureStart Parent Premium.  As well as measuring the extent of Sure Start’s failure to engage with the disadvantaged, we are creating an index of social deprivation against which we can measure families to assess the level of SureStart funding they need.  This will take into account their wealth, of course, but also their family structure, the prevalence of mental health or substance issues and their relationship to other services.  This is not an attempt to pry.  Rather we seek to use information intelligently to ensure that, in hard times, services reach those who need them most.

SureStart was a good idea that has gone badly wrong.  In finding ways to control, and reduce, spending we should not simply dwell on what to chop off the state.  Although sometimes appropriate, overall, that is a red herring.  Sometimes, as with Sure Start, it is progressive and conservative not simply to cut but to rethink, restructure and redouble our efforts.  A reformed SureStart is crucial and conservative.  In the long run we will save much more money for the taxpayer if we invest in intervening early to set children, and their families, on the right track.