"Sure Start is the centrepiece of the Government’s plans to eradicate child poverty by 2020. It aims to integrate a range of services, including childcare, health and early education. Introduced in 1999, local Sure Start programmes have been set up in disadvantaged areas across the country, run (in the main) by local authorities. The intent is admirable.
But despite the massive costs of this approach, Sure Start is failing to deliver on its promises:
- Sure Start schemes have not appeared to be helping disadvantaged children do better in school and society. Consistently poor SATs results reveal a distressing lack of change: two out of five of this year’s 11 year olds (a cohort who would have had at least some access to Sure Start schemes from age two) will go to secondary school this September without having reached a sufficient level of competency in all three core subjects. Illiteracy and innumeracy remain a stubborn feature of Sure Start area primary schools (those with a high percentage of children on free school meals): in 2003 the percentage of pupils on free school meals achieving the expected Level 2 (or above) at Key Stage 1 was 69 per cent; in 2008, that figure had not changed, remaining at 69 per cent.
- In terms of the programme’s actual management, official reports have not been positive. A National Audit Office assessment in 2006 found that neither Councils nor the centres themselves were aware of what activities cost, and were therefore unable to use resources cost-effectively. The National Evaluation of Sure Start concluded that programmes provided by existing health services offered more benefits to disadvantaged children than Sure Start ones.
- The Joseph Rowntree Foundation has stated that the Government will fall short of its (Sure Start) target of cutting child poverty by 2010 by some 600,000 children, with 2.3 million still below the poverty line. Some estimates are higher still. End Child Poverty – a coalition of bodies including Barnardo’s, Unicef and the NSPCC – reported in 2008 that up to 5.5 million children in the UK were “struggling” on the brink of poverty. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation also maintains that recessionary pressures do not have any bearing on this: government programmes to eradicate child poverty have simply not worked.
Bringing children out of poverty is a marathon, not a sprint, and success relies on improving life chances. That hinges on education, and as suggested in other parts of [the TPA/IoD] paper, the best way for schools to deliver what a community needs is to be given more freedom. A heterogeneous schools system, with competition at its heart, drives improvement. Good schools that produce results should be allowed to take over failing ones, meaning that early years education would be offered by those that can and want to, rather than just those that have to. Centrally directed schemes like Sure Start have not worked so far; now is the time for something new."
Savings id: Abolish Sure Start.
Department: DCSF
Annual saving: £1,456 million from 2010-11 onwards.
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Previous idea for saving: (15) Delaying restart of state pension upgrade
