It's official, Sure Start is a failure. That was the word from the top man, the prime minister, at the launch of 'Let's Talk', the Government's purported dialogue with the people, and in the same speech as his complaints about judges and the criminal justice system. So, Sure Start became a proxy for what's not working.
Sure Start is where law and order converge with family support, and the PM's comments 'confirmed' its failure to keep children away from crime and reach the people everyone fails to reach. Blair recently modified his criticism, but had he consulted the evidence and the very parents and professionals who are Sure Start?
Catherine was an isolated and exhausted young mother until she started a nursing course at Hackney Community College and secured a Sure Start funded place for her son at the college nursery. 'That helped me so much. When I drop him there I know he's safe, and so I feel safe to learn. I can just concentrate,' she says.
Of the 20 people on her course, ten are young mothers, who also access some of the 150 nursery places, nine of them funded by Sure Start. But despite the new Sure Start places, demand still far outstrips supply.
Nursery co-ordinator Jo Freeman says, 'We have 300 on our waiting list, last year 200 were turned away and stayed on our waiting list for this year.'
Freeman's involvement in Sure Start outside the college has confirmed her belief that with childcare must come 'outreach work, underpinning community support and regeneration - that's what is essential'.
That was the ethos that embraced Shaz Brown, who was introduced to Sure Start at a time when she was desperate and in temporary accommodation, having just fled from a violent husband. 'With Sure Start, nobody failed me, for once in my life,' she says.
Through Sure Start, a family support worker introduced her to Meet and Play, a mothers' support session, where they can access, for example, parenting classes and a toy library, while their children go to a creche.
'They were very welcoming, knew how to talk to people. They were direct, but in a way that's all right, you don't feel hurt,' says Shaz. 'I love Sure Start because it brought back life to me.'
Self-help
Her story is echoed by friends at Meet and Play. One says, 'I was so isolated. This group are like my relatives now. I come every week, I'm excited to come.' Another mother explains, 'We are hungry for the love we find here. We're a little family. You are able to build up your life instead of staying at home and crying all day.' One woman adds, 'nobody judges you here' and another woman recalls, 'I had no support, now I feel entitled to something'. None of this spirit has infused the PM's message.
These women live around the Nightingale Estate area, where the Sure Start programme is organised from an office in the shopping precinct in the newly-refurbished estate. The Sure Start team believe passionately in what they do. 'I love my work,' says director Nazmin Mansuria.
The team visits all mothers of new babies in the area to tell them about the range of Sure Start programmes, designed to provide good care for the children and empowerment for themselves. The schemes address issues such as child protection and women's education and include a fresh food stall and a 'reclaim the park' initiative to redeem green space on the estate as a safe place for women and children.
'It is really important that people don't have to travel to get their needs met,' says Mansuria, adding that programmes are revised by parents' input.
'They feel part of it, they take care of it and they educate themselves.'
Another of Hackney's hard-pressed neighbourhoods, Queensbridge and Dalston, is home to one of the borough's first Sure Start programmes, which is trying to ensure that the outreach and empowerment are sustained in the Children's Centre that will soon replace it.
Initially, the project faced the common criticism of Sure Start - that it was failing to reach the hard-to-reach. Social partners were finding partnership difficult and the scheme was underused. When programme director Netsai Idehen set out to find out why, she discovered huge and multiple unmet needs.
In response, Sure Start started to offer English and literacy classes. 'The greatest support for many mothers is learning English,' says Idehen. It organised sessions with the Citizens Advice Bureau, which is hard to access in Hackney, and accompanies families to meetings with official services - as many are fearful of authority. It set up parenting classes in the women's mother tongues and sewing classes at the request of Bengali women, who treat them as a social event.
'We have to be creative and tackle things in a non-traditional way,' she adds. 'When families come to us their self-esteem is in their socks. The idea is to get them back on their feet.'
Government manipulation
It is this work that is erased from the PM's assessment. Where Sure Start has failed, say the researchers, is in neighbourhoods where there was no real attempt to reach the hard-to-reach; where the arrival of Sure Start led to the loss of other affordable provision; where (according to anecdotal evidence) it was diverted away from some of the most impoverished places.
It didn't work well when it failed to create rapport with parents, disrupted young parents' own support systems, and encouraged women to find work only to leave them with more stress and less money than before.
However, the biggest problem with Sure Start has been its evaluation, which Government manipulated to service a self-fulfilling prophecy. So, it compared areas, but it didn't compare Sure Start and non-Sure Start children and parents. But now the evidence is about to emerge of what makes Sure Start successful, and the doyen of social science research, Michael Rutter, has written a devastating critique of the Government's interference.
Sure Start was always burdened with problems it could never hope to solve - namely social exclusion and child poverty. It wasn't parents who produced Europe's highest levels of child poverty and pauperised neighbourhoods, says Rutter, it was Government policy in the 1980s and 1990s, and under New Labour inequality has actually increased.
Sure Start could only ever be one element of a social regeneration strategy. Yet when Tony Blair complains that Sure Start has failed, Rutter cautions that we don't know what has, or has not worked, because 'the Government-imposed research design makes that impossible'.
The Government 'trumpeted the expectation that Sure Start would drastically cut child poverty and social exclusion', and so it would not allow anything to challenge that outcome. Nor did Government allow itself to learn from research. Indeed, it actually ruled out random controlled trials - that meant Sure Start programmes could not be compared to anything, and discovering, therefore, what worked would be impossible - 'The reason was political,' notes Rutter.
Positive difference
However, some qualitative investigation has been done and the results will soon surface. Researchers have innovated models allowing them to predict which programmes lent themselves to parental empowerment and which didn't, 'and amazingly it worked', said one. The research worked, both as research and as an insight into where and when Sure Start harvested better outcomes.
Among teenage mothers, for example, qualitative research is showing that Sure Start can impact either positively or negatively on mothers' own networks. 'The delicacy of interpersonal relationships can be enhanced, or you can screw them up,' says one researcher. You wouldn't know any of this unless you invested not only in quantitative but qualitative research.
Professor Fiona Williams studied six Sure Start projects and found that Sure Start made a positive difference to communities and individuals when workers led the way in developing services that did not regard the parents 'as deficit parents but as people to be listened to and respected'.
This personal and community development approach bequeathed better childcare and more confident parents who were becoming advocates within their own neighbourhoods. So, where multi-agency partnerships adopted a holistic approach to children's lives through vigorous and empathic community outreach, evidence is showing that outcomes for children and parents improved. Some of this spirit has been written into the children's centre guidance. But - amazingly - it wasn't what Downing Street decided to measure, or to learn from.
The greatest fear is that Sure Start will metamorphose into a narrow, standardised service providing childcare but abandoning parental empowerment. That would mean Downing Street is giving up on mothers and on community development through the partnership principles that the PM supposedly proclaims. NW
More information
* Michael Rutter, 'Is Sure start an Effective Preventive Intervention?' In Child and Adolescent Mental Health, 2006
