We can rely on Melanie Phillips and her coterie of grumpy old fogies - all singing the same old apocalyptic hymn about civilisation as we know it collapsing - to miss the point. They seize on the debacle over the Sure Start evaluation to show what they always thought - that the problem of disadvantaged children is feckless mothers and fatherless families; that the problems of childcare in Britain are not the legacy of historic dis-investment in public childcare, but crap parents in crap neighbourhoods.
The trouble with the controversy about the Birkbeck evaluation of Sure Start is that it shows nothing of the sort. But no doubt it will be interpreted by policymakers as a reason to erase the novelty of the Sure Start experiment: the planning of childcare with both parents' and children's needs in mind. Lest we forget, this was not necessarily the Government's intention.
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