It is little wonder that it is hard to define the purpose of children’s centres in anything but several sentences. In many ways they are the repository for all our hopes for children – the institutional expression of our commitment to better childhoods. Whether it is improving children’s language skills, their health and resilience, or shaping children’s emotional development and their appetite for learning, we look to children’s centres to realise our hopes to change the course of children’s development for the better.
Such bold ambitions should not be dismissed simply because they are hard to realise; quite the opposite. Children’s centres have a better chance of transforming children’s lives than any other government programme, because they bring services together under one roof so that parents do not have to navigate the labyrinth of provision for themselves. If children’s centres were abolished tomorrow and we asked, ‘What kind of programme could transform children’s lives?’, we would no doubt reinvent them.
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