Nursery World - Within reach

The children's centre programme is an ambitious project to integrate services for under-fives. In the run-up to phase 2, is it still on track? Nothing illustrates more graphically the Government's grand design to integrate and mainstream services for children from birth to five years old and their families, first within deprived areas and then in every community in the country, than its plan to create 3,500 children's centres by 2010.

Nothing illustrates more graphically the Government's grand design to integrate and mainstream services for children from birth to five years old and their families, first within deprived areas and then in every community in the country, than its plan to create 3,500 children's centres by 2010.

But while the programme enjoys a broad consensus of support from all those working in children's services and is consistent with the Every Child Matters agenda, there is some anxiety over the timescale for implementation, the level of funds committed in terms of both capital and revenue, and sustainability and staffing.

For the first phase of its children's centres plan, between 2004 and 2006, the DfES did not specify a target for centres but said that by April next year they should be offering services to 650,000 children in the 20 per cent most disadvantaged wards, based on the Index of Multiple Deprivation.

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