Opinion: To the point - Questions for Sure Start children's centres
Julian Grenier, head of Kate Greenaway Nursery School and Children's Centre, London
Tuesday, February 9, 2010
The National Audit Office has once again queried whether Sure Start Children's Centres provide good value for money.
Centres exist to reach the most disadvantaged families, but the NAO reports that on average they succeed in allocating just 38 staff hours per week on outreach.
It is tempting to respond by disputing these findings. I have no way of knowing how robust they are. But what I do know is that targeted outreach work is extremely difficult to do.
The pressures are contradictory. On the one hand, there is the desire to make the centres places that families want to come and use. Services like Stay and Play, relaxation and pampering, and respite creches for tired parents, are all popular, and to that extent they are worthwhile. But the evidence that they make any significant difference to the lives of young children is not easy to come by.
More targeted services, involving outreach and home visiting, may seem to have a better chance of engaging with the so-called 'hard to reach' families. But there is always the danger of coming across as rather unappealing - exactly what families are trying to stay out of the reach of. Parents do not want to be lectured and made to feel like hopeless school children all over again. Family support services that focus on multi-agency assessment and planning can feel just like traditional social services.
This is not to say that outreach services cannot be shaped and run so that they are experienced more positively. But it is hard to do, it is still quite experimental, and it is under-researched. I doubt that any new medical intervention on the scale of Children's Centres would even be proposed without a great deal more formal experimentation, piloting and evaluation.
The danger is that because so much money has been put into Children's Centres, we feel under crushing pressure to demonstrate the impact. We could end up in a dizzying spiral of activity and recording. We would become steadily de-professionalised, working away merely to generate data to show we are doing a good job. Instead, we should be stopping and thinking, as well as planning and doing. We need to show outcomes, but we also need to think about whether we are acting in the best interests of children and families, being ethical, and being responsible.
