Margaret Hodge
Adjournment Debate on Sure Start
House of Commons
The Minister for Children (Margaret Hodge) : I warmly congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Erewash (Liz Blackman) on securing this debate. I have had more representations in favour of additional funding for Sure Start from hon. Members across the political spectrum than anything else. It is a bit of an irony: everybody loves Sure Start, but not many hon. Members have chosen to come to have their say in this debate, which is a bit sad. Nevertheless, I am pleased that they like it and I would be delighted with any additional resources that we can secure to ensure the expansion of the programme.
I share my hon. Friend's commitment to the importance of investing in the early years. She comes to the issue having considered a lot of the powerful American research into investment in integrated services in the early years and into the impact that that can have on children's life chances. I come to the issue from that direction, but also from work that has been done in the UK by Feinstein, which shows how children from different socio-economic backgrounds start off very different competences at an early age. One can start measuring their cognitive skills at 20 months.
Children from lower socio-economic backgrounds can have high cognitive skills and those from high socio-economic backgrounds can have low cognitive skills at that age. What is depressing about the research is that, by the time one locks into school, class has overridden those early cognitive skills. The children with low cognitive skills in a higher socio-economic group outperform those with high cognitive skills from the low socio-economic group.
We should try to find ways in which children showing potential at an early age can realise it. That is at the heart of the Sure Start programme. If we really are committed to equalising outcomes on the basis of equality of opportunity, that has to be by investing in the early years. I came back from Sweden last week, and it is very telling that, after 30 years' investment, children there are offered far more equal opportunity. Far fewer children die from child abuse there, and I think that one of the reasons for that is the early investment in parenting support, family support and children's opportunities. That can help to deal with some of the tensions in family life that can lead to abuse, so other good results can come out of such early investment.
I looked with envy at the fact that in Sweden about 2.5 per cent. of gross domestic product is spent on early years services. Despite the very successful and massive expansion under the Labour Government, we still spend under 0.5 per cent. of GDP on early years services.
The early years are crucial. My hon. Friend mentioned Leicester and Corby as two examples. I opened a new children's centre in Hertfordshire this morning. It is a nursery school that has expanded into a children's centre and provides all the multi-agency services to children from the early years to age five. The headmistress finds that, as the children embark on their nursery education experience, those who have been able to take advantage of the early years services are even readier to do better than those who have not had that experience. Intervention from birth is very important.
My hon. Friend spoke about her experience of speech and language therapists and the benefit that she has experienced locally. My hon. Friend the Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant) asked whether we are expanding their use, and the answer is yes but it takes time. However, some interesting local experiments are taking place, involving the cascading of speech and language therapy knowledge and techniques to those who have not undertaken the full training programme but who can, in the nursery or pre-school setting, do sufficient work to help the development of children's language. That will allow para-professionals to work in early years settings and is one way of growing the competences more quickly than through the full training programme, which takes a long time to produce fully trained professionals, of whom we need more.
My hon. Friend the Member for Erewash mentioned our record to date, and it is worth reiterating that, before we came to office, there was hardly anything for children in their early years. There was no national child care strategy. We now have places for 1.2 million children, which did not exist before. There was no commitment to nursery education, but we now have a universal service throughout the country, so that all three and four-year-olds can have access to part-time nursery education for five days a week. We managed to deliver that six months before we said we would in our 1997 pledge.
There are more than 500 Sure Start programmes throughout the country, all of which are benefiting the children living in those areas. They are situated in the most deprived areas in the country, which is important in ensuring that those who can benefit most from early intervention have the opportunity to do so.
As my hon. Friend knows, we are trying to bring together the experience that we have gained with all the initiatives that we have tried during the past five years into the concept of children's centres. It is worth reiterating for the record what children's centres will deliver. They will provide good-quality early years education combined with full day-care provision for children of a minimum of 10 hours a day, five days a week for 48 weeks in the year. That provision will be substantially led by a teacher to ensure that we sustain and enhance quality.
The centres will provide an important outreach to parents. If I came back with only one plea from my visit this morning to Hatfield, it was that we should invest more in supporting parents in the difficult task of bringing up their children. The centres will provide a range of family support services, including child and family health services and antenatal and health visiting services. They will provide support to children and parents with special needs, and I know that my hon. Friend has a particular interest as chair of the all-party group on autism. The centres will provide strong links with Jobcentre Plus, local training providers and further and higher education institutions, so that they can support our welfare-to-work strategy, which aims to lift children out of poverty by providing job opportunities for their parents.
The model that we have developed for England is stronger than those that I have seen in some of the Scandinavian countries. Investment in those countries has been made over a longer time, but it has been on the welfare-to-work agenda, providing child care to enable parents to participate in the labour market. Our model is more child focused, takes a more holistic approach to the needs of the child and, over time, will prove more effective in turning around children's opportunities.
My hon. Friend made several points about the Children Bill and spoke about how, through it, we are embedding early intervention and working together across professional boundaries as key features of the delivery of services for children, not just in their early years but through all childhood and youth, from nought to 19. She asked me whether Sure Start managers will be involved in appointing children's directors, which is an important part of the proposal. I cannot promise that, because it is an issue for local authorities to determine, but the posts will be crucial because they will ensure proper accountability. They will embody the integration that we want in the front-line professional services that touch children's lives.
On whether children would be involved in the appointments, that, too, will be a matter for local authorities. It is part of our thinking to put children and young people at the heart of everything we do to configure and provide services. We want children to be involved in the appointment of a children's commissioner for England.
One of the big culture changes that makes co-location so important is that we want people who are not used to working together, whether they are from health, teaching or social care professions, to develop a mutual understanding of children's development. We want them to work across boundaries—even developing the same vocabulary would be a start. Co-location is one of the levers we can use to encourage that culture change. The others are leadership, training, the pooling of budgets and to set and to inspect targets for children's services in the locality.
My hon. Friend drew attention to what Camden is doing to bring the Sure Start programme into the mainstream and I entirely agree with what she said. One of my strong messages has always been that people do not have to wait for extra Government funding to change the way in which existing services for children are delivered in their locality.
Before the debate, I was engaged with officials in working out how to recognise and to brand the next group of children's centres. Although we will fund many of them, we hope to find mechanisms to brand others that do not get specific Government targeting, but which have all the features that I described, which we want in a children's centre. As my hon. Friend said, this is all about commitment and creative thinking. We want to spread knowledge and understanding of new ways of working, building services around the child and working together in multi-agency teams to improve outcomes for children. I am sure that, as we build and spread that knowledge, local authorities will respond by reconfiguring their services in a much shorter time than Government funding will enable us to do.
My hon. Friend asked what encouragement we could give and whether there would be some seed-corn funding for potential roll-out in the areas. I will consider that further. However, we have given money to some areas that are not in the most deprived wards in England, but where just a bit extra will enable them to develop a Sure Start children's centre. We are considering what further work we can do to encourage that development.
Much of the Children Bill is built on what we have learnt on what works for children through the Sure Start programme. We want to spread that learning throughout children's lives from nought to 19, not just in education and social care, but through children's trusts, extended schools, the development of children's directors and integrated local services, and by bringing into community health services that work with children.
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for securing the debate. Although short, it has been fruitful and I look forward to further opportunities to discuss the issues to enable us to provide equality of opportunity, which is at the heart of what politics should be about.
