Bridget Phillipson: Parenting seems too hard. Kids need a better start

Times

18 hours ago

Bridget Phillipson, the education secretary, recalls a dramatically different landscape for young parents when she had her first child 14 years ago.
It was 2011, a year into David Cameron's coalition government, and Britain was still benefiting from New Labour's Sure Start programme, a network of community centres offering services including early years education, health advice and family support.
The initiative is often regarded as one of Tony Blair's most successful social policies: evidence showed positive effects on children's health and educational performance.
By the time Phillipson had her second child in 2015, Sure Start had become a high-profile victim of Cameron's cuts. Funding for the programme was not protected by central government and was instead rolled into a £2 billion early intervention grant to local authorities. By 2012 this money was also being used to fund the expansion of nursery places.
Phillipson, now 41, said: 'When my daughter was born, there was still quite a big spread of services that were available. I remember getting a leaflet setting out all of the support that was there.
'By the time my son came along in 2015, that big sheet of paper had been reduced to a sliver of a part of an A4 sheet. And it just became harder and harder for parents to get the support they need.'
She has always been determined to right that perceived wrong.
This week the education secretary will unveil a £500 million plan for 1,000 'family hubs' by 2028 in an effort to support half a million of the most disadvantaged children. There will also be a new national digital family hub linked to the new NHS app. The money will come from her department's existing budget.
In an interview with The Sunday Times to launch the government's Best Start in Life strategy, to be published on Monday, she said: 'Being a parent is wonderful and fulfilling, but has its challenges and can be tough. I want to make it easier for families to manage and to get the level of support that they need to support their children to thrive.
'When one in four children are leaving primary school without having reached a good level of reading, then something's going seriously wrong in those early years and that has to go beyond the school gate.
'My big criticism of the last government would be not just what they failed to deliver in our schools, but what they failed to deliver beyond the school gate. Because so much of what will set children up to succeed is what happens through family in the home and also in those services in the community to allow children to thrive.'
Phillipson is concerned that Britain's declining birthrate is because young people believe parenting 'looks too hard'. She said: 'This announcement is also about making parenting easier and the state providing support to all families.'
The fertility rate in England and Wales was 1.44 children per woman in 2023, the lowest since records began in 1938. A rate of about 2.1 is needed to maintain a population without net immigration. The number of babies born in 2023 was the lowest since 1977.
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In an article for The Telegraph last week, Phillipson, who is Catholic, expressed concern at the UK's falling birthrate, saying she wanted more young people to have children.
'I can't bear the thought of young people being worried about starting a family because they are concerned about the lack of support,' she said. 'We need to put that right so that people can make the choices that are right for them. It's a personal tragedy for individuals who want to start a family, or they want a bigger family, but they're worried about how they can make it work. That's why I'm determined to make parenting easier and a source of joy as opposed to worry and anxiety.'
Family hubs are rooted in Labour's Sure Start programme, which began in the 1990s, and are intended to help families before they reach crisis point, providing services such as pregnancy and breastfeeding support, child developmental health clinics, mental health support, advice on online safety or knife crime, and support for addiction and domestic abuse.
At its peak in 2009-10 Sure Start had 3,600 centres in England but by 2018 local authorities had scaled back or closed most of them.
Research published by the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) in May looked at children born in the 1990s and 2000s who took part in the scheme, and found it improved health and educational outcomes, including better-than-expected GCSE results, as well as reducing school absences and less severe special educational needs and disabilities. It also found that the scheme generated £2 of financial benefits for every £1 spent.
Phillipson said she is determined to embed family hubs, which will be opened first in disadvantaged areas, into the fabric of society. It is a move that comes after weeks of infighting between the government and the soft-left over welfare reform and will put Labour back its comfort zone.
She said: 'We know from the evidence that Sure Start generated significant benefits. The evidence is really clear about the impact it had on reducing hospitalisations among children. The evidence was also clear that it improved academic outcomes for some of our most disadvantaged children.
'So there's a good and strong case for why parents need support but there's also a really strong argument that early family support, like our Best Start family hubs, will drive up standards in schools because too many children arrive at school not ready to learn, already having fallen behind, and that gap only widens as they go through the school system.'
Phillipson, who grew up in a council house in Washington, Tyne and Wear, is grateful for the support her grandparents Kathy and Pierce were able to give to her single-parent mother.
Her father had left when her mother was pregnant with her, and she was bullied at primary school because her family was so poor.
They were reliant on benefits and their terraced house, with rotten window frames and no upstairs heating, sat between a disused railway line and an industrial wasteland. In the winter she would go to bed fully clothed. Phillipson, who is among those thought to have leadership ambitions and regularly polls in the top six in the cabinet rankings, ended up securing a place to study modern history at Hertford College, Oxford.
Phillipson said: 'I was fortunate to have supportive grandparents who chipped in and did what they could to take me on trips to museums, to the beach, to the library.
'Those are all really important moments in growing up and they expand children's horizons. It breaks my heart when I speak to children in my own community in Sunderland when I visit schools and I hear that even though we're very close to the coast that they've never been to the beach, or they've never been on a train, and those are the kinds of experiences that we need for more children.'
Phillipson, who is the co-chair of the government's child poverty taskforce, believes the key is putting more money back into parents' pockets, through breakfast clubs, the expansion of free childcare and cutting the cost of school uniforms.
However, she wants to go further and lift the two-child benefit cap as part of the government's child poverty strategy which will be published in the autumn. The IFS has put the cost of this at £3.4 billion a year and Phillipson and other ministers have warned that the money may not be there.
'I've always been clear, together with Liz Kendall [the working pensions secretary], that social security measures are on the table; that we are looking at every way and every lever to lift more children out of poverty and social security is an important part of that …'
Asked whether the money would be there for it in the budget, Philipson added: 'The two-child limit was something that a Conservative government put in place. It's not something that we would have done, but of course we are mindful that any changes around social security do come at a cost.'
Pat McFadden, the Cabinet Office minister, was asked last week whether the government's £5 billion welfare retreat meant the chancellor cannot afford to axe the two-child benefit cap. 'There is a cost to the decision taken yesterday, there's no denying that,' he told the BBC. 'You can't spend the same money twice. So, more money spent on [welfare] means less for some other purpose.'
Philipson appears to have won her battle with former education secretary Michael Gove and ex-Ofsted chief Amanda Spielman, who rounded on her over changes to academy schools and a review of the curriculum. Labour's Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill, which has completed its passage through the House of Commons and is now in the House of Lords, aims to ensure all state schools — academies and those run by councils — follow the same pay and conditions framework.
However, another big battle is now looming for the government over special educational needs provision. The number of children on education, health and care plans (ECHPs), which lay out the action and funding needed for those with such requirements, has gone from about 250,000 in 2015 to 638,000 now. The number of children in special schools has also soared, and educating children in these costs double what it does in the mainstream.
Phillipson wants more children educated in the mainstream and has made greater inclusion a key part of her efforts to remodel special needs provision in England.
However, parents and campaigners fear the government's reforms will restrict or phase out the use of ECHPs and their associated guarantees of funding.
Asked about their concerns, Phillipson said: 'I think there is a wider recognition of the fact that the system isn't working as it should. But any change that we'll set out, which we'll set out later on this year in the schools white paper, will take account of all of the engagement that we've had with parents, with charities, with campaigners and with MPs who all acknowledge and recognise that we need to do much better as a country by children with special educational needs.
'This is about better support, more timely support, earlier identification of need. We secured the resources at the budget and at the spending review in order to make that a reality. So not just investment in schools, but also creating the places that we need across the country. So, the specialist provision that is still needed, but also the specialist provision in mainstream schools, that can work incredibly well.'