Latest news with #SureStart
The Guardian
5 days ago
- Politics
- The Guardian
To those who question what Labour stands for – look at Best Start. It will change Britain's future
They hunt high and low for Labour's missing message, vision, purpose or identity. Well, here it is, where it always was, in the future of children. It's what Labour does best, what it is for: building a society where children come first and everything else falls into place. The foundations have now been laid by Bridget Phillipson by finally bringing back Sure Start to England – the most successful achievement of the last Labour government – now rebranded as Best Start family hubs. It's a pity about the new name, but young parents recognise 'hubs', whereas Sure Start is largely gone and forgotten. Its uprooting began the day Michael Gove arrived as education secretary in 2010. He entered the 'Department for Children, Schools and Families' – a name chosen to reflect the awareness that children don't learn without wraparound care for their whole lives – and replaced it with the Gradgrind 'Department for Education'. Family stuff was flimflam, distracting from rote learning, and arts, music, drama and sports were expunged from his Ebacc's core subjects. Labour's identity and purpose is captured in Best Start's view of what makes children thrive. In a short time Phillipson will be rolling out across England free universal breakfast clubs, 300 nurseries in primary schools, nurseries for babies from nine months old, and 30 hours a week free childcare for preschool children in September. That's a blessing for working parents, but its prime purpose is infant education, where most good is done for life chances. A new database will now link all hub services to Wes Streeting's new neighbourhood health centres, helping to identify vulnerable children. Labour pledges £1.5bn over three years to fund 1,000 family hubs – at least one in every council in England. Councils, even those run by Reform UK, will be forced to use this money on Best Starts. More hubs will follow in the next spending round: it took 10 years to establish Sure Start, and even then many of the 3,600 centres were still in their early phases, not yet offering all the health visitors, midwives, speech and language therapy, children's mental health services, parental support, employment, debt and addiction support and many other services. Sadly, some beautiful, purpose-built centres were sold off in post-2010 vandalism. When fully functioning, they were life-changing: Angela Rayner speaks for many when she talks emotionally about how a Sure Start course taught her as a teenage mother to hug and read to her son, breaking a generational cycle. This time, Labour says it is determined to cement Best Start into the national psyche, making it as untouchable as the NHS, so it is unthinkable for future governments to wreck it again. The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), monitoring Sure Start's lasting effects, finds that those living near a Sure Start centre in their early years 'performed significantly better in assessments at ages 7, 11 and 16', and achieved better GCSE results. At 15 they had 15% fewer absences from school. Sure Start children had many fewer hospitalisations, with fewer injuries and poisonings, 'likely reflecting improved safety in the home environment', and 'an improvement in family functioning'. Teenagers suffered fewer depressive and anxiety disorders, while 12- to 14-year-olds had 50% fewer mental health hospitalisations. Because they caught problems early, fewer Sure Start children needed Send plans in school. This research raises hopes that Best Start will lead to fewer children needing education, health and care plans (EHCPs). But, unlike with the disastrous plans to cut disability benefits, Labour should wait for the plan to succeed and for the need to drop naturally, and not cut support first. Here's why this is being positioned as the emblem of Labour's prime purpose: Sure Start reduced inequalities, and was the best way to improve outcomes for the most disadvantaged. These children would, the IFS calculates, earn £11 more for every £1 of Sure Start investment, while the state would gain £ for the £2.5bn cost. Here's the IFS's conclusion. 'The impacts of Sure Start were remarkably long lasting.' And those effects may be even stronger than can be proved, since inadequate data means all children living near a Sure Start centre were counted as benefiting, including those with no contact, diluting the results. For those who seek a defining Labour project, this is it. Best Start hubs must be the flagship for future spending – the roots of a better society. Imagine if Sure Start had flourished and grown over the past 14 years, and if each cohort of children year after year had emerged better, instead of falling back. Phillipson revealed the cost of backsliding in a speech in Sunderland last week. The social gap between children arriving at primary school widened in the Tory years: a quarter are not fully toilet trained, a third can't follow instructions, half can't sit still, and reception teachers lose two and half hours a day catching these children up, to the detriment of the rest. That disadvantage gap at five years old is still there at 16. As Best Start begins the repairs, it should start by including left-out two-year-olds with unemployed parents – the most deprived, who for bizarre reasons are currently denied full-time nursery. Best Start alone is not enough. The cardinal pledge is that child poverty will fall steeply by the next election, as it has under every Labour government: Rachel Reeves and other ministers confirm this whenever they are asked. I am convinced that the child poverty taskforce led by Phillipson and Liz Kendall, reporting in the autumn, will remove the two-child benefit cap. Ignore the revengeful, anonymous No 10 briefer who taunted benefit rebels by saying that plans to remove the cap were 'dead in the water'. Phillipson admits the expensive welfare U-turn makes it harder, but I can't see the cap surviving. Counter-briefings I have heard say it is unthinkable that the taskforce will leave it in place. Listen when she says her 'driving mission' is to 'break the link between [a child's] background and what they go on to achieve'. How else would that be achieved? The way forward is clear: Starmer and Reeves must make Best Start core to every speech they give. Children come first, in everything. Triple-locked pensions, social care and even the NHS must give way to children. The children's commissioner for England today reports that 'children are living in 'Dickensian levels' of poverty'. Neil Kinnock has a suggestion: raise the money from the very richest. A 2% wealth tax on those who have £10m or more would yield £24bn – a plan that gets strong support from three-quarters of voters. Pain and political trouble beckon at the next budget. It's time for this government to do something popular: pay for children's future with the proceeds of past inequality. Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist
Scotsman
5 days ago
- Business
- Scotsman
Way forward for Keir Starmer's UK government after successes and mistakes of first year in power
A backbench rebellion, a policy U-turn and a Chancellor in tears are not how Sir Keir Starmer would have chosen to mark his government's first year in power. Sign up to our daily newsletter Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to Edinburgh News, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... But it's not unusual for prime ministers to have a tough time at the start of their premiership. Margaret Thatcher faced public attacks from "wets" inside her own Cabinet over economic policy. And Tony Blair suffered a revolt over single parent benefit cuts, including the front bench resignation of Leith MP Malcolm Chisholm. Both were returned to power with big majorities at the next election. So Keir Starmer and his colleagues should not despair despite the negative commentary which has followed the U-turns over winter fuel payments and welfare cuts. Chancellor Rachel Reeves was visibly upset as she sat next to Keir Starmer at Prime Minister's Questions last week Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad The prime minister has admitted mistakes - he says the emphasis on how bad things were when Labour came into power 'squeezed the hope out'; and he now regrets his speech warning that Britain was in danger of becoming 'an island of strangers'. But the government also has much to its credit at the end of year one - a 7 per cent increase in the national living wage; falling NHS waiting lists; an expansion of free school meals; major new capital investment; improved rights for workers; and gradual re-nationalisation of the railways. Nevertheless, there are still tough decisions ahead. Labour promised at the election there would be no increase in income tax, VAT, corporation tax or employees' national insurance contributions. But commentators now expect there will be tax rises of some sort in the budget in the autumn. Options talked about include freezing income tax thresholds, resulting in more people being caught by higher rates; ending some inheritance tax relief; and reducing the size of the tax-free lump sums people can take from their pension when they retire. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Many inside the Labour party want the government to be 'bolder' about policy choices - and that could include sensible tax increases to ensure those with the broadest shoulders bear the heaviest burdens. The government is reportedly about to adopt the theme of "fairness" to give its policies more of a focus. And it is planning to establish a large network of "Best Start" family hubs offering integrated services for under-fives and their families - a welcome revival of Sure Start, widely seen as one of the big successes of the last Labour government which was subsequently dismantled by the Tories. These are the kind of initiatives people have been expecting from a Labour government. They could help change Sir Keir's fortunes - and even give a boost to Scottish Labour too.
New Statesman
5 days ago
- Politics
- New Statesman
No one wants to pay to fix Britain
Photo byIt's not easy being Labour: yesterday, there was the very positive news that the government has replicated what was arguably one of New Labour's most popular and successful policies, Sure Start, with 'Best Start', a major expansion of parenting support hubs to every local authority by April 2026. But this very good policy is already being overshadowed by the outcry against a policy it hasn't even announced yet: changes to special educational needs and disabilities (Send) provision in schools. Sure Start was unequivocally a good policy. The Institute for Fiscal Studies estimated that every £1 spent on the policy returned £11 in benefits to the children who attended in improved health, educational attainment and lifelong earnings. It was particularly effective for children from disadvantaged backgrounds. It is a good example of what bodies such as the National Audit Office and the Public Accounts Committee say is the golden characteristic of good public spending: it addressed a problem in advance. A relatively cheap intervention into the parenting of very young children helps reduce their likelihood of needing other state services in future. Among its fiscal benefits, Sure Start was thought to reduce Send uptake in schools. Following the wholesale eradication of Sure Start centres during the austerity programme implemented by George Osborne, and then the educational crisis caused by the pandemic and lockdown policies, these Send services are now at a very high level of demand, at a cost to the government of more than £10bn a year. Campaigners fear that the government is considering changes to education, health and care plans (EHCPs), which give families a legal right to support from their local authority. The number of EHCPs is growing quickly, with take-up increasing every year – the number of new EHCPs in 2024 was 15.8 per cent higher than the previous year – and are in place for around 640,000 of the UK's roughly nine million pupils. The costs have ballooned with them, because in many cases the EHCP requires the council to compensate for the fact that other public services, such as public transport, are not available; councils will be legally required to spend almost £2bn on home-to-school transport (mostly taxis) for Send pupils in the current year, and this will likely only continue to rise. The government won't be attempting to put any legislation through on Send provision for some time; a white paper is expected in the autumn. But Labour backbenchers are already briefing against the government – the potential for a new rebellion leads both the Times and Guardian front pages this morning – because they fear that having tried and failed to save £5.5bn from reform to disability benefits, a further attempt is being made to save money from vulnerable children. The government insists it has no plans to remove funding from children or schools, and that the object of the white paper will not be to save money but to fix a broken system. But this was also the argument the government made for reforming the welfare system, which is transparently not working as it should. However, the reforms became framed as cuts, and the prospect of pushing large numbers of people into poverty turned into a backbencher rebellion. The same MPs are sending a clear message that attempts to save money on Send provision are likely to be rejected in a similar fashion. This is the trap in which the government is caught: clearly, it needs to spend a lot more on things like Best Start in order to bring down the bill for things like Send provision in future. But it can't raise the money to do that, because it's already spending so much money on Send provision now (which is partly the result of Sure Start having been cut). No one wants to pay the upfront cost of Britain being fixed. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe Investors from whom the government raises money are increasingly less interested in lending to us. Our long-term borrowing costs are both uncomfortably high and, as we saw last week, sensitive to any whiff of fiscal news. Businesses are increasingly vocal about the amount they are taxed, and hiring appears to have slowed considerably following the rise in employers' National Insurance in the last Budget. We don't know yet if claims of a 'millionaire exodus' are true, but a simple wealth tax is unproven and would make it much more likely. Labour backbenchers are right to protest measures about which their constituents are worried. But many of them have already spoken out against other fiscal fixes, such as means testing the winter fuel allowance or ending agricultural property relief. What cuts would they support, then? Which taxes would they raise? After the welfare rebellion, it will be easier for MPs to reject openly anything that sounds like austerity (even if it hasn't been announced yet). It is much harder to give a credible account of where the money should come from. This piece first appeared in the Morning Call newsletter; receive it every morning by subscribing on Substack here [See also: The special needs trap] Related
The Guardian
6 days ago
- Politics
- The Guardian
Labour vows to protect Sure Start-type system from any future Reform assault
Labour will aim to embed a Sure Start-type system of help for deprived children and families so deeply and completely into the state that a future Reform or Conservative government would not be able to dismantle it, Bridget Phillipson has pledged. Arguing that efforts to close the attainment gap between poorer and richer children was the government's 'moral mission', the education secretary promised to build on this weekend's announcement of a new wave of family hubs across England, an effective successor to Sure Start. Sure Start, a network of centres offering integrated services for the under-fives and their families, launched in 1998 under the last Labour government, and was seen as one of its major successes, with one study saying it generated longer-term savings worth twice the system's cost. But much of Sure Start was dismantled amid massive spending cuts by the Conservatives. The new policy of family hubs will commit £500m to opening 1,000 centres from April 2026. In an article for the Guardian, Phillipson said the centres should become part of a wider network of help for families, one that would not just be impossible to take apart, but that would become so popular that they would become an untouchable 'third rail' of British politics. The family hubs strategy was 'a watershed moment' for both government and families, Phillipson wrote. She went on: 'To make it a reality we will begin unprecedented collaboration between parents, councils, nurseries, childminders, schools and government, enmeshing family support, early education, and childcare so deeply that no rightwing government can ever unpick it, as the Tories did with Sure Start over 14 long years. 'We will ensure any such assault on the system will become the new third rail of British politics.' In a follow-up announcement to the plan for family hub centres, which are intended to be created in every council area in England by 2028, Phillipson's department has also announced plans to pay qualified early years teachers to work in the most deprived areas, where their work could have the greatest impact. Currently, the Department for Education says, just one in 10 nurseries have a qualified early years teacher. The incentive scheme will involve a tax-free payment of £4,500 to early years teachers who take a job in a nursery in one of the 20 most disadvantaged communities in England. In another change, the education watchdog Ofsted will inspect any new early years providers within 18 months of opening, with subsequent inspections taking place at least once every four years, rather than the current six. Sign up to First Edition Our morning email breaks down the key stories of the day, telling you what's happening and why it matters after newsletter promotion Sure Start and its successor programmes have a near-totemic role in the narrative of the modern Labour party, with Angela Rayner, its deputy leader, saying her life as a teenage mother and that of her son were turned around by her local centre, which offered her a parenting course. In her Guardian article, Phillipson recounted working closely with the first-ever Sure Start centre in Washington, Tyne and Wear, when she ran a refuge for women fleeing domestic violence, before she entered politics. 'It was a lifeline for those women who, despite everything, were determined to give their children the very best start in life,' she wrote. 'The gap in achievement we see between our poorest and most affluent children at 16 is baked in before they even start school, creating a vicious cycle of lost life chances that's all too visible in the shameful number of young people not earning or learning.' Speaking in interviews on Sunday morning, Phillipson said Labour was also committed to tackling child poverty, but said the fiscal cost of Downing Street's U-turn on changes to welfare last week would make it harder to implement other policies such as potentially scrapping the two-child benefit cap.
The Guardian
6 days ago
- Politics
- The Guardian
It is this government's moral mission to give every child in Britain the best start in life
Like many young mothers, Jenna was unsure where to start. But that's where her local family support service came in. Offering breastfeeding advice, a space to come together with other parents and for her son Billy to play with other babies, it reassured Jenna that she was on the right track – and crucially, that Billy was set up to achieve when he got to school. Jenna's service was the first of Labour's renowned Sure Start centres in Washington, my home town in north-east England. I knew it well: before becoming an MP I ran a refuge nearby for women fleeing domestic violence. I linked up the women who used our refuge with Sure Start. It was a lifeline for those women who, despite everything, were determined to give their children the very best start in life. But, sadly, after 14 years of Conservative government, stories like Jenna's, and those of the many women who were offered that lifeline, are much less common. Funding was stripped out of Sure Start centres and services scrapped in rebranded family hubs. Today, 65 councils, and the children and families who live under their authority, have missed out on recent funding. Many more are lacking the childcare places that so many families in our country need. For every Jenna, there are a host of other young mothers, and families, who missed out on crucial pillars of support, whose children have fallen behind before they have even started school. One in three five-year-olds enters year 1 without the basic skills – like holding a pencil and writing their own name – that they need to make the most of what education has to offer them. Some haven't reached essential milestones such as putting on a coat or going to the toilet by themselves. For the most vulnerable children, the situation is graver. Just over half of those eligible for free school meals reach a good level of development at age five. For children in social care, it's just over one in three. And for children with special educational needs, it's one in five. The gap in achievement we see between our poorest and most affluent children at 16 is baked in before they even start school, creating a vicious cycle of lost life chances that's all too visible in the shameful number of young people not earning or learning. It's this government's moral mission to bridge that gap, but to do it we must build an education system where all children can achieve and thrive, starting from day one. That is why reforming the early years education system is my number one priority. And it's why, just 12 months after Labour entered government, I am so proud to be setting out our strategy to give every child the best start in life. Backed by £1.5bn over the next three years, it brings together the best of Sure Start, health services, community groups and the early years sector, with the shared goal of setting up children to succeed when they get to school. We will create 1,000 Best Start Family Hubs, at least one in every council area, invest a record £9bn in funded childcare and early years places – and hundreds of millions to improve quality in early years settings and reception classes. These hubs will bring disjointed support systems into one place, allowing thousands of families to access help with anything from birth registration to breastfeeding, from housing support to children's speech and language development. The strategy takes inspiration from around the world. I've been really impressed by what happens in countries I've visited, such as Estonia, where early education and family support are bound tightly together with stellar results. Its disadvantage gap is negligible because children get to school ready to learn. Its children outperform those from much larger, wealthier countries in international rankings. The country punches above its weight economically as a result. At the heart of our strategy is the recognition that for our country to succeed in a fast-changing world, it is not enough for only some children to do well in education: every child must have the opportunity and the tools not just to get by, but to get on in life. Working people have always known that education is the best way to break the link between their background and what they go on to achieve, the route to prosperity not just for individuals, but for all of society. It's a common thread that runs through every Labour government: that we must use education to spread the freedoms that today too few enjoy, so that tomorrow they are common to us all. It's the essence of our politics, the socialism of extending freedom to allow working people to choose their own path to fulfilment: to get better employment, to achieve a better quality of life or even to start a family. This strategy is a watershed moment for our government, but more importantly for every single family who needs our support. To make it a reality, we will begin unprecedented collaboration between parents, councils, nurseries, childminders, schools and government, enmeshing family support, early education and childcare so deeply that no rightwing government can ever unpick it, as the Tories did with Sure Start over 14 long years. Our plan for change will ensure Jenna's experience – and Billy's future success – is shared by every family and every child in our country. Bridget Phillipson is the secretary of state for education and Labour MP for Houghton and Sunderland South
