Abstract
Specialist child care centres focusing on urban areas in which significant numbers lived in poverty were part of policies to reduce chronic poverty and disadvantage, and associated negative behaviours and achievements in children and young people. They were initiated by the New Labour government in the late 1990s, and evolved in various ways as Sure Start centres, and Early Childhood Care Centres. Methodologically sophisticated evaluation has shown that these interventions have been partially successful in various ways, particularly with regard to preschool children’s behaviour and adjustment, and parent-child interactions. When early interventions were linked to health programmes, and to teacher-led initiatives, the programmes were most successful. Nevertheless, the programmes failed to reach some 5 percent of those identified as most in need, for whom profound and chronic poverty was the cause of parental problems, and dysfunctional parent-child interactions. When programmes for such families were reduced because of changes in the manner and amount of funding, outcomes for the very poor families and their children were significantly worse. The Sure Start programmes were, in the final analysis, underfunded and subject to political change and interference, and hardly dented the chronic disadvantages imposed by England’s system of class division.
Highlights
Specialist child care centres focusing on urban areas in which significant numbers lived in poverty were part of policies to reduce chronic poverty and disadvantage, and associated negative behaviours and achievements in children and young people
As Melhuish et al (2010) acknowledge in their overview of the first phase of Sure Start a change of national government in Britain meant that ideological pressures meant that the focus, design and reporting of Sure Start had to change within a changing political climate, and identification of “success” in programme delivery may not have been welcome news for subsequent UK governments for whom reducing public expenditure, rather than enhancing the life chances of children born into the poorest social classes, even though this initially expensive venture would have been highly cost effective in the medium and longterm (Allen, 2011)
The evaluation programme focussed on families using the services, rather than on families who were in greatest need, but who might have not accessed the services offered
Summary
Identifying deprived neighbourhoods is an obvious basis for multiple-level interventions for community development, addressing both structural and individual problems, in order to enhance children’s physical and mental health, and cognitive development This was the basis for a programme initiated by the British government, called National Strategy for Neighbourhood Renewal (Glass, 1999; ODPM, 2005; Eisenstadt, 2011) which aimed over 20 years to regenerate all of Britain’s highly deprived local neighbourhoods (which constitute about ten per cent of all urban neighbourhoods identified at the “voter enumeration district” level). As Melhuish et al (2010) acknowledge in their overview of the first phase of Sure Start a change of national government in Britain meant that ideological pressures meant that the focus, design and reporting of Sure Start had to change within a changing political climate, and identification of “success” in programme delivery may not have been welcome news for subsequent UK governments for whom reducing public expenditure, rather than enhancing the life chances of children born into the poorest social classes, even though this initially expensive venture would have been highly cost effective in the medium and longterm (Allen, 2011)
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