The idea of ‘joined up’ services and support for babies and young children and their carers is excellent. The delivery is of course more complex. Sure Start may not as yet be a complete or fully accessed programme, but it is already showing us ways forward which hold promise for the future.
Sure Start’s a great idea. It’s intended to bring together all the support and services required by parents and carers of young children (up to their fourth birthday), so that those perhaps otherwise at risk will be able to flourish alongside their more fortunate classmates-to-be.
A National Evaluation of Sure Start report out this week from Birkbeck College, London, suggests however that at best the impact of Sure Start so far is ‘patchy’. Well, just three years from inception, I’d be rather surprised if it were anything else.
Grounded research
This, of course, is also what the evaluators say. Sure Start is a programme to reverse unconstructive or unfocused cultural patterns of behaviour which have sometimes now been embedded for decades. This is quite a challenge; and at present the programme still struggles to reach some of its target ‘audience’.
It may feel difficult to say this so starkly, but children may have very little chance unless they are offered more care and encouragement than some parents and carers can give. Fortunately, the very large majority of parents love their children; but that, without a synergy between positive examples of how to conduct onesself in adulthood and the opportunities to do so, is a tough call. This I think is what the evaluators are seeing thus far.
Tying future prospects into current contexts
It’s not just provision for small children which is on the agenda here. There’s also the whole question of how adults with the care of these children perceive and respond to their own world.
The message is not necessarily that new mothers (or indeed fathers) need to work full-time right now, but rather that they need to feel engaged in and connected with their communities and the opportunities which are there and on offer – whether joined up services, voluntary and social activities, education and training or whatever else.
Adults who themselves thrive in the world they inhabit are also adults who can care more confidently for their children. If we can help those currently engaged in caring for their young children to see a promising and potentially more prosperous future, then surely these adults will be more comfortably able to enjoy and nurture their small charges now.

Tony Blair has been unwavering in his determination to tackle low horizons head on. This challenge lies at the bottom of all his thinking on schools and how to improve them. But maybe the voluntary, faith and business groups the Prime Minister so wants to see become involved in schools should ask themselves first what they could do to raise ambition and opportunities for the wider families of the children who most need support.
Education, education, education…. and never conceding the politics of aspiration for all. The two things are, as Prime Minister Tony Blair rightly says in his Guardian article (18 November ’05), intimately connected. For almost all of us, and never more so than for those around the centre-left, this truth is both self-evident and compelling.
Perhaps however the Prime Minister’s idea that ‘there is a huge untapped energy in the private, voluntary and charity sectors for partnerships to help state schools’ is only part of the truth.
From where I look – in Merseyside, as someone who has seen quite a bit as a teacher, social worker, researcher, evaluator, entrepreneur and so on – I’m not sure this hits all the nails on the head. It may hit some; but not all.
The options for partnership action are wider
I’m still unconvinced that Tony Bair’s wished-for partnerships are most urgently needed in schools as such. For me, working on the ground, the politics of ambition has to be much broader than ‘just’ schools – though this is a part of the equation.
Ambition simply inside the school gates is not going to take many children very far. I accept that the Prime Minister’s idea of education-other sector partnerships is (at least for now) a matter of choice; but many of the least blessed parents who, like everyone else, want the best for their children, are less concerned with well-meaning voluntary and faith groups or businesses getting involved with their kids, than they are with getting themselves into work.
For lots of people on Merseyside the main objective is just to get a job – and preferably a decent one. If voluntary and business interests, for instance, want to support disenfranchised people, perhaps they could begin by finding ways to employ them.
There are plenty of currently almost-trained adults on Merseyside whose future trade registration depends on work experience which is very hard to find. (Small businesses say they can’t afford to provide this for apprentices; and most of Merseyside’s economy is small businesses….) So how about starting with opportunities for less privileged parents and carers to show their children what ‘real work’ is, by being able to actually do it, for pay?
Ambition is a cultural thing
I don’t doubt for a minute that Tony Blair genuinely wants to see progress and improvements for our children and their futures. He’s absolutely right to throw down the gauntlet to us all. If we, voluntary, faith, business and other communities, want the best for children, we do indeed need to think hard about where we can best support and encourage.
And we need, too, consistently to challenge complacency, incompetence and / or narrow comfort zones, whether in local communities, schools, hospitals, industry, churches or indeed politics itself. If there are employment, educational, medical or other practitioners who don’t cut the mustard, they need to understand just why this is not acceptable – though not at the (perceived) expense of people ‘at the coalface’ who are in fact doing a good job.
I still wonder however whether we have the right ‘mix’ in all this, as yet. Tony Blair has identified and articulated an important, probably fundamental, problem, in that he sees (and always has seen) education and ambition as key elements of a successful future for everyone. But I’d like to think that all those sectors apparently so keen to go into partnership to support children can grasp the aspirational challenge outside the school gates, as well as inside.