The title line of an article as this week’s Labour Party conference kicks off says it all. “Sure Start has survived 40% cuts to its funding.” The lefty activist authors mean it as 999 call to summon emergency services but my immediate response was to say if the programme is still alive then it was initially very overfunded.
Sure Start is the brainchild of the Blair government in 1998. Like most left-wing programmes it works to replace God and family life with government initiatives. The cause is usually genuine so when opponents want to reduce funding they are typically branded as unconscionable baby killers only interested in protecting their wealth.
The programme is classic liberal planning. 250 centres to reach 150,000 vulnerable children through improvement of childcare, early education, health and family support, with an emphasis on outreach and community development.
Initially the plan was for 10 years of funding. That means you get everyone hooked on the benefits then demand continuance or else all these children will suffer. Five years in, the then Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown announced plans to shift the burden of funding to local governments. Again, Westminster starts it up then the local councils get stuck with a bill they can’t afford.
Similar to America and Australia’s Head Start as well as Ontario’s Early Years, Sure Start is lefty budgeting that could be renamed Sure Spending. The emphasis on outreach was replaced with emphasis on recipients attending ‘the centre’; while the initial 524 locations (double the plan) targeting the most needy grew to 3,500 targeting everyone, regardless of need, by 2010.
Proponents point to a single class in Wales effective in reducing problem behaviour in young children. One could counter that the class could easily be taught in a number of settings without most of the expenditure. On the flip side a University of Durham study suggested that Sure Start was ineffective at improving results in early schooling.
Confronted with evidence of ineffectiveness the National Evaluation of Sure Start or NESS (more appropriately THE MESS) commented "For the time being, it remains plausible, even if by no means certain, that the differences in findings across the first and second phases of the NESS Impact Study reflect actual changes in the impact of SSLPs resulting from the increasing quality of service provision, greater attention to the hard-to-reach and the move to Children’s Centres, as well as the greater exposure to the programme of children and families in the latest phase of the impact evaluation."
That completely non-understandable quotation can only lead us to believe that the researchers are in fact married to global warming scientists and together they sit around the dinner table at evenings trying to devise ways of making no sense with the most complicated words possible.
Moving to the realm of common sense the current occupants of the central government hot seat have actually had the sense to reduce funding for this monstrosity. Subsequently local governments have announced cuts with ministers saying they want to focus on the most needy children.
But the activists at the Labour Party will lie in the path of oncoming juggernauts to save their social creations. Mikey Pavey and Abby Wood writing for Labour List say that “a great example is Nikki and her fellow mums from Portsmouth. Nikki turned to Sure Start when she was suffering from post natal depression. She says ‘the difference Sure Start has made to me and my family is unbelievable’.”
However, according to the people at THE MESS depression symptoms were one of the things that were actually worsening (along with parents missing school meetings) amongst the parents who attended the centres and received services.
Pavey & Wood continue “Communities are mobilising. They see valued services under threat as a result of Coalition cuts. We’ve heard from mums and dads, who didn’t think of themselves as campaigners, who have run fantastic campaigns to defend services in their area and to highlight the importance of supporting families.”
What’s amazing about this commentary is that we’re talking about people who are supposedly not together enough to parent properly or apply for work unassisted, yet they are organizing campaigns to save their centres from the evils of balanced budgeting.
If the masters of these concepts really wanted to help, they’d teach them that the kind of self-reliance demonstrated by the demonstrating is the best medicine there is and that responsible spending is something they need to learn for their own lives as well as teaching their children. Only humans on earth collectively organize to protect themselves from having to overcome.
Families at the economic bottom do need help and some of the ideas in Sure Start are legitimate. But the emphasis needs to be on building family, embracing morality, and moving towards graduation from economic assistance. Only then can healthy minded adults make success of marriage and raise strong functional children who won’t need the government to hold their hand.
