Is Sure Start really the success story that Rachel Sylvester suggests it is? I asked my colleague at the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS), Jill Kirby – perhaps the leading expert on family issues – for her take. She reviewed Sure Start in her CPS report Nationalisation of Childhood. That was two years ago, and the evidence was that for children of the most vulnerable (ie, jobless and lone parents) it was, amazingly, doing more harm than good. For the others, the benefits were negligible. Since then, Professor Edward Melhuish’s National Evaulation of Sure Start has said that it is “plausible if by no means certain” that this problem on deprived children has been overcome.
Jill says that, on 7 of the 14 measures, children and families in Sure Start areas were found to be doing better than non-Sure Start areas. Her analysis:
“Hardly a resounding endorsement. The evaluation itself is hedged with qualifiers, making plain that none of the improvements are dramatic. Also in the 2008 report, the comparison group (who didn’t go to Sure Start) were taken from the Millennium Cohort Study. So this is not strictly comparable in terms of time, or methodology. In the damning 2006 study, the comparisons were current and part of same survey and therefore more likely to be giving a true picture. I’d still argue that Sure Start is a huge waste of money which would have been much better spent on direct intervention in the worst case households. The government is belatedly realising this, hence ‘nurse-family partnerships’ now being piloted which unlike ‘non-stigmatising’ Sure Start, are based on something that worked in USA.”
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