Introduction
The study upon which this paper is based aimed to examine the extent to which policy assumptions about the agency of parents were reflected on the ground by parents using and professionals delivering Sure Start services during the period 2003–6. The Sure Start programme in the case study area, named as ‘Brambleton’, was part of the fourth wave of programmes, and Brambleton was a multi-ethnic locality, bordering a northern city of England.
This was an ethnographic study, which included participant observation of parent and worker events, groups and meetings and in-depth interviews with four white and ten Asian mothers, as well as 17 workers – the latter group almost all of white backgrounds. A narrative approach to analysis was used (Lawler, Reference Lawler and May2002). The findings in this paper draw largely on interviews with the sample of Brambleton workers, which included employees of Sure Start, the local authority and key voluntary sector agencies.
In this paper, I argue that a Third Way ‘social investment’ agenda that emphasised employability and educability, increasingly characterised Sure Start policy discourses during the period of the study. This perspective – alongside other related policy discourses of New Labour – contained within it assumptions about the agency of parents. The focus of the paper is to explore staff perceptions about an overall inappropriateness of the policy shift, which was based on their view of the ‘constrained agency’ of many within their primary target group, mothers of Pakistani-origin. Following an analysis of the policy background during this period, this perspective is explored in terms of how ‘need’ was constructed in this case study area, and through a contrast between Brambleton staff perceptions of the values of ‘early’ and ‘late’ Sure Start. Finally, considering views about the uses of childcare, a ‘counter discourse’ is described, in which parents, with worker support, were seen to use provision in ways that subverted the messages of policy and met their own self-defined needs.
Policy context
Sure Start as a Third Way ‘social investment’ programme
Sure Start, a multi-agency programme to support families and aiming to improve the health, educational and social outcomes of young children, was announced in July 1998 as part of New Labour's first Comprehensive Spending Review. Introduced as an important element of New Labour's programme to address child poverty, Sure Start could also be seen as influenced by other agendas, such as the philosophies of new Communitarianism, which had shaped a range of social policy areas (Etzioni, Reference Etzioni1993; Heron, Reference Heron2001).
Locating Sure Start principally within a ‘social investment’ perspective in this study offered a means of capturing the direction of policy, and provided an analytical motif to compare policy discourse and local stakeholder perspectives about the ‘investment’ needs of the area. The notion of social investment may be traced to various developments in the 1990s, notably the work of the Commission for Social Justice (1994), and is a central feature of Anthony Giddens’ Third Way (Reference Giddens1998). It emphasises the overarching economic goals of the state and the linking of these to social goals, the centrality of work and the framing of expenditures as future-orientated investment, and has a focus on human capital and on the responsibility of individuals.
Various writers have explored the development of this perspective in the policy field of children and young people, with its influence evident in the significant expansion of particular fields of welfare (notably childcare), and in the transformation of national and local institutions (Lister, Reference Lister2003; Dobrowolsky and Jenson, Reference Dobrowolsky and Jenson2005; Dobrowolsky and Saint-Martin, Reference Dobrowolsky and Saint-Martin2005). Ruth Lister, for example, has pointed to a particular focus on the child, with social investment discourse treating children and the community as ‘emblems’ and prioritising children as ‘citizen-workers of the future’ (2003: 437).
The failure to differentiate between (groups of) adults has, however, been recognised as a limitation in a child-focused social investment perspective. As Lister has more recently suggested (2006), a focus on the needs of specific groups of children, coupled with an under-emphasis on structural determinants, reframes the issue as one of personal responsibility, with major implications for the ability to deal with the poverty of children. This critique forms part of wider assessments of New Labour's treatment of ‘diversity’, in which the Government has been seen both to recognise structural differences (e.g. in anti-discrimination legislation) but also, in other contexts, to downplay them (e.g. in citizenship initiatives, see Cheong et al., Reference Cheong, Edwards, Gouldborne and Solomos2007).
Research strongly suggests that minority ethnic groups are more likely than the population as a whole to be living in poverty, although the experience of poverty cannot be assumed to replicate that of the population as a whole (Craig et al., Reference Craig, Adamson, Ali, Ali, Atkins, Dadze-Arthur, Elliott, McNamee and Murtuja2007; Platt, Reference Platt2007). There are, in addition, significant differences of experience between minority groups, in part reflecting differences in household and age structures, as well as different employment patterns (Barn et al., Reference Barn, Ladino and Rogers2006; Clark and Drinkwater, Reference Clark and Drinkwater2007). In terms of the Sure Start programme, in around 20% of local programme areas, minority ethnic groups formed a majority of the population (Craig et al., Reference Craig, Adamson, Ali, Ali, Atkins, Dadze-Arthur, Elliott, McNamee and Murtuja2007). However, although ethnicity was addressed in planning documents and guidance (e.g. Sure Start Unit, 1999), much of the focus was upon ensuring access and the delivery of services in a culturally sensitive manner, rather than addressing structural issues associated with poverty for particular groups.
Sure Start political rhetoric and policy guidance was characterised by various narratives – including meeting the needs of parents, community empowerment and parental participation. However, arguably a social investment perspective came increasingly to influence the direction of policy, a shift that can be seen in a number of related developments. One of these, occurring in early 2003, came in the move of the programme from the complicated accountability to the Department of Health (DoH) and the then Department of Education and Employment (DfEE), to a new larger Sure Start Unit incorporating early education, childcare and the local programmes. This was located between new Departments for Education and Skills (DfES) and Work and Pensions (DWP). The initial aim of Sure Start was focused centrally upon realising the potential of children:
to work with parents-to-be, parents and children to promote the physical, intellectual and social development of babies and young children – particularly those who are disadvantaged – so that they can flourish at home and when they get to school, and thereby break the cycle of disadvantage for the current generation of young children. (DfES, 2002: 3)
However, in the expanded Sure Start Unit, this aim was amended, taking on a more explicit social investment focus, to:
Increase the availability of childcare for all children, and work with parents-to-be, parents and children to promote the physical, intellectual and social development of babies and young children – particularly those who are disadvantaged – so that they flourish at home and when they get to school, enabling their parents to work and contributing to the ending of child poverty. (DfES, 2003b: 21)
While the focus upon supporting children remained, there was a new emphasis on paid work as a key mechanism to resolve the problem of child poverty and on childcare as the means to facilitate it. This was also reflected in an additional objective, listed above the initial four – ‘improving the availability, accessibility, affordability and quality of childcare’. In terms of ethnicity, although the differential educational attainment levels of some groups of minority ethnic children underlined the appropriateness of the original aim, the revised agenda may have had less relevance, or at least more complex implications, given the evidence, for example, about variable childcare use and patterns of mothers’ employment among these communities (Barn et al., Reference Barn, Ladino and Rogers2006; Bryson et al., Reference Bryson, Bell, La Valle, Barnes and O'Shea2005; Clark and Drinkwater, Reference Clark and Drinkwater2007).
The purpose of these changes, and the ‘re-balancing’ of the Sure Start focus, were described by Naomi Eisenstadt, Director of the Sure Start Unit, in April 2003.
Sure Start has always been positioned within the child poverty strategy; however, our initial work was primarily about reducing the impact of poverty on children, rather than reducing the actual numbers of children living in poverty. This closer relationship with the DWP allows us to do both. . . . Sure Start aims to stretch people's aspirations both in terms of what they want for their children and what they want for themselves. . . . Building confidence, taking up training, and particularly adult literacy, all build skills useful for parenting and for work. And good quality child care is essential to offering real choices in employment. (Eisenstadt, Reference Eisenstadt2003: 26)
The Children's Centres initiative, introduced in the 2002 Interdepartmental Childcare Review (Cabinet Office Strategy Unit, 2002) and to be implemented from 2006, could also be seen within this context. Although promoted as a way of mainstreaming the initiative, it provoked concern on various counts, including an unease that the much-heralded family support emphasis would be replaced by a stress on childcare for work, with Norman Glass, the so-called ‘architect of Sure Start’, famously voicing his own fears that the programme would become a ‘New Deal for Toddlers’ (Glass, Reference Glass2005).
Policy understandings of parental agency
The increased focus within Sure Start discourses on the employability and educability of parents also tapped into broader New Labour assumptions about the agency of welfare users, part of a longer-term shift away from a focus on structural change and towards the individual (Alcock, Reference Alcock2004). In addition, as part of New Labour's particular interest in parenting and the family as moral activity, a new focus on parenting as a way of being a ‘good citizen’ has been identified, with Government defining what this entailed and how it could be achieved (Gerwitz, Reference Gerwitz2001; Gillies, Reference Gillies2005).
Throughout New Labour rhetoric and policy discourse of this period, reference was made to parents as ‘naturally’ well-intentioned and aspirational for themselves and their children, and to a correspondingly ‘natural’ and shared government support for this. As Gillies noted:
The government constructs the worthy citizen as a self-determining, agentic individual who accepts their obligation to act morally. For parents this entails ethical self-management within the moral parameters of normative definitions of ‘successful parenting’. Reasonable, rational, moral citizens, by New Labour definition, seek to do the best for their children, and according to policy doctrine, government should play an active role in guiding and supporting them to do so. (Gillies, Reference Gillies2005: 76)
Within policy documents and also in Ministerial speeches, Sure Start itself was often described as bringing services together in order to meet the natural and legitimate aspirations of parents more effectively. In the context of Sure Start policy targeting areas of deprivation, ‘aspiration’, a word increasingly used in New Labour discourses, ostensibly signified a ‘natural’ desire to improve personal and family circumstances and potential.
Every family should get access to a range of services that will deliver better outcomes for both children and parents, meeting their needs and stretching their aspirations. (DfES, 2003a: 4)
Outcomes and options for children, families and their communities will be enhanced by increasing the availability of high quality integrated childcare and early learning, health services and family support services. We want to see services brought together at neighbourhood level to support parents/carers both in their parenting and in their aspirations towards employment. (DfES, 2005: 2)
It should be stressed that the discourse of policy is not synonymous with the policy itself. Discourse in policy – embodied in objectives, targets and the language that is used, including in political rhetoric – constructs the problem and signifies the behaviour that will rectify it (see Clarke, Reference Clarke2006, on the discourse of Sure Start objectives). In Sure Start, by comparison to other policy fields, the relationship of discourse and policy implementation might be characterised as ‘light handed’, with the programme arguably on the ‘benign’ end of family policy. There was no enforcement of parents to register with the programme, and while, in the period of the study, local programmes were subject to annual monitoring of targets and to regular risk assessments by regional Government Offices, they had a relatively high degree of autonomy in how they delivered their services.
Findings and discussion
Understanding need in Brambleton; contrasting ‘early’ and ‘late’ Sure Start
Census data indicated that Brambleton was broadly divided between white and Asian residents of Pakistani origin (Office for National Statistics, 2001).Footnote 1 A major theme within the study, the ‘racialisation’ of the area, was exemplified by a widespread characterisation of Brambleton as ‘Asian’.
In a reflection of this, ‘need’ for a Sure Start programme in the area was primarily associated with workers with Pakistani-origin mothers. While recognising major differences within the Pakistani group, depictions of many women in this community as highly circumscribed by expectations – variously attributed to religious or cultural factors – dominated accounts, and were used to explain a ‘constrained agency’ with significant implications for the focus of services. This did not mean that Asian mothers were viewed as lacking in agency; agency was seen as context-bound, as shaped by and, in turn, shaping a culture in flux.Footnote 2
In the worker narratives, the constrained agency described was often attributed to the restricted roles of many women, particularly those living in extended families. While life in the extended family was understood to be supportive in many ways, it was also seen by some parents and staff to reinforce a cultural control of women, often with immense impact upon the choices they could make. Powerful and emotive descriptions about the demands upon women were so commonly used in discussion that the constraints upon female autonomy often seemed to become the symbolic rationale for the programme itself. The description about extended family life below from ZainabFootnote 3 who was both a Sure Start worker and a local parent, taps into a narrative widely used by staff and parents who speak of some Asian women as if they are ‘trapped in the house’. In her account, the obligation to others presents an absolute barrier to using most of the Sure Start, or indeed any other, services.
Zainab You still have a lot that live with extended families. [They have difficulties] accessing Sure Start activities because their workload at home is too much, too demanding for them to take those couple of hours out . . . As far as mothers-in-laws are concerned, well, there's a daughter-in-law in the house, that's what she's there for. She did her stint and now it's your turn. It's true believe me (laughs) . . . And you've got these women, start visiting 9.00, half-past nine in the morning. Because they're up, they've got their daughter-in-laws up to get their work done . . . And then you'd have the ‘your daughter-in-law's still in bed, how can you allow that? Well, that's it, you're asking for trouble with these girls of yours’. And you know, sometimes, I'd come in on it and I'd hear it and I'd think ‘what the hell has it got to do with you?’
Often the extended family was seen to represent the main or indeed only sphere of adult female activity. In some cases, it was seen to preclude the need for outside support, with the extent of interconnectedness (in particular, the level of co-sanguinous marriage) reinforcing this. The extracts below are from Helen, the Sure Start Programme Manager, and Leela, a local parent. As the second extract below highlights, cultural mores about gender mixing and concerns about ‘officialdom’ also contributed to a difficulty for some women in accessing support from outside of the family.
Helen I don't think they [the Government] understand how strong family – life is the wrong word – the family ethos is in South Asian communities is, because it's incredibly strong, too strong sometimes. So much so, that in a place like this, you are actually living with your immediate family, then you've got your Grandma, your second cousin, your third cousin . . . And I do wonder whether the government understands about the extended family, how big it can be. And how strong that can be, for good or bad.
Leela I think a lot of people, they've got a lot of issues haven't they, like some of these more cultural women, they're a bit more timid to go out, aren't they? If they think there's going to be men around, or if they don't know what to expect. And as soon as you start mentioning health visitor or home visitor, some start panicking don't they, thinking ‘oh god, it's a health visitor’ and it sort of worries them and they sort of try and keep their distance. But because they've got their mums and you know, grandmas to help them, haven't they, they don't really go out and make use of facilities really.
In early interviews, staff answering a question about the initial rationale for the Brambleton programme identified the need in the Pakistani community for support to improve dental health, address the risks of Coronary Heart Disease, diabetes and more generally nutritional needs, and noted also a ‘hunger’ for education in this group. In addition, staff put particular emphasis on expanding existing childcare provision and on providing opportunities for mothers to mix. A significant sub-set within the Pakistani-origin community, women who had arrived as adults to marry British-born husbands, were often identified as those with the greatest needs. In accounts from research participants, these women were seen to have very low levels of confidence, and, initially at least, few expectations about realisation of personal desires or interests.
It was the understanding of the constraints faced by many women that shaped the ethos and focus of the Brambleton Sure Start programme, also suggesting the level at which services were to be provided and the approach to be taken, which involved both accepting and ‘quietly’ challenging the cultural norms that some women lived by. The second quotation below is from Anna, a Sure Start home visitor:
Helen I think we really are trying to accept where people are coming from, and work with that . . . what we're doing partly is challenging the perception of Islamic culture in this community through the back door, in other words, about women not being allowed out, coming to things, and for it to be acceptable to attend and take part in some of the activities.
Anna It's not about taking them off their families or giving them careers, we have to be sensitive about what their day entails.
The centrality of home visiting in this programme was seen to be a key element of the level at which the programme needed to be pitched. This was often the only service a mother might be able to access; for others, their lack of confidence meant that they would need one-to-one support on their own territory before being able to go out to groups and other activities. Here Helen, identifying that cultural and religious norms define a particular relationship between women and the home, pits the ‘superiority’ of local understandings against assumptions of policy discourses.
Helen [Home visiting] could well continue [when the Children's Centres come onstream], but the focus would be on the Children's Centre rather than the home and there is that kind of assumption that is okay for people to do that. You know, actually it's not okay for some people. They have to have the home visit . . . the home is where the family will live and grow up and the woman's place is to nurture that . . . and we have some very devoutly Islamic people here, and they believe that, and it's their absolute right, and we can't invade on that to say ‘you will come to this, because you live in Brambleton’.
As these extracts suggest, a narrative about the appropriateness of ‘early Sure Start’, in which programme staff were able to work with ‘where people are coming from’, was contrasted with perceptions about ‘later Sure Start’, epitomised by the new emphasis on childcare for work and the recently announced Children's Centres initiative. Although those with a management or strategic role were most likely to comment on the implications of policy, a wider disquiet that impending developments had begun to jeopardise the Sure Start ethos was also evident in other interviews. These quotations are from Programme Manager, Helen, and Sure Start Health Visitor, Sarah.
Helen . . . what the early Sure Start was trying to do, all these – parental activities, the gentle ones, the courses, the support groups, the home visiting, health visiting, midwives, play groups, all that kind of stuff. But the late stuff, I don't see it at all. I think the Government's making huge assumptions. You've just had a baby, or even before you've had a baby, about your mental health, about your confidence, in terms of your relationship with your partner and their family, especially if you've come into this country. I thought ‘whoah, the bubble's burst here’, you know, how harsh could this seem? This pressure to get parents to work or into that way of thinking – when there is so much else they've got to deal with.
Sarah Nationally, I think the stuff that's coming out is going more along the education for employment and childcare. . . . There are a lot of women in this area who don't want to go into employment. It's not the norm really, and, yes, some of them might want to, but there are a lot who won't . . . You know, there are health issues within the community and social issues and a lot of educational work to be done, so it's about not losing sight of that. And Helen, she's battling with the national policies to maintain that.
Advantages of the Children's Centre model were acknowledged, not least that its absorption into local authority control would represent the mainstreaming of Sure Start that professionals had so eagerly sought. However, as suggested above, concerns about the forthcoming policy developments usually centred on the relevance of the anticipated new model for Brambleton. These accounts suggested a gap between the New Labour discourse of agency – in which, with specific support, parents would be able to actively engage with interventions – and a professional conceptualisation of local mothers, which foregrounded the constraints they faced, and suggested that long-term input was necessary for the kind of engagement that policy assumed. Amanda was a childcare manager.
Amanda We're starting from a very low baseline, we've come an awful long way in four and a half years, but not as fast as the Government is driving us.
A ‘disputed’ narrative: the uses of childcare
A particular area of dispute about the direction of Sure Start policy concerned the role of childcare in the lives of Brambleton mothers. In this study, narratives from workers, about why childcare is used, function as part of a counter discourse, which is based on understandings of the constrained agency of this group of mothers. This identifies flawed assumptions inherent in Government discourses and the reasons why policy based upon them is unlikely to produce its intended outcomes.
The new Sure Start objective introduced in 2003 required local programmes to contribute to the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) goals, with a Public Service Agreement (PSA) of reducing workless and low-income households by 12% through Service Delivery Agreement (SDA) targets of linking into Job Centre Plus and providing additional childcare. In Brambleton, this was to be done through Sure Start's childcare provider, Brambleton Childcare Project, which had secured Neighbourhood Nursery Initiative (NNI) funding for daycare places.Footnote 4 In both of the extracts below, a flaw in the central premise of these assumptions, that the provision of daycare itself would facilitate parental employment, is highlighted. Thus, while able to deliver on the SDA targets, it was felt that Brambleton Sure Start would nonetheless fail to meet the PSA goals of reducing workless households, highlighting the contradictions within the objective as a whole.
Helen In terms of the national objectives, if the question was ‘are Brambleton Sure Start meeting those?’ we could happily say ‘yes, we are’, because we actually do provide an awful lot of childcare. My issue, I suppose, is that the assumption that, by offering this, and by offering education, training opportunities, parents will want to take them up and go on to work and I don't want to sound derogatory, but I don't necessarily witness that.
Accounts of staff and mothers about the purposes of childcare contest New Labour discourses, characterised in part as enabling ‘poor mothers’ to work and avoid poverty (Penn and Randall, Reference Penn and Randall2005, and see Glass, Reference Glass2005, about Sure Start specifically in this context). They add to extensive evidence about the difficulties faced by many poorer mothers (lone parents for example) in making decisions about employment and childcare, especially those who are limited to low-paid or insecure opportunities (Duncan et al., Reference Duncan, Edwards, Reynolds and Alldred2004; Millar and Ridge, Reference Millar and Ridge2009). They also reflect findings from research about the different ‘rationalities’ that are used when making such decisions (Duncan et al., Reference Duncan, Edwards, Reynolds and Alldred2004).
A major theme in both worker and parent accounts is the role of childcare in Brambleton as enabling at some level the ‘escape’ of the women from their constraints. Here Pete, a local authority employee and Chair of the Sure Start Programme Management Board, points to the profoundly powerful impact of childcare in facilitating, sometimes for the first time, a ‘socialised’ existence for women and for their children.
Pete [The interest in childcare] may be to do with all the naturalisation stuff and the demand for English literacy programmes, but, even so, that kind of represents a major increase of education provision, the experience of having your kid in daycare, meeting with other kids and being in socialised environments, talking to nursery staff. All that kind of stuff is suddenly becoming part of the lives of a number of women that, certainly four years ago, wouldn't have enjoyed that.
Several professional accounts emphasised the important non-vocational benefits of training and education for which childcare was provided. Below, Janine, a childcare worker, identified tangible social benefits to individuals and their families of women finding ‘something that they really enjoy doing’; there is, in this narrative, a strong signal of support for women to access courses and use childcare, whatever their motives are.
Janine I think there's a big focus on getting people to do vocational stuff, but, in actual fact, it's nice for people to go out there and find something that they really enjoy doing, which makes them a better person, which then, when they go back to their families, makes them able to deal with situations at home better.
In some accounts, and presenting a ‘subversive’ challenge to the official discourse, the assumed relationship between childcare and its use to facilitate particular outcomes, such as employment, was reversed. In the extract below, discussing the decision of the city College to fund childcare for those attending classes, childcare manager Claire likewise inverts Government assumptions in suggesting that the offer of childcare leads to interest in course attendance rather than the reverse.
Claire And there is something around that they recruit to their course because they've got the childcare, and not the other way round. People aren't coming on the courses and then, incidentally getting the childcare. They're coming for the childcare ‘oh well, to get childcare, let's go on this course’. So you know, it recruits for them as well. [It's part of] the need to get some time away, there's nowhere here to be sociable, you know, you can't sort of, you know, go in the pub and meet your friends.
The accounts suggest a range of reasons for the use of childcare as well as clear professional support for childcare use that is not daycare for the purpose of work, or the provision of sessions for employment-related training. They form part of a wider narrative about the needs of this particular group and their involvement in services and activities outside the home as beneficial in their own right. They also contribute to conceptions of the way in which women engage actively with policy in exercising a self-interested agency, albeit that this self-interest is seen by professionals as fundamentally shaped by constraint.
Conclusion
New Labour's Third Way politics have frequently been seen to exemplify aspects of a ‘social investment’ state. Such an approach is seen to include certain key elements, notably the funding of services for children, viewed as ‘emblems of the future’ and an emphasis on the development of human capital, particularly through initiatives to encourage educability and employability (Lister, Reference Lister2003).
This paper began by identifying the increasing influence of a social investment perspective on the direction of Sure Start policy, in particular through a shift from a focus on children to an emphasis on the employability of parents. It then went on to contrast worker concerns about the relevance of this shift with their understandings of the support needs of their primary target group, local mothers of Pakistani-origin. While the discourse of ‘early’ Sure Start was seen to reflect the needs of Brambleton parents, actual and impending policy changes suggested that the new model would have less relevance. The unease expressed was based on an understanding of the agency of many mothers in the area, not as narrowly ‘rational’ and ‘aspirational’ as expressed within policy discourses, but often as highly constrained by their roles and concrete obligations within the family. A focus particularly on the role of childcare in Sure Start discourse and its uses on the ground further highlighted the tensions between national and local understandings of parental agency and the contradictions within targets.
These findings support other claims, such as those of Craig et al. (Reference Craig, Adamson, Ali, Ali, Atkins, Dadze-Arthur, Elliott, McNamee and Murtuja2007), that although ethnicity was an important factor within Sure Start, structural differences between groups, and the relationship of these with poverty, were not addressed adequately within the national programme, a suggestion that has been made elsewhere about policy with a social investment dimension (Lister, Reference Lister2006).
Social investment notions continue to be very important within New Labour policy and childcare for work remains a prominent focus within Sure Start Children Centres. This research contests the tendency within such policy to fail to give adequate recognition to differences between families. It also reinforces the need to recognise that families and parenting itself reflect a range of different structural contexts, and that this will impact upon the agency that welfare users can exercise and how parents will engage with policy interventions.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Professor John Flint for his comments.
