The idea and role of a CC compared to an SSLP

Government spokespersons and documents represented the shift to CCs as something that built on Sure Start. While interviewees were broadly agreed that both the underpinning principles and broad goal of the two programmes – to do the best for children – were similar, one of the local authority officers commented that ‘children's centres were packaged as Sure Start grown up [our italics]’. In addition, as another local authority officer observed, people's jobs had often ‘evolved with the Government's agenda’ in ways that were not always easy either to recall or explain to an interviewer. Nevertheless, interviewees revealed different approaches to CC provision.

SSLPs were described by one manager as ‘tighter’ because they were more often located in one place (with seconded staff: for example, health visitors) than are the CCs. In urban areas, CCs often conform to a ‘hub and spoke’ model, with a ‘lead setting’ identified by the local authority and other sites delivering other parts of the core offer, particularly childcare and education. As a manager put it: ‘to me a children's centre is not a building . . . it's an umbrella, isn't it?’. However, as many respondents acknowledged, this made it ‘confusing’, ‘misleading’ or even ‘meaningless’ for parents, who tended to think of a children's centre as a building, when in fact it is a service. But the idea of a centre as a ‘one stop shop’ for people with children under five is difficult to sustain when in practice services are delivered in several different places. Front-line staff tended to talk more about the changes that had taken place than did managers, largely because CCs had affected their ways of working. In fact, there was little evidence as to a strongly focused perception of a children's centre; rather, views differed according to the particular institutional history of the centre and the approach taken by the staff, particularly the managers, which was in turn influenced by their different disciplinary backgrounds.

The longer history of development of both SSLPs and CCs is crucial for understanding the approach to centres locally. For example, four of the former SSLPs visited in two of the authorities had been based in maintained nursery schools that then became ‘lead settings’ for CCs. Three of the managers were nursery school heads, and were convinced that in essence the nurseries had continued to work as they always had – pre- and post-Sure Start – with one stressing that the nursery had always also included services to support parents. One of these managers felt strongly that the extra staff brought in by the development of the SSLP had worked in something of a ‘parallel universe’, as ‘a team operating alongside the nurseries’, focusing on securing community representation and bringing family support services together. Because of their background in early years education, these managers were convinced of the overwhelming importance of educational achievements for children – something that the CCs agenda also brought to the fore – and thus felt that in essence ‘the nursery is the children's centre and the children's centre is the nursery’. The professional background of these heads and managers of CCs was crucial in forming their ideas about SSLPs and centres.

CCs serving the most disadvantaged areas were required to provide the core offer and to focus more strongly on educational outcomes for children and on increasing the employability of parents, shifts that were clearly recognised by respondents with experience of both programmes. However, paradoxically, it was not uncommon to find interviewees with no previous experience of Sure Start stressing the importance of parents’ views about the services that should be provided and emphasising the importance of other parts of the core offer. Thus, a manager of a recently established children's centre run by a voluntary organisation replied to a question on the role of the centre thus: ‘I like to refer to this as a family centre. We have to call it a children's centre, but . . . that is more government policy I would say. The role of this particular centre as I see it is to support local families.’ While this manager had no knowledge of Sure Start, his priorities were more in keeping with the idea of an SSLP than of a children's centre. Indeed, a recent report on outreach work commented on the basis of work in 55 centres that ‘although called CCs, in reality much, if not most, of their work is with parents who are adults’ (Capacity, 2009: 4).

CCs should be seen as a service rather than a building. However, continuities in terms of both the institutional histories of the centres and the approaches taken by managers in particular seem to have been important factors accounting for different approaches to delivering the core service offer.

Changes in the core offer: issues of funding, consistency, local responsiveness and balance

Respondents were agreed that the bulk of funding for CCs is absorbed by labour costs and that there was limited room for the provision of services that might be requested by parents after core services had been provided. The funding per child for SSLPs was in any case much more generous. One local authority officer referred to this rather disparagingly as having provided money for services such as ‘baby yoga’ requested by middle-class mothers; a CC manager said that ‘I've known [SSLP] managers who've bought ponies with Sure Start money’; while a voluntary sector provider in another authority referred to the ‘bribe money’ that had been available in SSLPs to fund trips to the seaside or leisure centre passes and thus to entice disadvantaged families into the SSLP. Certainly, SSLPs had enough money to respond to a wide variety of requests from parents and to particular local needs; all respondents who had worked in them considered that they had been well funded and many expressed the view that it could not be expected that such a level of funding would be sustained. In all the CCs visited for this study, there was a small amount of discretionary money – usually about £5,000 per year – to spend on additional services, but one manager said that her centre was unable to do even a quarter of the work with the money allocated to CCs that they had done as an SSLP (this centre was run by a voluntary organisation as a social enterprise and the manager thus was able to rely on other streams of funding). Several interviewees anticipated that future cuts in public sector expenditure would result in more charging and a more basic level of service.

Given the tighter service specification for CC, it is reasonable to expect that centres would offer a more consistent service than had SSLPs. One local authority officer commented that ‘[i]f you've got a universal service to offer, you can have it locally tailored to local need, but you need some consistency in the way it runs because of money and accountability’. But a second officer in the same authority was rather more cautious about imposing a more standard core offer across CCs:

These comments about the differences in the nature of services provided by SSLPs and CCs wrapped up two issues: the extent to which the CC core offer resulted in greater consistency and the extent to which CC services were less responsive to local need.

The extent to which services became more consistent or standardised is difficult to assess. Some primary school heads who had only become involved in CCs since 2006 felt that services were still ‘bitty’ in the words of two interviewees, and wanted much more consistency. But an outreach worker, who had worked in the same place when it had been an SSLP commented regretfully: ‘so it's a case of well, we've decided that the parenting programme we [the local authority] will offer is this, or the exercise programme we will offer is that and you will have to go on this training and then you have to roll it out’. Local authorities were advised, for example, to choose from ‘evidence-based’ parenting programmes (usually American and in one case Australian), one of the criticisms of SSLPs having been that they focused too much on responding to the needs expressed by local parents rather than delivering evidence-based programmes, which many felt necessary in order to achieve better outcomes for children (e.g. Rutter, Reference Rutter, Belsky, Barnes and Melhuish2007). Local authorities commissioned many services for all CCs in their authority, whereas SSLPs had done their own commissioning. This should have resulted in a more recognisably similar profile for CCs, at least within a particular authority. But as the last section showed, the history of each centre, together with the predilections of the manager, were sufficiently powerful to make even geographically adjacent centres rather different.

Nor was the nature of services necessarily more standardised in terms of delivery or quality. For example, while CCs were obliged to employ outreach workers, there was no one model for outreach work, in terms of staff qualifications or the numbers of visits to families that were expected, despite this work having been identified as much more important in the shift to CCs. Nor was there any real consistency in terms of the quality of childcare and education provision, despite the fact that from September 2008 providers registered with Ofsted have been obliged to work to the statutory framework for the early years foundation stage, which sets common standards for the development, care and education of children aged 0–5. Many managers of CCs reported being linked to private, voluntary sector and independent childcare and education providers over whose work they had no control.

Interviewees tended to agree that most of the elements of the core offer CCs were obliged to provide had been present in SSLPs, but that the balance had changed, with much more emphasis on childcare and education, on outreach work in order to make contact with the most disadvantaged families, and on the employability of parents, with the additional requirement that a worker from Jobcentre Plus (an executive agency of the Department of Work and Pensions, which provides services to support people of working age from ‘welfare into work’) be made available to work in CCs. However, one manager took the long view of changes in the balance of the service offer, commenting that while Sure Start had focused on young and vulnerable parents, now the focus was more on the speech and language development of children: ‘The wheel turns and things go round . . . work that's happened in the past, fallen out of trend, [has] come back into play.’ He felt that some of the work he had been doing prior to becoming an SSLP was now back in favour. Nevertheless, outreach workers who had experienced the Sure Start approach were unhappy about the greater emphasis on early years education, which they felt had in some CCs (especially in the newly founded ones attached to primary schools) put an end to ‘fun days’ with entertainers, balloons and face-painting, because the educational aim was unclear. Yet, in the view of the outreach workers interviewed (see also DfES, 2007), but not some of the managers or the local authority officers, such activities served to draw parents into the centre.

In several CCs that had been SSLPs, there were differing degrees of resistance to the shift in the balance of the core offer. One manager, who was also a nursery school head, was very much in favour of the new emphasis on early years education, but not on childcare as a means to increasing employability: ‘I think it's quite difficult for people in early child education and care and health to take on . . . [P]eople [in SSLPs] felt passionately that it should not be about pushing parents into low paid jobs.’ Thus, while her view of childcare and education provision was positive, she was nevertheless suspicious of linking childcare to employability rather than solely to child outcomes, fearing that an offer of both mediocre childcare and mediocre jobs would result.

A second manager reported that daycare and education provision had not been developed because of lack of local demand. She was in the process of making a case to the local authority that there was a ‘sufficiency’Footnote ³ of provision in their area, which had a large proportion of Asian families with relatively few working mothers, and that additional provision of childcare and education by the centre, which was run by a voluntary organisation, might endanger the businesses of other independent sector providers. This interviewee ‘struggled’ with the shift in the service offer to a greater emphasis on childcare linked to employability, which was additionally at odds with local perceptions about the proper role of mothers:

A third manager in the same authority reported that he had been preceded by a Muslim manager, who had not developed daycare because of the preferences of parents for homecare in his area, but who had set up good partnerships to ensure the delivery of family services to support parenting. Finally, a voluntary sector manager of a CC and former SSLP agreed that often it was more important for someone to work with the parent to sort out the child's behaviour – ‘if you've got a parent that's having an issue with behaviour management, putting the child in a nursery is not going to tackle that’ – adding that support for the parent to work with the child should be judged the most important task for the centre in such cases.

CCs were not funded as well as SSLPs, and their money was largely absorbed by meeting the core offer. But, the imposition of a core offer did not result in greater consistency or in higher quality services. Nevertheless, change in the service prescriptions did result in a change in the balance of services above all. The emphasis on children's cognitive achievements and on parents’ employability shifted away from the focus of the SSLPs on parent and child services, and on responding to parent demand. One interviewee remarked that SSLPs had been about ‘working with families for the good of the family, rather than working with families for the good of the child and for that child achieving educational outcomes’, which he felt was the case in CCs. A manager of a former SSLP commented that SSLPs had paid more attention to parents qua parents, organising trips out, parent groups and benefits advice, services that had not usually been ‘rolled over’ into CCs.

A universal service: mainstreaming and partnership

All interviewees welcomed the ending of the ‘post-code lottery’ whereby SSLPs had been permitted to serve only a particular geographical area, but making CC provision a universal service under the control of local authorities brought new challenges. SSLPs had often seconded staff from the provider and based them in the SSLP. Usually, SSLPs housed a number of staff from different disciplines on their sites. CCs are unable to operate like this. It was intended by central government that they would become ‘permanent, mainstream community services’ (DfES, 2006: 2) and as such would rely on working with other mainstream services in partnership to deliver a fully integrated service. It is often the case that relatively few CC staff work out of the lead setting; in fact, no centre visited for this project had the full complement of staff recommended in the official guidance. Indeed, the vast majority of the managers interviewed for this study were only appointed late in 2008, even though the National Evaluation of Sure Start (Tunstill et al., Reference Tunstill, Allnock, Akhurst and Garbers2005b) and the official guidance on practice for CCs (DfES, 2005) had drawn attention to the importance of leadership. A local authority officer talked energetically and optimistically about mainstreaming in terms of ‘reshaping the workforce’:

This interviewee felt that there was an upside to having less money than had been available to SSLPs, because:

A CC manager in the same authority also interpreted the changes in the ways of working that had taken place during the 2000s positively:

But neither the clarity nor the optimism of these ways of thinking about the changes in ways of working was widely shared, either in this particular local authority or in the others. Many interviewees saw mainstreaming and the need to rely on partnership working as having been necessitated by the reduction in the budgets of CCs. One voluntary sector provider commented that mainstreaming ‘is kind of like “dream on” really, you know’. Most managers saw that operating a CC required partnership working, which had not necessarily been the case in an SSLP. Several also stressed the extent to which this in turn required ‘goodwill’ because many service providers had to contribute the time needed to attend meetings or to deal with the paperwork that resulted from the more intensive local authority monitoring requirements that had not been properly costed. Nor were the partnership arrangements always reliable. In all three local authorities respondents mentioned problems working with health visitors, who were understaffed, and with Jobcentre Plus workers, who were not used to working outside their offices.Footnote ⁵

Nor was there consensus on whether SSLPs were advantaged or disadvantaged in adapting to the new ways of working. One manager was of the view that SSLPs started with ‘bigger teams’ and were better placed to begin work as CCs. However, another manager, who had not herself worked in an SSLP, felt that

The challenges of working across boundaries and across different sites in ‘hub and spoke’ CCs, together with the need to integrate staff with different lines of accountability as well as training and terms and conditions of employment, are much stronger for CCs. As one CC manager who had experienced work in a SSLP put it: ‘They did do integrated working, but within their own little building.’ Furthermore, a voluntary organisation provider said that the SSLP workforce had not really been integrated, despite often working on a single site, and that ‘silos’ had continued to exist, something reinforced by a nursery head and CC manager, who commented that new SSLP staff had worked ‘in parallel’ with nursery staff (see above).

The shift from an area-based service to a universal, mainstream service necessitated partnership working, something that was broadly accepted – unlike the revised prescriptions for services – but which proved hard to achieve.

Changes in governance: information, accountability and parent participation

The more top–down approach to the control of CCs might have been expected to result in greater uniformity in governance. However, no centre visited for this study conformed to any of the models of governance set out in the official guidance (DfES, 2007). In addition, the vast majority of respondents in all three research areas reported a lack of ‘interference’ by the local authority. The closer monitoring that was required by local authorities was attributed largely to central government policy.

The main change perceived by centre staff had more to do with the flow of information than the degree of control that was exercised; indeed, three managers in one authority complained about the lack of guidance from the local authority. Two interviewees in another authority were more positive about the advice they had received, but commented that the local authority was a lot less ‘transparent’ than the SSLP had been. These people felt that they no longer knew as much about ‘what is going on’ in terms of the shifts in the policy of central government and the decisions made by the local authority officers. An outreach worker said that she had been used to meeting the SSLP programme manager every four to six weeks and had heard about developments in Sure Start programmes locally and nationally. Now she hears nothing about future plans and has never met many of the local authority officers with whom she deals; she referred to the officer from whom she regularly sought reimbursement for the fruit provided at the parents’ forums as a ‘virtual man’. Yet managers and providers of services complained about the number of different kinds of meetings that they were now supposed to attend. A provider of services to an SSLP only had to attend one meeting at that site on a regular basis, but in the universal children's centre service, providers may be commissioned to provide a service across all or a large part of a local authority, and it is impossible for them to attend regular meetings in a large number of CCs.

In part, problems of information and feelings that there was a lack of strategic direction flowed from the late appointment of managers in CCs. Some former SSLP programme coordinators became CC managers, but many moved into the local authority hierarchy to oversee the development of the new universal service. Virtually all managers and many front-line workers referred to the difficulties they had in sorting out lines of accountability in the new governance structures. For example, in a former SSLP that was run by a voluntary organisation, the manager reported to the voluntary organisation but was employed by the local authority, which was described by a front-line outreach worker as ‘an interesting arrangement’. There were many similar examples. In the same authority, the head of a nursery school, which was the lead setting for a CC, said that she reported to the nursery's governing body but not to the CC, which she thought was ‘a very odd situation’. Several managers said that they would much prefer to have direct oversight of the people working in their centres, as the managers of SSLPs had had over their seconded staff. An outreach worker commented that ‘everybody is employed through somebody different’, an aspect of partnership working that she found ‘bitty’ and difficult.

Finally, the new forms of governance affected the role played by parents, which many had felt to be of primary importance to the ethos of SSLPs. While many CCs visited for this study continued to ‘consult’ parents about services, ideas about the importance of their participation and empowerment had faded. Official guidance had suggested that parents should occupy as many as one third of the places on SSLP partnership boards, but parental participation in CCs was confined mainly to ‘parents’ forums’, from which a parent representative might be persuaded to sit on one of the committees overseeing the work of the CCs. But as one manager commented: ‘I don't see how it [the CC] can be parent driven in the same way [as the SSLPs]. . .the stuff around children's language development is not negotiable.’ Bagley et al. (Reference Bagley, Ackerley and Rattray2004: 559) quoted an SSLP manager on the importance of meeting targets, but CCs have been driven much more by the core offer, national targets and local monitoring. Most interviewees stressed the importance of consulting parents (often via a survey) even if they were unable to respond to their desire for particular kinds of provision (which often had to do with leisure activities and would not help to achieve targets). As another manager in the same authority said, parents are asked to come in for a consultation and they are asked what they'd like, but the CC has to meet the core offer, ‘so we have to reach a happy medium between what the parents want and what we can provide’. As encouraged by the guidance from central government, parents still have a ‘voice’ and are consulted (DfES, 2003b, Annex 2), but participation as a means to empowerment and community development has largely dropped off the CC agenda (see also Mulgan, Reference Mulgan, Ali, Halkett and Sanders2008; Pemberton and Mason, Reference Pemberton and Mason2008). One manager reported that parents were considerably less involved in the CC, with the parents’ forum becoming a meeting for ‘moans’.

Thus the new forms of governance have given rise to difficulties regarding the dissemination of information and the establishment of clear lines of accountability. Above all, a more top–down approach to CCs has meant less emphasis on the importance of parental participation. One local authority officer, who had been involved in Sure Start, admitted that ‘sometimes I think, gosh, you know, where are the parents in this, whereas I think in Sure Start local programmes that was very evident’.