The government risks missing its target of ensuring that 75 per cent of children are “school-ready” by 2028 unless it commits to overhauling the “precarious” funding system for children’s centres and Family Hubs, a think tank warns.
A report from the Centre for Young Lives reveals that almost half of local authorities in England (49 per cent) expect cuts to their children’s centre and Family Hub budgets between 2023-24 and 2024-25.
The report, published today, says this funding situation is “putting more pressure on our public services, particularly our schools and teachers”. “It is not sustainable,” the report warns.
The Centre for Young Lives says reduced budgets for children’s centres and Family Hubs are “putting the government’s good-level-of-development-on-starting-school target at risk and, with it, [Labour’s] ‘Opportunity Mission’”.
Children not school-ready
In December prime minister Sir Keir Starmer announced a target of 75 per cent of five-year-olds reaching a good level of development in the Early Years Foundation Stage assessment by 2028 as part of the government’s Opportunity Mission.
This is equivalent to between 40,000 and 45,000 additional pupils reaching that level.
The Centre for Young Lives warns that more than half of children who were deemed not school-ready performed below expected in their assessment. And only 6 per cent of children who performed below expected were deemed school-ready.
It adds that children deemed not school-ready are nearly two-and-a-half times more likely to be persistently absent from school.
Jo Green, co-founder of the Centre for Young Lives, said: “Too often schools are left to pick up the pieces of the serious challenges facing many children and families due to a lack of early intervention services.
“Boosting early family support would allow teachers and schools to spend more time on teaching and less time and resource on having to respond to problems like children starting school behind in their expected levels of development.”
Data obtained through freedom of information requests, covering 121 local authorities across the country, shows that the average spend per Family Hub is now £275,000, a little over half what was spent per hub under the old Sure Start programme introduced by Tony Blair’s Labour government.
The report notes that the number of centres has also decreased, to 2,100, and the variety and depth of services offered has been cut.
The current funding model for the hubs is a blend of non-ringfenced local authority money, funds pooled from local budgets in some areas and some additional investment from central government, including the Family Hubs and Start for Life programme.
Plea for more funding
The Centre for Young Lives report calls for the Department for Education and the Department of Health and Social Care to create a ringfenced grant for local authorities to fill gaps and “secure the future of existing family support”.
The report argues that this investment should be scaled up in phases with the aim of reaching 2 million children in its ninth year.
The estimated cost of the first phase - in which an initial 200,000 and then 500,000 children would benefit - is £1.2 billion. The second phase over a five-year period would see investment of £2.26 billion.
The reports warns that a major concern is that cuts further undermine the school-readiness of pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds.
Baroness Anne Longfield, executive chair of the Centre for Young Lives and a former national children’s commissioner, said: “It has been more than a quarter of a century since the first Sure Start centre opened and many of the challenges children and families face today are even greater than they were in the years leading up to that landmark programme. Since 2010 early help and family support programmes have been hollowed out.”
The report cites recent studies by the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) on the short- and medium-term impact of Sure Start. These found that children who lived within a close distance of a Sure Start centre during the first five years of their life performed 0.8 grades better in their GCSEs, with the benefits more pronounced for children from ethnic minorities and those from more disadvantaged backgrounds.
Another IFS study, also cited by the Centre for Young Lives, found that joined-up family support from Sure Start had considerable benefits for cutting youth crime, while access to Sure Start was also shown to have a positive impact on child health, preventing more than 13,150 hospitalisations each year for children aged 11 to 15.
A Department for Education spokesperson said the government will get thousands more children school-ready by aged 5.
They added: “We have already started that work: extending early language support and staff training, delivering thousands of places in new school-based nurseries, and rolling out 30 hours government funded childcare from September.
“We’re also ensuring thousands more families will have the support of a specialist worker who can make sure they receive all the help they need from parenting to mental health or addiction support, by doubling council funding for early intervention from this year.”
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