Battle lines are being drawn up across the country as parents and early years practitioners campaign to protect local children's centres from proposals to axe their funding and services.
Many of the country's 3,600 Sure Start children's centres, which were a major driver in New Labour's flagship policy to eradicate child poverty and reduce inequality, are facing uncertain futures.
Across the country, local authorities are taking different approaches to the funding crisis.
Some are introducing plans to shed staff, or cut services, merge or even shut children's centres in order to meet the public spending cuts imposed by the Chancellor, George Osborne.
Westminster City Council has pledged to keep all 12 of its children's centres open, but with a radical re-shaping of the service. It is reorganising the provision into three clusters, with three lead or hub centres and nine smaller satellites. Centres are still waiting to hear officially whether they have been selected to be the hub centre in their particular locality.
The council is looking to shave 17 per cent from its children's centres budget for 2011-12, or just over £700,000, by reducing management and back office costs in order to protect frontline services. Nearly 25 per cent of the 2010-11 budget of just over £4m was allocated to management costs, and this will shrink to just over 11 per cent in the 2011-12 budget of just over pounds .25m.
In future, instead of each centre being led by a manager, there will be a locality manager for each geographical area: North West, North East and South Westminster. The plan is being introduced over a 12-month transitional period and it is envisaged that the new regime will be fully in place from next April.
It is expected that services might be put out to tender next spring and new three-year contracts and service level agreements adopted.
RADICAL RE-SHAPING
Westminster City Council consulted parents and providers on its plans and has published its response to their representations. It is clear there is strong opposition to the proposals on a number of grounds - not least that the service could lose touch with the communities it serves.
Being recognised as a part of the local community has been the hallmark of Sure Start, with practitioners working to build the strong relationships and partnerships in communities necessary to enable them to engage effectively with vulnerable and hard-to-reach families.
Parents raised concerns that the three locality managers would not be able to deliver fair and equitable services across the smaller satellite centres, as they would not know the local communities as well as the current centres and staff do. Parents would prefer to keep the centres local, with staffing that reflects the community.
Teachers attached to children's centres in Westminster have already been made redundant and tight staffing levels are being set for the future (see box). Despite protests from parents, the council is set on re-shaping its children's centres provision rather than rationalising it and making some cost savings by closing or merging centres located close to one another.
Jo White, head of the Portman Early Childhood Centre, lead setting for the Church Street Children's Centre, says, 'The difficulty is, these changes are completely driven by money and they are trying to wrap it all up in the idea that there will be no reduction in the quality of service.
'There is this great mantra: We will not close any children's centres. The problem is, the door might be open, but what you find when you walk in may or may not be of high enough quality to provide effective early intervention and prevention work.'
Megan Pacey, chief executive of Early Education, says the Westminster scenario is not unique. 'It is a similar story across the country. While children's centres might not actually be closing, there are significant cuts in funding which are clearly having an impact on the services available within them.'
AIMING TO GIVE VALUE
Ms White says full budget details for the coming year are not yet clear. The Portman Centre has already suffered funding cuts of £190,000 from the council's social service budget and five staff have been made redundant - mainly experienced early years educators who were family workers.
The centre has a Bengali outreach worker and aside from its nursery, which was rated Outstanding by Ofsted, it offers a respite creche for parents who need childcare for a few hours during the week. However, the creche budget for the year has been cut to £10,000 for the whole of the North East Westminster locality.
Ms White says, 'I am not blaming anybody. I think it is an invidious position to put anybody in. The people making the decisions are thinking from political and economic viewpoints, when what we should have been saying is, "OK, what works? What is absolutely non-negotiable?"
'Instead, what we are trying to do is keep things going with half the staff and much less money. My worry is that it is not going to be cost-effective. If we are not careful we will end up just as event organisers and not doing the important early intervention work which makes such a difference to children's lives.
'It comes down to value for money, but we need to be careful about what that means. You might be spending less but that does not necessarily make it value for money. We are not going to have that consistency and continuity of staff to enable us to build relationships.
'We are not sure how the locality managers are going to work. We now have three children's centre managers instead of 12. It seems unlikely that anything like the services that have been delivered will be preserved.'
The Portman Centre was part of the first wave of children's centres and over the past 11 years has built up a full integrated team which has cemented strong relationships locally.
'The workforce is highly motivated and we are all very committed to the Sure Start children's centre model. I think we will have to share our staff around all the other children's centres.'
It is envisaged that hub centres will have core teams of staff and what is needed, says Ms White, are 'people who are children's centre staff. Someone may have a speciality such as speech and language therapy or social work, but they need to see themselves as part of the team that works holistically with the families. We have to make this work. It is a moral imperative.'
The charts below show an analysis of the proposed budget changes to the children's centre budget issued by Westminster City Council in its consultation paper
City of Westminster Children's Centre staffing levels
Hub centres
- - Locality children's centre manager
- - 1.5 whole-time equivalent early years practitioner
- - One full-time equivalent assistant/administrator
- - One full-time equivalent worker providing flexible, targeted support - for example, a community language specialist
Smaller satellite centres
- - 1.5 whole-time equivalent early years practitioners
- - One full-time equivalent assistant/administrator
There will be a number of specialist staff, employed by third party contractors, to deliver services as
- - Outreach
- - Portage - Early years advice and teaching
- - Speech and language therapy
- - Social work - Childcare development
- - Information outreach
- - Housing and benefits advice
- - Fathers' support
- - Parenting support
- - Domestic violence support
Next month: Birmingham in the spotlight