At what cost?

An assessment of the childrens centre programme based on visits to centres around the country points up what it may need to succeed. Simon Vevers reports
The clock is ticking. The Government has 14 months to reach its target of 2,500 childrens centres by 2008. By last September there were 1,000 centres, made up of around 500 Sure Start Local programmes, 420 neighbourhood nurseries and 70 early excellence centres a rapid acceleration of the programme from September 2005, when there were 350.

Childrens minister Beverley Hughes recently hailed the success of the childrens centre programme and pointed to the fact that it had exceeded its national target to reach 650,000 children in phase one, which was achieved by March 2006.

But a more detached, objective assessment is being made by the team conducting the national evaluation of the programmes effectiveness, and benefits may not be measurable for some years a point made forcibly in a National Audit Office (NAO) report released just before Christmas. The report, based on visits to 30 childrens centres in 27 local authorities and focus groups with parents, does provide important pointers to some of the gains to be celebrated and the weaknesses to be addressed.

The NAO visits took place in the last quarter of the 2005/06 financial year, which it acknowledges was a time of transition and substantial change for local authorities and childrens centres. It adds that many of the improvements they are seeking to make in childrens lives will show their main results only after a number of years.

Notwithstanding this caveat, the report reveals that a third of the centres visited had not agreed their 2006/07 budget or been allocated one by their local authority and could not provide a forecast for the financial year 2006/07. Four centres were forecasting a deficit.

The report says discussions with staff showed there was widespread concern about a range of financial and management challenges they considered centres will face in the future. Staff at a quarter of the centres said they needed more financial training.

However, the report adds, The concerns went beyond financial management capability and related mainly to viability of childcare provision, availability of trained staff to deliver the programme, future resourcing of centres through local authorities and plans to bring all centres on to a more even spending basis.

Cost effectiveness
More than half of local authorities consulted (56 per cent) were not monitoring the performance of centres and 52 per cent had not done any work to identify the cost or cost-effectiveness of services. Most centres recorded income and expenditure, staff and non-staff costs of different services, but did not record the cost of activities in sufficient detail to determine whether the services provided are cost-effective, the report states.

The DfES published a performance management system last November for local authorities to monitor the work of centres. But the NAO report says this needs to be supplemented by longitudinal data and local monitoring in order to identify what is working.

At the Hailsham and the Diplocks childrens centre in East Sussex, the NAO report reveals that a performance monitoring system has been developed so that staff are clear about their responsibilities and the targets they are expected to deliver. Targets are assigned to categories such as health, early education and childcare, and the staff complete an annual profile of what they will deliver and report on their performance quarterly. The monitoring system is also applied to service providers who have service level agreements with the centre.

Anne Longfield, chief executive of 4Children, says that the Together for Children partnership, which has been hired by the Government to help local authorities plan strategically the delivery of centres, will involve people who are skilled and experienced in childrens services. She says that most local authorities were meeting targets but that some needed help to bring them up to speed. They may have been affected by staff changes or a failure early on to build the programme in at the right strategic level.

In the process of creating the centres, she says, many staff have moved from different models of delivery. There will not be uniformity but there will be a greater consistency with a central support programme, because we will be able to share good practice, she adds.

She welcomes the reports revelation that 56 per cent of the local authorities the NAO consulted were planning to amalgamate childrens centres with extended schools initiatives, as the extended schools programme does not have the same infrastructure money that childrens centres have.

Sustainability
Sian Phillips, who is the lead officer for extended schools in Cambridgeshire, says the county council has created an extended services project board to bring the two programmes together. Where we can have these synergies, it is a good thing and we are drawing the funding streams together. She emphasises that this can be done where there is co-location of both elements on a primary school site.

The NAO report says that local authorities phase two targets for childrens centres are ambitious and most will need to find innovative ways to fund new centres. It found that 37 per cent of local authorities it surveyed are considering whether to make one manager responsible for several small centres and about a third are planning to ask centres to share resources such as finance officers and receptionists.

But sustainability of services, particularly childcare, remains a key concern. Fran Lee, childrens centres support officer in Nottinghamshire, says that the process of mainstreaming services is sensible, but questions the amount of money being provided by the Government. While local authorities have a duty to ensure that childcare is affordable and of high quality, she adds, We can manage the high quality bit, but parents in areas where we need to deliver a service do not have the sort of money needed to make it sustainable.

The report reveals that more than 40 per cent of the 30 centres visited had received start-up funding for childcare which was about to run out. To compensate, 13 per cent of managers were considering fee increases, and an alarming 17 per cent were thinking of diverting resources from other centre activities to prop up the daycare.

June McHugh, manager of Greenfields childrens centres in Ealing, says Government policy is focused too strongly on helping working parents, often excluding support for the most vulnerable children and families. We have some money from the local authority to help vulnerable families. But we are in a bit of a catch-22 situation, as there are not the working parents in this part of Southall to pay for childcare. Most of them claim tax credits. Then there are the refugees, the asylum seekers and traveller families that the Government is not reaching.

We hear rhetoric from the Government about the importance of Every Child Matters. Well, these children matter.

The NAO revealed that less than a third of the childrens centres visited (32 per cent) were pro-actively targeting hard-to-reach groups who were less likely to approach a centre for help. Excluded groups identified in the report include people from some ethnic minorities, the unemployed, people with disabilities, teenage and lone parents, and asylum seekers.

It pointed to the efforts of the Peterlee Childrens Centre in the north east, which has created a database of all children, parents and families in the area.
This has been gathered by a dedicated team of health visitors and midwives and is used to identify the needs of children from an early age, develop appropriate services and monitor their development. Families sign a data protection agreement and the centre ensures that the terms are upheld when sharing the childrens developmental profiles.

Something to celebrate
Judith Thomas, manager of the Lune Park childrens centre in Lancaster, which is praised in the NAO report, argues that the gains made through Sure Start local programmes need to be celebrated, particularly vital outreach work through strong family support teams and the impact Sure Start services have had in changing the way mainstream services operate.

She cites the example of her two Sure Start health visitors, who have shown other health visitors how to work in a different way to meet the needs of disadvantaged families. But the result of best practice being filtered down to mainstream services is, ironically, that some Sure Start staff face being displaced during this period of change. We need to think about staff changes and ensure the ethos of Sure Start is not lost, she adds.

But, as the NAO report indicates, the number one issue for many childrens centres is the long-term sustainability of daycare and the extent to which other services may be drained
of resources just to make it viable.

More information
Sure Start Childrens Centres - Report by the Comptroller and Auditor General, National Audit Office can be viewed at: www.nao.org.uk