Chancellor Gordon Brown hailed them as Britain's 'best kept secret', helping parents in disadvantaged areas with parenting skills and providing play and learning opportunities for their children. Yet the early national evaluation of Sure Start local programmes found that only 26 per cent had shown positive outcomes for children.
In her assessment of public service agreement targets for Sure Start set by the DfES, Kitty Stewart, a research fellow at the Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion (CASE) at the London School of Economics, suggests that 'some of the targets may simply have been too ambitious'. She adds, 'However, the lack of improvement in several of the health indicators is cause for concern.'
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