We hear a lot about the legacy of Sure Start at the moment. But what happened next as austerity hit early intervention, and what can we learn from this? I’ve been digging into my archive to see what I can find, inspired by the recent Better Start conference.
In 2014 I was a strategic commissioner in Solihull leading the closure of children’s centres and working with partners and communities to try to mitigate for the impact of this on families. We were designing a new Best Start (yes, really!) system of early childhood services, built around:
– a play and learning service to help communities to develop and lead support for preschool children and their families.
– a community champions service to build community capacity to lead change.
– targeted family support, integrated within the Health Visiting Service to track the progress of every preschool child.
– evidence based services for younger children, including speech and language therapy, parenting programmes and parent infant mental health services.
– a support and challenge function to quality assure the Best Start system across health, education and care, focused on the child’s journey rather than service boundaries.
– oversight of the effectiveness of early childhood services through five Best Start Local Governing Bodies, with membership drawn from local parents and other community members.
– and an integrated Best Start management team, led by the Health Visiting Service, to ensure coherence across the Best Start system.
You can see the full report here:
Did this new approach improve the lives of babies and children in Solihull? Sadly we never found out. The cuts to children’s centres happened but the investment and rebuilding work had to wait a decade.
What am I taking from this?
Well, 2026 is not 2014, and we need solutions that match today’s context, built with today’s families. However, a lot of the underpinning ideas of the time were ambitious and important, and still feel current. It’s not that the need for them went away, we just couldn’t afford them anymore. Our search for innovation and new evidence for individual interventions can feel like we’re pretending that the issue isn’t essentially a lack of investment in the core system foundations.
It reminds me that we shouldn’t assume that today’s maternity and early years services are the best they can be. They have been distorted by almost two decades of funding reductions. The offer is now by default not by design.
At their best, public services can and must be relational, responsive, positive, ambitious, humble and collaborative. “Human”, as parents from Blackpool’s Better Start reminded us. And when services are paid for using our taxes this makes them accountable to us and this matters.
The 2026 version of Best Start may not yet be enough, and there are risks ahead for implementation. But it is a start, and we really need this vision and ambition. We can’t afford to lose another decade.