Good news. A government programme was rolled out on the basis of good evidence. It did what it set out to achieve. It almost certainly delivered benefits significantly greater than it cost. Even better, it created the greatest benefits for those most in need.
Bad news. The programme was first expanded and diluted and then had its funding slashed. It no longer exists in anything like its original form.
I am talking about Sure Start. Introduced in 1999, it was an early initiative of the last Labour government, designed to provide support to families of young children, with the aim of enhancing their life chances and development. In its initial incarnation, it set up 250 or so projects in areas with a very high concentration of children under five living in poverty. Each project had a remit to offer a range of services including outreach and home visits, support for play, learning and childcare, primary and community healthcare and support for children and parents with special needs.
The local projects were not told how these objectives should be met; considerable local autonomy was built in. Partially modelled on the US Head Start programme, it was introduced off the back of increasingly convincing evidence that high-quality interventions to support children and families living in poverty really could work in improving their life chances. Previous interventions had been shown to improve everything from the health of the children to their educational and labour market outcomes and to reduce the chances that they would end up in the criminal justice system.
This carefully designed, evidence-based initiative seems to have worked. As part of an equally carefully constructed evaluation, colleagues of mine at the Institute for Fiscal Studies previously have shown that it had a measurably positive long-term effect on health, particularly reducing hospitalisations among school-age children. Last week Pedro Carneiro, Sarah Cattan and Nick Ridpath showed that it also had a big positive effect on the language, communication, numeracy and social and emotional development of five-year-olds from poorer families. More importantly, these effects persisted into much-improved GCSE results at age 16. Further work will look at other long-term outcomes, including engagement with the criminal justice system. Even if no further effects are found, what we know already is enough to provide convincing evidence that the programme will effectively have paid for itself.
These findings are consistent with a slew of international evidence that high-quality, often resource-intensive interventions can be highly effective in improving the life chances of children growing up in poverty. It is great that we now have such good and robust evidence that our very own Sure Start programme was also highly effective. It is also a tragedy and a study in how good policy can be lost.
