KAREN CLARKE

University of Manchester

Childhood, parenting and early intervention: A

critical examination of the Sure Start national
programme

Abstract
The Sure Start programme is central to New Labours long-term
strategy for preventing social exclusion. Its focus on young children and
early intervention epitomizes a social investment approach to social
policy and reflects a social integrationist understanding of social inclu-
sion that identifies individual opportunity in the labour market as the
means for achieving inclusion, and educational achievement as its basis.
Evidence on which Sure Start is based has been used by the government
to support a primarily individual and instrumental approach to combat-
ing social exclusion. Complex research evidence is transformed into a set
of target outcomes for Sure Start resulting in a policy that at national
level promotes a view of mothers as principally responsible for childrens
development and well-being, and risks sliding into a moral discourse of
social exclusion that blames parents for poor outcomes.
Key words: children, mothers, social exclusion, social investment,
targets

Introduction

The Sure Start programme, announced in 1998, is a central element

in New Labours long-term strategy to address social exclusion. By
intervening in the lives of young children in areas of high deprivation,
it seeks to prevent their social exclusion in adulthood, primarily by
enabling children to realize their potential within the education
system and to avoid outcomes that are seen as the consequences of
educational failure, such as juvenile crime, unemployment and teen-
age pregnancy. The programme exemplifies New Labours social

Copyright 2006 Critical Social Policy Ltd 02610183 89 Vol. 26(4): 699721; 068470
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700 CRITICAL SOCIAL POLICY 26(4)

investment approach to social policy and its framing of the problem of

social exclusion in terms of two competing discourses. This paper
examines the ideas about the process of social exclusion that inform
Sure Start, the way in which these ideas have been translated into policy
at a national level and the implications of this for the norms promoted
by the programme and for its conceptualization of parental roles.
Levitas (1998) has identified three distinct discourses of social
exclusion, each associated with a different political position and
having its own implications for how the problem is to be
addressed: a redistributionist discourse that constructs the problem
in terms of poverty and structural inequality; a social integrationist
discourse that focuses on paid work as the means of bringing about
inclusion; and a moral underclass discourse, in which social exclu-
sion is seen as a consequence of the culture of the excluded. These
different discourses reflect different conceptions of what social
exclusion is and how and why it occurs and therefore lead to differ-
ent kinds of policy solutions.
Early in the first term of the New Labour administration social
exclusion was identified as something that is transmitted inter-
generationally, and as resulting from child poverty, and its long-term
consequences became a key policy issue. In his 1999 Beveridge
lecture, Blair made his now famous commitment to the eradication of
child poverty within a generation, and to the breaking of what he
referred to as the cycle of disadvantage: so that children born into
poverty are not condemned to social exclusion and deprivation (Blair,
1999: 16).
Explanations for poverty or social exclusion that draw on the idea
of a cyclical process have a long history (Welshman, 2002) and have
tended to be framed at the level of the individual in the family, or the
individual and family within a community of families in similar
circumstances, and to focus on individual behaviour rather than
structural explanations (Deacon, 2003). Deacon argues that New
Labour has managed to avoid both the determinism of structural
explanations and an approach that sees social exclusion as the result of
individual pathology. Instead its policies for fighting social exclusion
are both structural and behavioural and offer a multi-faceted response
to a multi-faceted set of problems (Deacon, 2003: 134). At a
structural level New Labour has introduced policies that seek to
redress inequalities by redistribution through the tax and benefits
system, while at the same time policies such as Sure Start address

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 C L A R K E S U R E S TA RT 701

individual behaviour and development. While there have been impor-

tant measures to address family poverty through redistribution (see,
for example, Stewart, 2005), the strong emphasis of New Labours
welfare strategy on work for those who can, places its approach to
social exclusion primarily in Levitas discourse of social integration in
which the role of the state is to support individual opportunity.
The idea of social exclusion as a trans-generational phenomenon
has repeatedly found practical expression in interventions that aim to
change parenting practices in poor families and to provide poor
children with high quality early education, in order to counteract the
effects of their poor social and physical environment and produce a
better future generation of adults. There are interesting parallels
between Sure Start and the Educational Priority Areas (EPAs) estab-
lished following the Plowden Report and the rediscovery of poverty
in post-war Britain in the 1960s (Smith, 1987). Plowden saw the
education of both children and their parents as the means to break a
vicious circle that operated from generation to generation (Smith,
1987: 24), and parental involvement in childrens education, promoted
by outreach work with parents, as an important contributor to educa-
tional success. Earlier examples include the maternal and child welfare
services established in the early 20th century in response to concerns
about high infant mortality and the poor physical health of working
class recruits to the army during the Boer War (Davin, 1978).
Because of young childrens physical and psychological depend-
ency, interventions directed at them necessarily involve intervening in
the family and working with those on whom they are primarily
dependent their parents, particularly their mothers. Such inter-
ventions have generally focused on mothers, not for their own sake,
but because mothers are the principal means for achieving desired
outcomes in children. The form and content of the services provided
have tended to reflect prevailing middle class conceptions of mother-
hood and of the responsibilities of mothers in relation to children, and
thus have helped to construct and maintain a dominant ideology of
motherhood. Poor mothers whose behaviour does not conform to the
norms promoted by this ideology and who come under scrutiny from
the state are easily construed as exhibiting pathological behaviour
resulting from a combination of ignorance and moral deviance.
Preventative policies aimed at young children have a strong
intrinsic appeal to a wide constituency. The social construction of
childhood as a period of innocence and vulnerability, and of childrens

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702 CRITICAL SOCIAL POLICY 26(4)

development as shaped by experience, means that infancy represents a

unique opportunity for intervention. There is thus the possibility of
considerable consensus about the desirability of ensuring a good start
(but also plenty of scope for debate about what constitutes a good
start). Infants dependency on adults makes them innocent victims
when things go wrong, where blame for failures and problems is seen
to rest with others. By contrast, older children and adolescents are
seen as having individual agency and therefore can be held account-
able and blamed for actions that lead to their social exclusion.

Children and social investment

New Labours response to the collapse of consensus on state welfare
provision has been to redefine the role of the state as one of supporting
investment in individual human capital through education and the
promotion of life-long learning, with the aim of promoting labour
market participation and individual employment opportunity (Lister,
2003). Giddens (1998) has termed this the social investment state.
From within a social investment perspective, state expenditure is
costed, calculated and highly strategic (Dobrowolsky, 2002: 44).
Children are central to the social investment state in several ways
(Dobrowolsky, 2002; Lister, 2003; Dobrowolsky and Jensen, 2005).
Investment in childrens well-being and education represents the
epitome of prudent long-term investment, which promises to save on
future expenditure by avoiding the costs of future social exclusion.
Children also offer the means for reforming parents, by reinforcing
their responsibility to enter the labour market to support them.
Central to the social investment approach is the measurement of
the returns on those investments through the evaluation of the
outcomes of policy initiatives, as well as through performance man-
agement, using the pseudo-contractual device of public service agree-
ments and extensive monitoring of performance. The danger of
placing too strong a reliance on the social investment rationale is a
narrowing of perspective to the benefits in terms of the return on the
states investment, and losing sight of the inherent benefits of, and
social justice arguments for, provision of services for children and
support for families. As in other areas of policy, the focus on
measurable outcomes carries the danger that these outcomes, often
chosen somewhat arbitrarily from a multiplicity of possible ways of
assessing progress towards a more abstract (and therefore less easily

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 C L A R K E S U R E S TA RT 703

measurable) end, become an end in themselves and distort the larger

vision of what is to be achieved.

Origins of Sure Start

In October 1997, as part of its Comprehensive Spending Review, the

Treasury set up a cross-departmental Review to examine services for
children under eight (Glass, 1999). The focus of the Review was on
young children and social exclusion with the aim of identifying what
policies and services were needed at a family and community level to
ensure the development of their full potential throughout their lives
(Glass, 1999: 260).
The Review was carried out by a steering group of civil servants
from a wide range of government departments. It was chaired by the
Treasury and its work was overseen by a ministerial steering group
consisting of ministers from the eleven departments involved. The
initial brief to look at services for children under eight was modified
to focus on children under four as it became clear that the greatest
problems in service provision lay in the early years and also because
the accumulated evidence suggested that successful intervention in
the earliest years offered the greatest potential for making a difference
(Glass, 1999: 260).
As part of the Review, and in response to submissions made to it
by academics and campaigning groups, a series of three seminars was
organized early in 1998, involving academics, civil servants and
representatives of voluntary organizations. The aim of the seminars
was to examine the research evidence on 1) the factors that contribute
to the risk of social exclusion, and 2) the effectiveness of early
interventions, and 3) to make suggestions for possible action in the
UK. The final seminar was for ministers and included a presentation
of the results of the previous two seminars. At the end of the third
seminar there was a discussion between the ministerial group and
some of the experts present, after which, according to Norman Glass,
the senior Treasury official involved in the Review, officials were
given a clear steer as to the main lines of the report which ministers
wanted to see (Glass, 1999: 261).
The Review concluded that a community based programme of
early intervention and family support which built on existing services
could have positive and persistent effects, not only on child and family

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704 CRITICAL SOCIAL POLICY 26(4)

development but also help break the cycle of social exclusion and lead
to significant long-term gain to the Exchequer (Glass, 1999: 261).
The local programmes were to be two-generational (parents and
children), non-stigmatizing, multi-faceted, long-lasting, locally
driven and culturally appropriate (Glass, 1999: 262). These features
reflected the research evidence on effective interventions that had been
presented and discussed at the seminars.

The Sure Start programme

Funding was announced in 1998 for 250 Sure Start local programmes
in England, serving a population of 187,000 children, approximately
18 per cent of poor children under four. The first 60 trailblazer local
programmes started in 1999, with the remainder rolled out in the
period to 2002 (HM Treasury, 2000: 24.2). The 2000 Spending
Review extended the programme to over 500 local programmes by
2004, doubling the planned expenditure to 500 million a year and
reaching one third of poor children under four (HM Treasury, 2000:
ch. 24). By the end of 2004 there were 524 Sure Start local
programmes in England, funded over a series of six funding rounds.
The guidance for the sixth wave of Sure Start local programmes
identified as the aim of Sure Start:
. . . to work with parents-to-be, parents and children to promote the
physical, intellectual and social development of babies and young
children particularly those who are disadvantaged so that they can
flourish at home and when they get to school, and thereby break the
cycle of disadvantage for the current generation of young children. (Sure
Start, 2002: 19)
This aim is reflected in four objectives that express the commitment
to a multi-faceted programme. These are: improving social and
emotional development; improving health; improving childrens abil-
ity to learn; and strengthening families and communities (Sure Start,
2002). The objectives are linked to a series of Public Service Agree-
ment (PSA) targets, in terms of the outcomes to be achieved, and to a
set of Service Delivery Agreements (SDAs) that specify further the
means to be used to achieve them.
Each local programme operates within a small geographically
defined area and is focused on the population of children under four
within that area (normally 400800 children), who live within pram

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 C L A R K E S U R E S TA RT 705

pushing distance of the Sure Start centre. By defining target popula-

tions geographically and by age, and then making services universal,
the programme avoids the potential stigma associated with receiving
targeted services, although it carries the potential of stigmatizing all
families in problem areas (Power and Willmott, 2005: 285). Find-
ings from the National Evaluation of Sure Start (NESS) confirm that
Sure Start programmes in rounds 14 were located in some of the
most deprived areas in England, with levels of unemployment, child
poverty and low income that were double the national average (Barnes
et al., 2003).
One of the principles informing Sure Start is that it should be
responsive to local need and build on existing services in the area.
This means that there is no blueprint for what services should be
provided, nor for how they should be delivered, although they are all
expected to be outcome driven (NESS, 2005a: 12). The lead body
for a Sure Start local programme may be a local authority, a Primary
Care Trust (PCT) or a voluntary organization. In all areas the
programme is multi-agency, involving statutory agencies and volun-
tary organizations, delivering an average of 17 different services that
range from family centres, grandparents groups, and fathers groups
to telephone helplines and equipment loan schemes (NESS, 2005b:
10). This makes it difficult to characterize or evaluate the programme
as a whole, except in the most general terms. The NESS reports make
it clear that there is considerable variation in the kinds of services
offered. Community involvement and responsiveness to local need is
promoted through parental representation on the programme board
and parents are also involved as volunteers and paid workers in many
local programmes. There is evidence from the national evaluation of
the programme and from other studies that Sure Start is popular with
many parents and has brought benefits to many, in the form of access
to training and paid work within the local project and through an
improvement of local facilities for parents and children (Power and
Willmott, 2005).

The underlying model

The Treasury seminars that formed part of the Review drew upon a
substantial body of academic research which demonstrated associa-
tions between social exclusion and a large number of risk factors

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706 CRITICAL SOCIAL POLICY 26(4)

operating at various levels material, family, child and school (Pugh,

1998; Oliver et al., 1998; Bynner, 1998). The focus was on ways of
preventing social exclusion outcomes, in particular poor educational
outcomes, while including, where relevant, contact with the criminal
justice system, teenage pregnancy and failure in the labour market
(Oliver et al., 1998: 1). Evidence for the effectiveness of interventions
in terms of long-term outcomes drew on a number of programmes in
the US which had been established in the 1960s as part of the war on
poverty. Particularly influential were the Head Start and the Perry/
High Scope programmes, where longitudinal evaluations had demon-
strated that provision of high quality pre-school experience for
children from poor families, combined with home visiting, led to
long-lasting benefits in terms of employment, crime and teenage
pregnancy. One extensively cited finding from Perry/High Scope was
that for every $1 invested by the state in the programme, $7 was
saved to society, in particular through savings in the criminal justice
system (Schweinhart and Weikart, 1980, cited, for example, in Oliver
et al., 1998).
This conceptualization of the problem of inter-generational repro-
duction of social exclusion draws strongly on certain traditions within
Anglo-American developmental psychology and quantitative sociol-
ogy that demonstrate statistical associations between a large number
of variables, labelled as risk factors, and particular negative out-
comes. Such empirical findings do not form the basis for an explicit
causal theory of the associations observed; rather, what is proposed is
a complex mesh of interrelated factors operating at several different
levels and in different contexts that together result in particular
outcomes by means of processes that are largely untheorized (France
and Utting, 2005). The principal model informing the discussions of
social exclusion at the Treasury seminars is one derived from the
ecological model of parenting put forward by authors such as Belsky
and Vondra (1989) in the context of research on child abuse, and the
attempt to identify models for predicting and preventing it (Oliver et
al., 1998: 5). Within the ecological model there is a hierarchy of levels
at which the determinants of parenting operate: socio-cultural; com-
munity; and family. Individual differences in parental functioning are
also shaped by individual, historical, social and circumstantial factors
(Oliver et al., 1998: 56). While social exclusion has not been modelled
in such a systematic way, and there seems to be less explicit theory than

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 C L A R K E S U R E S TA RT 707

in the case of child abuse, it would appear from the papers presented at
the Treasury seminars, that the underlying ideas are similar.
In the paper presented by Oliver and colleagues (1998) to the
second seminar, the lack of a causal explanation for many of the
associations observed between risk factors and outcomes is acknowl-
edged. The authors introduce a distinction between distal and
proximal variables. Distal variables are defined here as demographic
variables describing major attributes such as income, marital status or
age of the mother (p. 5). The authors comment that [i]t is difficult to
propose a mechanism to demonstrate how any of these variables per se
can impact on child outcome. But these variables through chains of
causal events, predict other variables (p. 5). The latter, proximal
variables, can be seen as more directly causally linked to particular
outcomes, with the following given as an example:
A low income may impact in a number of ways, as a stressor to the
parents, and therefore on their ability to parent, and more directly it may
mean that buying toys and books for children is not a priority. The
relationship can be demonstrated between the number of childrens
books in the home, or the frequency children are read to, and childrens
reading ability. These variables, which tend to be more difficult to
measure, are proximal variables. Other identified risk factors may not be
causally implicated at all, but may simply be acting as markers for other
variables that are implicated. (Oliver et al., 1998: 5, emphasis added)
The authors conclusion from this analysis is that the proximal
variables, rather than any distal or marker variables are, or should be,
the focus of the intervention if it is to succeed in achieving change
(Oliver et al., 1998: 5).
A problem with this emphasis on the micro-management of
proximal variables without acting on the distal variables at the same
time, is that it risks taking a mechanistic view of the processes
involved, despite concomitant assertions about the importance of an
holistic view. It can lead, for example, to a concern with the provision
of toys or books in the home, but without addressing the more
complex and diffuse effects of low income, whose relationship with
reading ability may be less obvious. The need to address underlying
issues, such as the effects of poverty on self-esteem and depression and
the impact of these on parenting capacity, are acknowledged in some
of the background papers, but these present more complex and
intractable problems than the provision of toys or reading materials,

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708 CRITICAL SOCIAL POLICY 26(4)

which can then come to be seen as easier and more measurable aims
when setting targets and implementing policy. There is a danger of
regarding parents as simply another environmental influence, whose
behaviour can be broken down into proximal causes which produce
particular effects in children, and which with appropriate modifica-
tion can produce the desired outcomes. Good parenting then comes to
be regarded as a question of technique instead of being fundamentally
about quality of relationships. The individual child is seen as a passive
product of factors operating on him/her in combination with intrinsic
characteristics, such as being an easy child. In this way, parents and
children are treated as largely abstracted from the web of relationships
in which they live, and the specificities of their circumstances and
identities, for example in relation to race, ethnicity and gender (see
Burman, 1994; Rose, 1999).
The observation that the presence of even several risk factors does
not inevitably lead to poor outcomes, has led to the concept of
resilience, and to attempts to identify, again using statistical tech-
niques, factors that can create resilience. In the paper by Oliver and
colleagues, Belsky and Vondras work is cited as indicating that the
significant protective factors operate at the most proximal level. These
are the parental relationship, the availability of social support, and
employment. Child outcomes are seen as being the product of a
buffered system of parenting in which multiple causal factors
operating together may be moderated by the effects of protective
factors. This view of the processes involved tends to encourage
optimism about the possibility for controlling and intervening in
complex situations at a micro level, and fits well with New Labours
pragmatic emphasis on identifying what works, and on evaluations
that focus on measurable outcomes.

The role of education

Instead of a theory of the complex processes leading to the multiple
outcomes labelled as social exclusion, there is evident in the Treasury
seminars a relatively simple view of the relationship between educa-
tional attainment and the prevention of social exclusion. The associa-
tion, demonstrated by numerous studies, between poor educational
outcomes and crime, teenage pregnancy and unemployment in adult-
hood, provides a strong rationale for the focus on education. This is
reinforced by New Labours emphasis on the role of the state being to

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 C L A R K E S U R E S TA RT 709

promote opportunity and to give a hand up not a hand out, through

its social investment strategy. The stated aim of Sure Start is to ensure
that children from poor families arrive at school ready to flourish.
This is seen to be affected both by the quality of parenting and by
access to high quality pre-school services which offer children experi-
ences that are valuable in their own right and that compensate for
parental and environmental inadequacies.
As Sure Start has developed, the importance of pre-school educa-
tion has become an increasingly central issue, not least because of the
findings emerging from the Effective Provision of Pre-School Educa-
tion (EPPE) project. This is a longitudinal study of a national sample
of 3000 children aged 34 through a wide range of pre-school
settings to entry into school at age 5, with further follow-ups at ages
6 and 7. The highly influential findings of the study (EPPE, 2004)
were that, after controlling for a range of background characteristics
(such as birthweight, gender, parental education and home learning
environment), children with pre-school experience were more devel-
opmentally advanced than those without. Children from disadvan-
taged backgrounds gained most developmentally from pre-school
experience. The EPPE study concluded that:
Whilst not eliminating disadvantage, pre-school can help to ameliorate
the effects of social disadvantage and can provide children with a better
start to school. Therefore, investing in good quality pre-school provision
can be seen as an effective means of achieving targets concerning social
exclusion and breaking cycles of disadvantage. (EPPE, 2004: iii)
Parental behaviour and parents involvement in education were identi-
fied as important for improving educational outcomes in the Plowden
Report in the 1960s and emerge again from EPPE as an important
influence on childrens development. The EPPE study measured what
it terms the home learning environment on a standardized scale and
concluded that it had significant effects:
For example, reading with the child, teaching songs and nursery
rhymes, painting and drawing, playing with letters and numbers,
visiting the library, teaching the alphabet and numbers, taking children
on visits and creating regular opportunities for them to play with their
friends at home, were all associated with higher intellectual and social/
behavioural scores. (EPPE, 2004: v)
In effect, measuring the home learning environment reduces the
childs home to its role in producing a particular outcome in the

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710 CRITICAL SOCIAL POLICY 26(4)

childs scores on a variety of scales. The things that parents or others

do with children are described in terms of their contribution to
producing a discrete set of attributes with a statistical correlation with
other longer term goals, particularly educational outcomes (EPPE,
2004). The evaluation of the benefits of pre-school education is
essentially future-oriented (preparation for school), with little interest
in the quality of the experience for its own sake and the benefits to
children in the present. The focus is its effectiveness in generating
certain outcomes as the first steps toward producing well-educated
and qualified, responsible and well-behaved adults (Moss, 2000; Moss
and Petrie, 2002).

Implications of Sure Start for parents and children

The identification of infancy as a uniquely influential period in

development in terms of educational and other outcomes in adult-
hood, combined with an ideological commitment to the privacy of the
family and the reality that parents (and particularly mothers) have
principal responsibility for the care and upbringing of young children,
creates a problem for the state, given the evidence of substantial
differences in development between children from different social
classes. The identification of proximal causes of poor outcomes for
children as the appropriate focus for intervention, results in a pre-
occupation with the individual behaviour of parents, rather than with
social structures as the principal problem to be addressed. In the
process the discourse slips from social integration through education
as the foundation for future labour market participation, to a dis-
course that is couched in terms of the culture of the excluded, and
which aims to change the culture of parenting (mothering in partic-
ular) and promote a particular model of the family. The behaviour and
characteristics of poor parents come to be seen as the problem, for
reasons that are driven by instrumental aims in relation to their
children. This is not to suggest that those who work in Sure Start
local programmes see their role in this way, or that they take this view
of the people that they work with. This analysis is concerned with the
way in which national policy is framed and its implications for
parents and children, rather than on the practices and beliefs of those
involved in the local programmes.

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 C L A R K E S U R E S TA RT 711

The targets for Sure Start offer one way of looking at the ideas
about parenting that inform the national programme and the implicit
norms that it promotes. While the selection of targets is presumably
driven partly by pragmatic considerations about what can be meas-
ured, these targets and the way they are linked together under a
broadly stated aim, carry within them an implicit causal model which
identifies the significant aspects of childrens care that produce
particular outcomes. Furthermore, once these targets have been selec-
ted they inevitably become influential in shaping local programmes as
they are implemented, whatever latitude there is to determine the
particular services to be offered and their method of delivery, since
these are the outcomes against which success will be measured. As the
national programme has developed there have been interesting chan-
ges to the order in which the objectives are listed, to their wording
and to the detail of the targets, but an examination of these changes is
beyond the scope of this paper. Here, I examine the targets as specified
in the Guide for Sixth Wave Programmes (Sure Start, 2002).

Improving social and emotional development

The first objective of Sure Start is improving social and emotional
development, in particular, by supporting early bonding between
parents and their children, helping families to function and by
enabling the early identification and support of children with emo-
tional and behavioural difficulties (Sure Start, 2002: 19). In the
Public Service Agreement (PSA) target associated with this objective
the focus is on child protection, specifically a reduction in the number
of children under four who are re-registered on the child protection
register. This is a curious jump from a broad aim in a programme that
is supposed to be about universal provision for children under four
and their parents, to a target that is related to a very small minority of
children. By selecting this as the measure of improving social and
emotional development, it implicitly pathologizes parents in Sure
Start areas by focusing on their dangerousness to children, rather than
on other aspects of the relationship between childrens social and
emotional well-being and parental functioning. These may of course
be harder to define and may not be possible to quantify and this in
turn illustrates how the requirement of quantitative evidence of
effectiveness can potentially distort the conceptualization of the
problem and the work done.

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712 CRITICAL SOCIAL POLICY 26(4)

Parental inadequacies are also implicit in the mechanisms identi-

fied in the statement of this first objective of Sure Start in the
reference to supporting early bonding between parents and their
children, helping families to function. The implication is that poor
bonding and poor family functioning underlie deficits in social and
emotional development, and that these are particular problems among
parents in Sure Start areas.
One of the Service Delivery Agreement (SDA) targets associated
with this PSA target is that all parents must be contacted by Sure
Start within two months of the birth of a child. Given its appearance
in the context of a child protection target this can be seen as
introducing a form of surveillance. It is clear from the national
evaluation that local programmes have not succeeded in reaching all
the target group of children in their area (NESS, 2005a: 79). The
NESS report identified the sharing of information between agencies,
and issues of confidentiality as presenting problems for identifying
hard to reach families. There are many reasons why families may be
hard to reach, including a wish for privacy and a fear of the
consequences of contact with state agencies. The contradictions
between asylum and immigration policies and Sure Starts focus on
child well-being are apparent in the difficulties that Sure Start local
programmes have in working with asylum seekers and refugees
(NESS, 2005b: 54). There appears to be a fundamental tension within
Sure Start between the voluntarism associated with providing univer-
sal services that parents can access according to their own assessment
of their needs, and the requirement to ensure that every new parent is
seen within two months, regardless of their wishes.
The second SDA target within this first objective is a reduction in
post-natal depression. Mothers thus become identified as the key
actors in terms of social and emotional development (and child abuse),
and their depression as a problem of concern because of its effects on
children (rather than for mothers own sake).

Improving health
The second objective of Sure Start, improving health, refers to
supporting parents in caring for their children to promote healthy
development before and after birth (Sure Start, 2002: 19). Here
again, despite the gender-neutral reference to parents, there is a
particular focus on maternal behaviour. The PSA target is a 10 per

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 C L A R K E S U R E S TA RT 713

cent reduction in maternal smoking in pregnancy. The associated

SDA targets are:
Parenting support and information to be available for all parents in
Sure Start areas.
All local programmes to give advice on breast feeding, hygiene and
safety.
A 10 per cent reduction in children in the Sure Start area aged 03
admitted to hospital as an emergency with gastroenteritis, a respira-
tory infection or a severe injury. (Sure Start, 2002: 20)
The selection of these targets implies a belief that the care parents
provide for their children is the reason for poorer child health among
poor families. Other factors such as damp housing, overcrowding and
inadequate incomes that affect both childrens health and parental
ability to cope (see, for example, Ghate and Hazel, 2002), become
part of the context to which parents must adapt, rather than causes of
poor health to be addressed directly. By bracketing together in a
single target breast feeding (which only mothers can do) with hygiene
and safety, there is an implication also that these are private maternal
rather than parental or wider social responsibilities.

Improving childrens ability to learn

The specific issues identified in relation to the third objective are
encouraging high quality environments and childcare that promote
early learning, provide stimulating and enjoyable play, improve
language skills and ensure early identification and support of children
with special needs (Sure Start, 2002: 20). While social and emotional
development and health are parental responsibilities within the home,
learning takes the child away from the family. The PSA target is a
reduction of 5 per cent in the number of children with speech and
language problems requiring specialist intervention. The SDA targets
suggest this is to be achieved by a combination of services outside the
family and parental activity:
All children in Sure Start areas to have access to good quality play
and learning opportunities, helping progress towards early learning
goals when they get to school.
Increase the use of libraries by parents with young children in Sure
Start areas. (Sure Start, 2002: 20)

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714 CRITICAL SOCIAL POLICY 26(4)

The EPPE research provides a firm social investment justification for

expanding early years services, which the government sees as bringing
a double benefit:
(a) the need to prepare all children especially those from disadvantaged
backgrounds, for the challenging National Curriculum which lies ahead
and (b) the contribution of child care to help workless families move out
of poverty and into paid employment. (EPPE, 2004: 1, referring to the
Inter-Departmental Childcare Review 2002)
Thus pre-school care and education become something that is partic-
ularly needed by disadvantaged children, and by parents living in
workless households, with reassuring evidence that non-maternal care
is better than arriving at school with what is identified as no pre-
school experience (i.e. no experience of formal care/education outside
the home plenty of experience, but of the wrong kind). Paid
employment thus becomes a duty for parents, not only in terms of
their obligation to provide for themselves and their children if they
are able to, but also for the benefits that the experience of pre-school
care and education will bring for their children.
The EPPE finding that links a higher home learning environ-
ment score with increased co-operation/conformity, peer sociability
and confidence, lower anti-social and worried/upset behaviour and
higher cognitive development scores (EPPE, 2004: 24) supports an
instrumental approach to parenting education, so that children are
provided with the right environment, in a way that is built on
middle class norms that require considerable resources of time, space
and equipment:
Poor mothers with few qualifications can improve their childrens
progress and give them a better start at school by engaging in activities
at home that engage and stretch the childs mind. This EPPE finding
underpins the work in programmes such as local Sure Start and
Childrens Centres that target areas of high social disadvantage. (EPPE,
2004: 5)
Infancy becomes a period of preparation for entry into an education
system that is preoccupied with measuring individual attainment,
from the age of five, at the end of the Foundation stage, through the
various Key Stages to the end of compulsory education. The child
needs to be stretched and groomed for this, both at home and in
publicly provided institutions.

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Strengthening families and communities

The fourth objective of Sure Start is strengthening families and
communities in particular, by involving families in building the
communitys capacity to sustain the programme and thereby create
pathways out of poverty (Sure Start, 2002: 20). The PSA target is a
reduction of 12 per cent in workless households. It thereby identifies
paid employment as the cultural basis for a strong family and
community, with strength somehow deriving from conformity to a
norm of parental employment. There is no acknowledgement of other
forms of work that might play an important part in maintaining a
strong family or community, such as participation in the management
of the Sure Start local programme itself or working in a voluntary
capacity, even though parental participation in the programme is one
of the SDA targets. The reference to the community and the absence
of any reference to difference and diversity in specifying this objective
and its associated target, means that cultural and ethnic differences
within and across communities are unacknowledged.
When 25 per cent of households in Sure Start areas are headed by
lone mothers, the target of reducing workless households by 12 per
cent makes no acknowledgement of the way in which mothers
decisions about employment may be shaped by alternative ideas about
what it means to be a good mother (Duncan and Edwards, 1999), or
of the cost and complexity of being a lone parent in low paid work.
Evidence from the national evaluation indicates that many mothers in
Sure Start areas believe that they should stay at home with their
children when they are young although they might intend to seek
paid work when the child starts school (Meadows and Garbers, 2004).
As Meadows and Garbers point out, this suggests that the target of
reducing the number of children under four in workless households
may be inappropriate and that the target [should] relate to older
children . . . to recognise that investment in parents of younger
children should pay off when the children are in school (p. 11).

Conclusion

The Sure Start national programme reflects many of the tensions and
contradictions at the heart of New Labours approach to social policy.
On the one hand it represents an important shift of resources to a

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716 CRITICAL SOCIAL POLICY 26(4)

section of the population, children under four, whose needs had

previously been seen as almost entirely the private responsibility of
their parents, and, in practice, primarily their mothers. Young
children and their mothers living in areas of high deprivation have
benefited from a substantial investment of resources in a wide range of
universal and targeted services and facilities. On the other hand, the
combination of a social investment approach, a social integrationist
analysis of social exclusion and concentration on proximal causes of
exclusion, has resulted in a policy whose implementation is con-
ceptualized in an instrumental way. It focuses on the manipulation of
the childs immediate environment, primarily individual maternal
behaviour, rather than on structural inequalities; and on individual
educational achievement as the principal mechanism for avoiding
social exclusion in the longer term.
The national programme uses the gender-neutral language of
parenting and in doing so fails to differentiate parents and issues
associated with parenting into those affecting mothers and those
affecting fathers. Despite the commitment in many local programmes
to engaging with fathers, the national performance targets for Sure
Start are primarily aimed at mothers, who are still seen as having
principal responsibility for infant care and welfare. By focusing on the
child within the family and on proximal influences on development,
Sure Start tends to reinforce current gender roles within the family, in
particular, maternal responsibility for infant well-being.
Sure Start also operates with an undifferentiated notion of chil-
dren under 4. The objectives and targets of Sure Start make no
reference to social divisions and their effects on childhood experience
and opportunities. Children are referred to as disadvantaged but the
multi-faceted nature and the varied contexts of disadvantage in terms
of race, ethnicity, gender or disability are not acknowledged. Without
such acknowledgement, there is a danger that the objectives of Sure
Start become those of assimilation to a single norm, which is
implicitly white and middle class.

Instrumentalism and a mechanistic view of development

processes
The attempt to manipulate the proximal variables associated with
poor outcomes, involves a mechanistic view of development, and the
motivation to engage in different ways with the child becomes an

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 C L A R K E S U R E S TA RT 717

instrumental one. Parenting becomes an activity whose purpose is to

deliver children with the desired characteristics. The emphasis is
predominantly and increasingly on preparing children for entry into
education, both cognitively and behaviourally, with the infant con-
ceptualized largely as future-citizen-worker (Lister, 2003).

Individualism
The approach to social inclusion in Sure Start is individual rather
than structural, but without measures to address structural inequal-
ities there is a danger of simply redistributing poverty and social
exclusion. Without universal services for pre-school children and
redistributionist policies to reduce family poverty, Sure Start may
merely be giving participants a marginal advantage over other poor
children and moving some of them into slightly more favourable
positions in an unequal society. However, the current transforma-
tion of Sure Start local programmes into Childrens Centres, and
their extension to serve a wider population, moves early years pol-
icy towards an intermediate position between the US targeted
intervention model and the more universal provision evident in
some European countries (Featherstone, 2005).

Parents: Competent or incompetent?

Sure Start characterizes risk as residing, at least proximally, in parents
and parental behaviour, and therefore makes parental behaviour the
focus for intervention. It simultaneously requires that parents be
involved in the management of the programme. This suggests a
contradictory conceptualization of parents as both competent and
incompetent. On the one hand, parental involvement in the manage-
ment of the programme and its local ownership implies that parents
are capable, reflective and aware of their own and their childrens
needs and able to articulate these needs effectively. On the other hand,
the targets for the programme are built on an assumption of deficits in
parenting and parental ignorance, with some parents at least who are
hard to reach, unable or unwilling to acknowledge their needs and
requiring outreach work to draw them in. On this view, parents need
to be educated and changed fathers need to be engaged in caring for
children, mothers need to be encouraged to breast feed and need to be

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718 CRITICAL SOCIAL POLICY 26(4)

educated about hygiene and safety. Knowledge of what is required to

be a good parent comes from outside, from experts and from
professionals rather than parents themselves.

Maternalism
Despite the language of parenting, and the acknowledgement of the
role of fathers or other family members, the infant is seen primarily in
the context of the motherinfant dyad in which the mother is all-
powerful and the infant passive and vulnerable. The focus on promot-
ing particular kinds of maternal behaviour risks neglecting material
factors and slipping into a view of social exclusion as the consequence
of maternal inadequacy. Social exclusion therefore becomes a purely
cultural phenomenon, to be addressed by changing the norms of
parenting in poor families: reading books, structured play, breast
feeding, cleaner homes, better safety, attendance at nursery and
maternal employment. This in turn easily results in blame falling on
mothers whose children deviate from those characteristics and whose
failures lead to the repetition of the cycle producing adults with the
same problems as themselves and thus to a slide from a social
integrationist discourse to a moral discourse of social exclusion.

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank John Churcher, Francesca Gains, Lorraine Green

and Steve Harrison for comments and suggestions on an earlier draft
of this paper.

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Karen Clarke is a senior lecturer in social policy in the school of social

sciences at Manchester University. Her principal research interests are in
family policy, gender and parenting. Recent publications include Lone
Parents and Child Support: Parental and State Responsibilities in

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 C L A R K E S U R E S TA RT 721

L. Jamieson and S. Cunningham Burley (eds) Families and the State: Changing
Relationships (London: Palgrave, 2003). Address: Politics, School of Social
Sciences, University of Manchester, Dover Street, Manchester M13 9PL,
UK. email: karen.clarke@manchester.ac.uk

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