On May Day 1997 Labour won a landslide election victory, returning to power for the first time since 1979 with a 177-seat majority. The end of 18 years of successive Conservative governments represented an opportunity to change policies that would be seen to place the improvement of people’s lives at the centre of government strategy. On 6 May, Gordon Brown, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, enacted a policy at the forefront of macroeconomic thinking by giving the Bank of England operational independence from the government, including freedom to set interest rates. One consequence of this change was that a number...

Communities and neighbourhoods are the places in which children develop. Sure Start was, in its inception, an area-based initiative with certain types of neighbourhoods as targets – those that were among the most disadvantaged with high concentrations of families with young children. Each Sure Start Local Programme (SSLP) was expected to focus on developing and enhancing services for residents of a relatively small, disadvantaged neighbourhood that would be defined locally. As Naomi Eisenstadt notes in the Foreword, SSLP areas were conceptualised in terms of ‘pram-pushing distances’ and partnership boards were encouraged to think of local need and to avoid pre-existing boundaries...

Most area-based initiatives (ABIs) – of which Sure Start Local Programmes (SSLPs) are a classic example – have needed to face the challenge of translating the concept of ‘deprived areas’ as targets for government intervention into actual boundaries ‘on the ground’. Chapter Two explained that, in the case of SSLPs, this responsibility was largely given to the local agencies who initiated the proposals for the establishment of SSLPs. They were required to identify local communities that contained a significant number of deprived families, had a degree of social coherence and contained a sufficient number of young children to make programmes viable (Glass,...

The research design of the National Evaluation of Sure Start (NESS) presented many challenges. These challenges were not unique, and as this chapter shows, have been and continue to be faced by others. However, Sure Start Local Programmes (SSLPs) are both a social intervention and a complex one. There is as yet no firm consensus around the best methodologies to use to evaluate the outcomes either of social interventions or of those in which the details of the treatment can vary between individuals and may be unknown to the evaluator. The purpose of this chapter is to review some of...

Sure Start Local Programmes (SSLPs) have enjoyed one of the highest ever profiles of any UK government initiative concerning children and families. Such visibility carried both advantages and disadvantages and also affected the task of evaluation. While the main advantage was that SSLPs were, from the outset, of interest at the highest levels of government, this led to the major disadvantage: the short-term perspective often adopted by politicians in search of signs of its positive impact (Glass, 2006; Jack, 2006;) and, closely related, the attendant high level of publicity granted by commentators tosomealthough notallof the evaluation...

The introduction of Sure Start Local Programmes (SSLPs) in 1999 presented a significant shift in the way family life with very young children was regarded by central government in the UK. Hitherto this had been largely a private space in which intervention was not a normal occurrence unless some crisis of health, child protection or family failure had occurred. The SSLP approach, however, was to be universal, proactive and preventative, to change the way service providers and others worked with families and the way parents in deprived communities reared young children.

The intervention also reflected a general shift in conceptual...

The cost-effectiveness evaluation of Sure Start Local Programmes (SSLPs) is integrated with the implementation, impact and local context components of the National Evaluation of Sure Start (NESS) (see Chapters Two, Five and Eight). This chapter discusses the underlying principles of economic evaluation of social interventions, and briefly considers the difference between cost-effectiveness evaluation and cost-benefit analysis. It goes on to describe the relationship between the NESS cost-effectiveness work and related aspects of the evaluation. Included are discussions about which costs should be taken into account in addition to the expenditure of SSLPs themselves and how they might be measured, an...

Sure Start Local Programmes (SSLPs) were intended to break the intergenerational transmission of poverty, school failure and social exclusion by enhancing the life chances for children less than four years of age growing up in disadvantaged neighbourhoods. More importantly, they were intended to do so in a manner rather different from almost any other intervention undertaken in the western world. What made them so different was theirarea-basednature, withallchildren under four and their families living in a prescribed deprived area serving as the ‘targets’ of intervention. This resulted in the need for a distinct approach to evaluation,...

Sure Start Local Programmes (SSLPs) were true community interventions (see Barnes et al, 2006), in that all children under four and their families in an area were ‘targets’ of intervention. As discussed in Chapter One, community control was emphasised and was to be exercised through local partnership management boards. These boards brought together all stakeholders in the community concerned with children (that is, health services, social services, education, the private sector, the voluntary sector and parents). The placing of almost complete control with the community meant that there was very little specification of how to provide services, only what they...

The Local Context Analysis (LCA) team of the National Evaluation of Sure Start (NESS) had two main tasks, the first of which was discussed in Chapter Two and involved describing the areas in which Sure Start Local Programmes (SSLPs) were situated. The second task, the results of which are summarised in this chapter, was to document change over time in SSLP neighbourhoods, based on the boundaries originally specified when SSLPs were first implemented, between 1999 and 2002.¹ This task was considered of great importance because extent of change over timemightreflect a community-level impact of SSLPs, although it is...

This volume provides a most valuable, thoughtful account of both the origins of Sure Start Local Programmes (SSLPs) and what they have achieved so far. My assignment was to provide an independent assessment of the initiative as a whole, insofar as it can be judged at this rather early stage. I approach that task wearing the hat of a clinician who has throughout his career been concerned with preventive and therapeutic interventions, that of an epidemiologist concerned with the study of risk and protective factors for psychological outcomes, and that of a methodologist concerned with the critical examination of the...