Is Sure Start coming back? It seems it would be welcome, if it were. Since Labour returned to power last year, with early years support a key promise in its manifesto, there have been calls for the relaunch of New Labour’s flagship early years programme, which saw “one-stop-shop” children’s centres set up in every region of England, bringing services for under-five-year-olds under one roof.
By 2010 there were 3,290 children’s centres, with 83% of four-year-olds having local access to Sure Start provision. Pensions minister Torsten Bell has referred to subsequent closures of Sure Start centres as “criminal”, while former prime minister Gordon Brown has called for the return of the programme as part of a “rescue plan” for children born under austerity. Hilary Armstrong, Labour peer and chair of the Independent Commission on Neighbourhoods, has said the commission’s polling found the Sure Start brand is recognised by 62% of the public, and that 72% would welcome its return.
Appeals for the programme to be reinstated have coincided with the children who were born in the Sure Start era reaching adulthood. The Institute of Fiscal Studies has been able to demonstrate, in a study published last year, that the programme had far-reaching benefits for those children, their families and wider society. The IFS evaluation found a causal relationship between children who had access to a Sure Start centre and a 0.9 percentage point increase in the probability of obtaining five A*-C grades at GCSE. Children with access to Sure Start were 0.7 percentage points less likely to require a Special Educational Needs support plan at age 16, and were at least 10% less likely to be hospitalised for external causes during their early and primary school years. There was also suggestive evidence that Sure Start reduced the likelihood of criminal convictions and custodial sentences.
And these societal benefits appear to have been cost negative in the long run: the IFS estimates that for every £1 of up-front spending, Sure Start generated £2.05 in benefits.
No wonder the launch this summer of a new early years strategy, Giving every child the best start in life – to be jointly delivered by the Department for Education and the Department of Health and Social Care – was met with excitement. In July, Polly Toynbee wrote in The Guardian that education secretary Bridget Phillipson was “finally bringing back Sure Start to England – the most successful achievement of the last Labour government – now rebranded as Best Start family hubs”. The comparison is also there in the strategy itself. It pledges to “take the best of Sure Start” when developing Best Start family hubs, which are to be established in every local authority in England, using the “one-stop-shop” model. The family hubs, “like Sure Start, will be designed with local communities”, the strategy says.
Taking the best from Sure Start would seem a logical decision, given the IFS findings. As Estelle Morris, education secretary under New Labour from 2001 to 2002, put it: “Why would anyone want to waste time and resources constantly reinventing the wheel when there is good, strong evidence about what works?” But is the comparison a valid one? And if Best Start is essentially a rebranded Sure Start, can we dare to hope that Best Start could deliver similar outcomes to its predecessor?
Sarah Cattan led on the evaluation of Sure Start for the IFS and is also director of the Fairer Start mission at the innovation agency Nesta, which aims to improve outcomes for disadvantaged children. She is hesitant to draw too strong a comparison between the two programmes. She doubts it would even be possible to bring back Sure Start in its original form, for a number of reasons.
“The lion’s share of spending in the early years system is directed at growth, not the opportunity mission”
Nehal Davison, IfG
Firstly, she says: “We know about the impacts that Sure Start had on children and families from the IFS evaluation and the government-commissioned evaluations that were conducted while the programme was in place. But we’re still far from knowing exactly what the centres were doing and for whom.” Although Sure Start staff did keep data on who attended centres and which services they used, this data was not collated or retained. Sure Start is therefore “a little bit of a black box in the sense of knowing exactly why it was so effective”.
Secondly, she points out: “Families live differently now in 2025 than they did in the early 2000s. Mothers are more likely to work than they were back then, and that also means children are spending more time in childcare or early education from a younger age.” We also need to take into account the huge changes in the way we interact with technology, Cattan says, and consider the best way of reaching out to families and ensuring that they make use of services.
A third significant difference between the Sure Start era and today is that “we have 25 more years of scientific research and evidence”, Cattan says. There is much more evidence now about how to manage children’s emotions and behaviours, or how to promote language development through play, for example. “We’ve got to take into account what we’ve learned about what programmes are effective. Evidence-based programmes weren’t necessarily a central feature of Sure Start.”
This knowledge, coupled with progress in the collection of data on outcomes for families, should allow the Best Start service both to “target services to families better, but also to be able to monitor and more continuously evaluate what the programme is doing, better than we were able to 25 years ago”, Cattan says. There is potential, then, for Best Start to offer a more tailored and evidence-based service, benefiting from the lessons learned from Sure Start and from advances in technology. Could Best Start prove even more effective than its predecessor?
Nehal Davison, programme director for policymaking at the Institute for Government, thinks it’s important to manage expectations. She describes the ambition of Best Start as “similar-ish” to that of Sure Start. But she notes that Sure Start was “much tighter in scope”, focusing very much on children’s first five years. Best Start, meanwhile, will provide services for young people up to age 19 – up to 25 for those with SEN – an offer that was introduced under the Sunak government and is to be retained. Alongside this, Best Start promises to improve maternity care, strengthen health visiting services, increase access to vaccinations and reduce tooth decay in children.
“Best Start is more ambitious in terms of the expanded age range, supporting children as they grow and transition to adulthood,” Davison says. “But [Best Start] family hubs are just not backed by the same level of investment that made Sure Start possible and incredibly successful. Best Start really does aim to do something much broader, but on a much leaner budget. And prior to 2010, budgets were generous, but also ringfenced.”
This point is reinforced by Christine Farquharson, associate director at the IFS, in the institute’s response to the Best Start in Life strategy: “Spending on integrated early years services today will be less than a third as high as peak spending on Sure Start. And family hubs are meant to serve children up to age 19, not just age four.”
“If you don’t have a lot of money, let’s just try to do one thing really, really well”
Sarah Cattan, IFS
Cattan shares this concern about money: “I do worry that this is going to be a big impediment to realising the benefits of this kind of approach,” she says. “We’re talking about a much smaller funding envelope from central government. We know that local authorities are spending some of their own budgets on early years services, but that also means funding is a lot more vulnerable than when it was ringfenced.”
Clearly Best Start is launching into a far less favourable fiscal situation to that of the Sure Start era. As Cattan points out, “the welfare state was just expanding alongside Sure Start, and I don’t think we’re going to see that today. So that is another difference that I think is going to be quite a challenge”. But the fiscal situation alone does not explain the smaller funding envelope for Best Start in comparison to Sure Start. As Davison points out, government has chosen to prioritise investment in free childcare provision for working parents – meaning that 80% of pre-school childcare in England will be state-funded from September 2025 – over its funding of early years programmes.
Funding for the latest extension of the free childcare rollout – according to IFS figures – could reach £5bn a year by 2028-29. This alone is ten times the £500m for Best Start. Davison sees this as a “major challenge” to its long-term success: “The lion’s share of spending in the early years system is directed at growth, not the opportunity mission,” she says. “And we know that childcare entitlements actually do little to alleviate inequalities. They could in fact worsen them.” Private providers are likely to focus on the parents who can afford to pay more, she explains, “which may squeeze out spaces for disadvantaged children”.
Linked to this is another difference between current early years policy and that of the early 2000s. “When Sure Start started, it had a very strong focus on the 20% most deprived areas of England,” Cattan says – new centres in more affluent areas opened later, with the original programme target doubling by 2004. “It was really a programme for poor areas and then it changed over time.”
Best Start, by contrast, aims to have a family hub in each local authority from the outset. “I don’t think we’re seeing such a strong focus on disadvantage from Best Start,” Cattan says. “The evidence from our evaluation would suggest that it’s children in disadvantaged areas who tended to benefit the most.” She is concerned that the ambition to have “at least one hub everywhere” could be a problem, unless there’s sharp targeting within areas.
Like Davison, Cattan thinks the broader scope of Best Start could be problematic, partly because it lacks clarity of purpose. “This is a programme for age zero to 19, which also wants to be really focused on early years,” Cattan says. “What do people do with this?” She also fears that “in some cases, it is going to dilute the resources that would be available for zero to five. So I’d say, if you don’t have a lot of money, let’s just try to do one thing really, really well. And this means making very difficult choices.”
Despite these concerns and reservations, there is a lot to celebrate.
“Honestly, I think the government deserves a lot of praise,” Cattan says. “First, we have an early years strategy. It has not happened in ages, and the early years sector has been craving some intention-setting and direction from the centre, so I think the strategy is really starting to provide that.”
“What I think is really ambitious and innovative,” Davison says, “is the fact that the strategy, for the first time, recognises that government needs to actively steward the childcare market for outcomes and, crucially, steward it for quality and access, not just expansion.”
Davison makes the point that rather than asking whether Best Start is comparable to Sure Start, we should see it as building on the groundwork that its predecessor put in place. “It does build on Sure Start,” she says. “It does connect the dots between health, education and other services to provide a clearer offer to families. And there’s also a much-needed recognition that so much happens before children start school.” What’s more, says Davison, this strategy is an example of government working holistically – something that the IfG frequently calls for. “I think DfE does deserve credit for not just focusing on the levers it controls, but also matching the commitments made in the 10-year health plan around improving maternity care and bolstering health visiting,” she says.
Cattan, meanwhile, is happy that government has set itself “an ambitious target”, which she hopes will motivate and organise those responsible for delivery. “Whether you like the ‘good level of development’ target or not – and we can debate that – there is now a clear metric that everybody can rally around,” she says.
Davison has views on the “good level of development” target that Cattan is referring to: the goal driving the opportunities mission, which aims for 75% of children to be school-ready when starting reception as they turn five. Local areas are asked to develop local Best Start plans to steer them towards achieving this goal by 2028. “The question is whether local authorities have that capability,” Davison says, referring to the market-shaping role around childcare provision, where she believes more support is needed. “I think local areas probably know how to deliver more transactional services like waste collections,” she says. “But in more complex areas like childhood development, where you’re trying to hit multiple goals around affordability as well as quality and tackling inequality – that does require much more sophisticated market-shaping skills.”
Davison also questions how the data feeding into the target will be monitored. “While central government might think the good level of development measure is a reliable and objective marker of success, we know that it’s only a subjective, teacher-assessed ‘best guess’ indicator of a child’s development,” she says. “And because there is no external moderation, there’s a real risk that it could be gamed by schools. Headline targets could be met, while leaving underlying inequalities or issues untouched.”
There is a lack of detail around implementation at this point, Cattan says, which presents a challenge: “One of the things that wasn’t super-clear in the strategy is whether this is a three-year strategy, or a 10-year strategy. But there’s definitely a sense that this is more long-term thinking than anything we’ve seen for years in this space,” she says. “The devil will be in some of the details.”
Can we hope, given the challenges but also the ambition and innovation in this strategy, that Best Start might achieve comparable outcomes to Sure Start?
“There is a lot of potential,” says Cattan. “But a lot of whether or not the Best Start programme will have an impact is around how it’s actually going to play out on the ground, and what difference it’s going to make to what’s currently happening. That’s what will determine whether outcomes are shifting or not as a result.” The risk, Cattan says, lies in the school-readiness target asking for measurable progress by 2028, which is only three years away. “In an environment where there isn’t a lot of money, where the time horizon is fairly short, and where the delivery questions are intrinsically difficult, there’s also a risk that not a lot of big change actually occurs,” she says.
She suggests that in such a challenging context, it’s vital to keep very focused: “Decisive leadership will be essential to drive behaviours, like a North Star.” Davison also picks out the challenge around time: “The programme needs to survive a short parliamentary cycle, and it needs cross-party consensus,” she says.
“I think it’s worth remembering that Sure Start went through many iterations over the years as ministers changed,” Davison continues. “We only know now, many years down the line, that it was effective. So this is just the start of re-building that more integrated family services approach. And the only way it’s going to deliver better outcomes is if the foundations are sustained. The local relationships and infrastructure need to endure well beyond the next three years, well beyond the 2028 milestone. If they do, then I think it’s got a chance of delivering some of the same outcomes that Sure Start did.”
The biggest risk, for Davison, is that priorities change and momentum is lost. “We’ve just got to keep building,” she says.