Children with Sure Start access got better GCSEs

The Institute of Fiscal Studies has published a study looking at the short and medium-term impacts of Sure Start centres on educational outcomes.

It found that children who lived within a short distance of a Sure Start centre for their first five years performed 0.8 grades better in their GCSEs. These are average impacts across all children living near a centre, regardless of whether those families used the centre.

The impacts are larger for children from the poorest backgrounds and those from non-white backgrounds. By the time they took their GCSEs, effects were six times higher for those eligible for free school meals than for those not eligible for them. Positive effects for those from the poorest backgrounds were spread across white and non-white children. For those not eligible for free school meals, Sure Start only significantly improved attainment amongst children from ethnic minorities.

Access to a nearby Sure Start centre at early ages increased the likelihood of children being recorded as having a special educational need or disability (SEND) at age 5, but significantly decreased the proportion of children recorded as having a SEND at ages 11 and 16 by 3%. By age 16, the probability of having an Education, Health and Care Plan decreased by 9% (or over 1,000 children a year). Further analysis suggests that Sure Start likely increased reporting of need for some children while reducing the actual need for support for others.

These positive impacts of Sure Start are entirely driven by children who lived near centres that opened between 1999 and 2003, known as Sure Start Local Programmes (SSLPs), rather than Sure Start Children’s Centres (SSCCs), which opened subsequently. This remained true even after centres that opened as SSLPs were rebranded as SSCCs. Centres opened as SSLPs had much larger budgets than SSCCs even after 2003. Much of this extra budget was spent on parental outreach, focused on reaching out to families who were less likely to use and more likely to benefit from Sure Start. Until 2003, Local Programmes also had much more community input into what programmes were offered.

Under the assumption that Sure Start only benefited children whose families used its services, the IFS calculated that the benefits of using a Sure Start centre are around three times as large as the average impact on all children in the area.

By its peak in 2010, total spending on Sure Start was around £2.5 billion in today’s prices, across both former SSLPs and SSCCs. The programme’s benefits in reducing the cost of SEND support for the government offset around 8% of this cost. More significant are the benefits for children from better attainment in the form of higher lifetime earnings; we estimate that for every £1 the government spent on Sure Start, there were benefits to attending children worth £1.09, solely through school outcomes.

These results provide further evidence that intervening in early childhood to promote child development through holistic family support can yield important dividends when programmes are well designed and funded. The cost–benefit ratio reported here is modest, but masks substantial impacts among the poorest families and among ethnic minorities. Moreover, the benefits of the programme are likely underestimated as they do not incorporate benefits to the exchequer in terms of increased tax revenue and reduced welfare spending, nor savings from reduced hospitalisations found in previous work.