August 31, 2007
Sure Start is bearing fruit and promises more
Sir, We’re not surprised that Sure Start has had no effect on the vocabulary, ability to count or recognise letters, shapes and rhymes of preschool children. (“£3bn scheme to help preschool children learn has had no effect”, Aug 28). Its main intention, along with New Deal, the Child Support Agency and supposed free nursery care for all three-year-olds was to get mothers on benefits into work.
Where are the figures to show that dusk-to-dawn cleaning, working on supermarket cash tills, in sweatshops and factories, lifts mothers and children out of poverty? Mothers are the lowest paid of all workers, earning less than other women who receive only 82 per cent of men’s wages for full-time work, much less for part-time. Black women can expect 32 per cent less than white women.
Things are on course to get worse for children from toddlers to teenagers as 70 per cent of mothers on welfare are to be targeted by the Government for waged work by 2010. Instead of valuing mothers’ vital work of caring for and educating our children by giving us time, benefits and resources, we are forced to be available as cheap labour to maximise the profits of industry. Government advisers on this are investment bankers, after all.
KIM SPARROW, Single Mothers’ Self-Defence, Crossroads Women’s Centre, London NW5
From
August 28, 2007
£3bn scheme to help pre-school children learn ‘has had no effect’
Alexandra Frean Education Editor
A £3 billion series of policies designed to boost the achievements of pre-school children has had no effect on the development levels of those entering primary school, a study suggests.
Although there have been big changes in early years education, children’s vocabulary and their ability to count and to recognise letters, shapes and rhymes are no different now than they were six years ago.
The results of the study from the University of Durham will come as a huge blow to the Government after a string of initiatives that have cost more than £3 billion since 2001 and that include the early childhood curriculum, the Sure Start programme, free nursery education for all three-year-olds and the Every Child Matters initiative.
Tony Blair and Gordon Brown made much of the drive to improve pre-school education, which was promoted heavily in Labour’s last general election manifesto.
The findings follow the results of an assessment of the Sure Start programme in 2005, which also found no overall improvement in the areas targeted by the scheme.
Sure Start, which was influenced by the Head Start programme in the US, is targeted at children aged up to 5 and their families in deprived areas. It is intended to offer a range of early years services, including health advice, childcare, parenting classes and training to help mothers into work.
Christine Merrell, of the University of Durham’s Curriculum, Evaluation and Management Centre and co-author of the study, said that she had no idea why the investment of so much public money had produced so few results. “One would have expected that the major government programmes would have resulted in some measurable changes in our sample of almost 35,000 children. It is possible, however, that it is just still too early to measure the effects of these programmes, particularly those of the Children Act and Every Child Matters, which were only introduced in the past few years,” she said.
Dr Merrell and her team studied 6,000 children a year aged 4 and 5 at 124 primary schools. The children were asked to complete a 15-minute series of fun activities on a computer and were not aware that they were being tested. The tests were designed to measure the children’s vocabulary acquisition and whether they could recognise rhyming words and repeat certain sounds. The children were also tested on their ability to count and to recognise shapes, letters and words.
No clear progress was detected on these measures among the 35,000 children from a range of backgrounds who were studied over the course of the six-year study, to be presented today at the biennial European Association for Learning and Instruction conference in Budapest. Dr Merrell admitted that the study was limited because it failed to identify which children, if any, had been subject to contact with Sure Start or any other of the Government’s recent pre-school initiatives. However, given that 35,000 children in 124 schools were assessed, she said it was likely that many had taken part in the initiatives. She said that the research highlighted the importance of subjecting education policies to continuous scientific monitoring to see if they were working before introducing them nationally. “Even then, high-quality data needs to be used to track the impact of the evolving intervention. Only then can the Government really measure what does and doesn’t work in education,” she said.
The research used the Centre’s performance indicators in primary schools (Pips) assessment to measure the cognitive development of the children. The Pips baseline assessment is one of a range of assessments that enable schools to monitor children’s progress. Pips is used by more than 3,000 primary schools in Britain, 800 schools in Australia and others worldwide including New Zealand, the Netherlands and South Africa.