Education Committee
Oral evidence: Early years: improving support for children and families, HC 211
Tuesday 30 June 2026
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 30 June 2026.
Members present: Helen Hayes (Chair); Jess Asato; Jodie Gosling; Dr Caroline Johnson; Darren Paffey; Rebecca Paul; Manuela Perteghella; Mark Sewards; Caroline Voaden.
Questions 196 - 228
Witnesses
I: Dr Samantha Callan OBE, Director and Co-founder, family hubs Network; Sir David Holmes CBE, CEO, Family Action; Christine Farquharson, Associate Director, Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS); Eavan Mckay, Policy and Public Affairs Manager, National Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC).
Witnesses: Dr Samantha Callan OBE, Sir David Holmes CBE, Christine Farquharson and Eavan Mckay.
Q196 Chair: Welcome to this oral evidence session of the Education Committee. This is the penultimate evidence session in the Committee’s inquiry on the early years. I welcome members and witnesses to our evidence session this morning and I invite witnesses to introduce themselves to us, please.
Christine Farquharson: I am an associate director at the Institute for Fiscal Studies and a co-director of the new DFE-funded Economics of Education Research Centre.
Eavan Mckay: I am policy and public affairs manager at the NSPCC.
Sir David Holmes: I am the chief executive of Family Action.
Dr Callan: I am the director of the family hubs Network and I was the Government’s independent reviewer of the Child Maintenance Service’s response to domestic abuse.
Q197 Chair: Thank you. I will begin our questioning this morning. Can I ask each of you to briefly say how you interpret the Government’s phrase, “Giving every child the best possible start in life”?
Dr Callan: There is a good, broad definition of this and I am just going to emphasise the communication and language side, personal, social, emotional and physical development. There are other aspects but these areas have been somewhat neglected over the last maybe quarter of a century. School readiness is not simply being able to sit still and be toilet trained; for example, what is a child hearing at home? It is these other areas where the home learning environment is absolutely essential.
Sir David Holmes: For me and Family Action, giving a child the best start in life means reaching every family without exception. It means ensuring that all children have the strongest possible foundations all the way from pre-birth to age five. It is about creating environments where children can develop, learn and thrive, regardless of their background or circumstances. It is about ensuring equal opportunities for every child, their carers and their parents. It is about building trusted relationships with families and recognising their strengths, not just their needs. Vitally, support should be accessible, consistent and preventive; walking alongside families at all times and not just in times of crisis.
Q198 Chair: You mentioned good foundations for children. What do we mean by that? What is it that we are wanting for every single child?
Sir David Holmes: For me it is about helping parents and carers to create safe, nurturing environments where children can develop: they can explore, they can play and they can be secure in the attachments they are making with their parents, in the progress that they are making, but also in just being safe little children.
Eavan Mckay: For me, giving every child the best start in life captures a long-overdue national focus on the crucial early years of a child’s life and the need to get things right at the outset. We know from research that those earliest years are critical moments of cognitive, physical and emotional development that provide the building blocks for future outcomes; but they are also some of the most vulnerable months and years in a child’s life. Babies and infants cannot communicate in the same way that older children do, so they are entirely reliant on the adults around them to be their eyes and ears and to keep them safe. We were really pleased to see the best start strategy speak to this bold vision for early intervention, focusing on a joined-up approach to giving children the best start in life.
Christine Farquharson: Echoing what Eavan says, a really important part of this is recognising both the importance of the early years, and the funding that is starting to flow in that direction. For me, the best start in life is also about understanding that children’s lives are complex and multidimensional. It is not just about intervening to support academic attainment; it is also thinking about physical health, mental health, that child’s place in the community—and underpinning all of that, as Eavan says, their safety and their wellbeing. It is not just Government’s gift to give every child the best start in life, an important part of that has to be recognising that although Government can set the institutions, the policies, and the funding, fundamentally this is down to parents and families, as well as the workforce, to actually deliver on providing that best start.
Q199 Chair: A couple of you have mentioned this already, but can I ask whether you think the Government are delivering on their objective of giving every child the best possible start in life through the early years strategy that they have published?
Sir David Holmes: There are lots of good intentions, there is a lot of money going into early years, and there is a big focus on family help. A key challenge is to make sure that offer reaches every family and every child who needs it, and not just those who are in a position to benefit from it. There are lots of learnings from Sure Start and so on about the importance of proactively reaching out into communities and working with all partners to make sure that every child is being reached. If we are really trying to ensure that the next generation is going to be able to thrive and move on, then we need to reach everybody. That is a huge challenge: making sure that policy actually translates into reaching every child.
Dr Callan: I would say this, would I not, as the director of the family hubs Network, but I really appreciate this Government has spread family hubs across all local authorities. People have talked about learning from Sure Start—obviously Christine will probably say more about this—but the IFS research shows the very good, long-term effects of Sure Start. There was a sense in that research that the original Sure Start local programmes had a larger positive effect than those opened during the later children’s centre expansion. There was more funding per child, but they were also more community-led; there was more parental involvement, and there was more intensive, integrated support. While family hubs are absolutely essential to the institutional delivery arm of what the Government are trying to do in the early years, as Christine has already said, we must not lose sight of the fact that it is parents who are going to raise the next generation. We have a real dearth of parenting confidence across the country that will not just go away.
David mentioned the next generation, so I would just finish by saying that I did a report for the Centre for Social Justice in 2008 called “Breakthrough Britain: The Next Generation.” We found this Canadian national longitudinal study, delightfully named McCain and Mustard. It followed nought to six-year-olds across those years, and it concluded that if poverty were eradicated—we absolutely want poverty to diminish to zero if possible—there would only be a 10% reduction in the number of children experiencing behavioural, social, educational and health difficulties. We cannot put all our eggs into the finance or state intervention baskets: it is about upskilling parents so we have a major uptick in parenting confidence.
Eavan Mckay: There are a number of barriers—we will get into lots of them—but I want to start by thinking about the workforce. We simply cannot discuss this without talking about the huge challenges facing the workforce. The NSPCC published research just last month that spoke to parents accessing early years services. It highlighted that health visitors and health workers were some of the most trusted kinds of messengers to signpost early support services, such as family hubs. Yet we know that health visiting numbers have absolutely plummeted. There has been a staggering 45% reduction in health visitors over the last decade, falling from approximately 10,200 to about 5,575. That is a shocking statistic, really. That steep decline is obviously due to a lot of things, including local authority budgets and staff burnout but, to me, it feels crucial that this needs to be addressed to actually resolve lots of those wider issues.
We talk about health visitors being the eyes and ears of the youngest children; they are the only professionals that see every single child, nought to five, regularly. We had a refresh of the healthy child programme recently that signalled the need for in-person visits. We know those visits are extremely important for safeguarding the youngest children, spotting concerns in the home and getting support at the earliest point, as is the importance of continuity of care, such as having the same health visitor. But we know that those things are not going to be possible without actually replenishing numbers and rebuilding that workforce. That feels like a really crucial point to draw out at the beginning.
Christine Farquharson: Well, the ambition here is huge and this Government, as well as previous Governments, have tried to put resources in to match that. In a genuinely constrained period for public finances, the early years is one of the very few growth areas for public services. There really is a lot more resource being directed there. However, the profile of how that resource is spent has changed a lot too.
We have seen a lot less emphasis on integrated family services, such as Sure Start, though there has been a bit of an uptick in recent years. We have seen much more emphasis on childcare entitlements that seem to be targeted around supporting parents who are in work. That is not a silly aim to have by any stretch of the imagination. But looking back over the last 25 years, the early years system has often been pulled back in one direction and the other between supporting children to have that best start in life and supporting parents looking to take on paid employment. That has made it more difficult for both Government and the workforce to build up a continuity of approach and, really importantly, to build up the evidence base as well.
One thing that Dr Callan touched on very nicely is that we are putting more resource into the early years space. We have some sense of a toolkit, but there are huge questions left unanswered about what works, for whom it works, why it works, and how we can stack these interventions together. Without a commensurate focus on how that money is spent, or how we can build the evidence to understand later on how to spend it better, putting ever more resource in would be a strategic error at this point.
Q200 Mark Sewards: Good morning, everybody. Dr Callan, you have already touched on this in some of your answers, but what are the main systemic barriers—policies, funding, structures, wider systems—to giving every child the best possible start in life? What changes are needed to genuinely improve outcomes for disadvantaged children?
Dr Callan: A huge question, but absolutely the right one. What we cannot do is lose sight of the importance of upskilling parents. I work with lots of local authorities and they buy parenting packages. You get these online for a certain number of users, but they are not very economically efficient because a lot of them go unused. We need to find a way of helping parents realise that by doing a parenting course, an intervention, or even a one-to-one session in a family hub, it is not saying you are failing in any way. You do not know how to parent just by giving birth, especially if there is a dearth of antenatal support. As anybody who has been through antenatal classes will know, you are really just being prepped for the labour itself, which is obviously hugely important.
I could touch on lots of things, but one thing I would say that Christine has touched on is there is such an emphasis on paid work when children are very small—we do not have the choice in our country. If you want to look after your own child, it is almost impossible. It is becoming a luxury to be, I say at home with the children, but actually most people who are at home with their children are out most of the day because it is very hard being inside all day with children: they go to parks, they go to museums, they do all sorts of things, even with tiny children. The DFE’s own research shows that 70% are not using childcare because they want to look after their own children. Two thirds of mothers with children under four would rather work fewer hours, and that has been an upward trend over the last 10 years. One of the ingredients of our demographic difficulty is fewer babies being born.
Agan, I will let other people say a lot of other things. We talk so much about nurture in the early years, but if people are doing it in the time bind—utter time famine—then we are asking them to do the impossible.
Q201 Mark Sewards: Just very briefly on the first point you made: parents are not failing if they go to those classes—those are incredibly helpful. But clearly, Sure Start had a tremendous impact. Did Sure Start have a better way of addressing those taboos than what we have currently?
Dr Callan: Good question. Norman Glass, the fantastic architect of Sure Start, wrote a Guardian article in 2005 called “Surely Some Mistake”, By 2005, after a fantastic start with the Sure Start local programmes, the scaling up, that we all wanted, came at the cost of the nurture and the development of the child. Being a policy emphasis it became much more about, “Let’s make sure there is plenty of childcare.” I would not want to pit Sure Start against family hubs: family hubs can learn a huge amount from the really successful aspects of Sure Start. But one thing that was not as explicit then as it is now is the relational emphasis in family hubs. The DFE’s own guidance in 2022 had three pillars: relationships, connection and access. It was just wonderful to see the word relationships in government policy. It might have been there in Sure Start, but now it is much more implicit. Take things such as reducing parental conflict: we talk about parenting, but if two parents are really struggling in their relationship with each other, then a parenting class will often not even scratch the side.
Sir David Holmes: I am going to speak from a service delivery perspective because that is what Family Action does, and I am going to broaden it out to beyond childcare to be thinking about early years and early help as well. It is really important that we go back to that point about systems being really difficult for families to navigate. How do we make it possible for people to get the right help at the right time, in the right way for them? Otherwise, when families have lots of things going on, we risk overwhelming them. This can lead to them not engaging, not getting the support they need at the right time, and things eventually escalating into a crisis.
Samantha has already said something very important about working relationally to build trust. That is one of the things the voluntary sector is really good at: knowing the communities we work in, building that trust, adapting our service provision for different communities with unique needs, and ensuring we are as responsive as possible. But it is also about designing really flexible services that recognise that families work shifts and there are different types of families with different kinds of issues going on. It is about making sure that support is available when people need it, whether it is digitally, in person, via a drop-in, through outreach or by going to a centre. We need to avoid creating fixed models that fail to reflect the variety and complexity of family life.
There is a big issue here around building parental confidence as well. It is not just about the state providing services, it is about recognising that parenting is hard. It is hard for everybody, but it is harder still if your housing is insecure, if your finances are insecure, if you have conflict in your relationship. It is being realistic about how we design services that meet different people’s needs in the right way.
Q202 Mark Sewards: Are there any specific changes you think Government should make around service level barriers?
Sir David Holmes: It is recognising that the design of services needs to be really flexible. If you look across a local community—not just at statutory partners, but also at the contributions of the voluntary sector, community groups, and digital offers—you can actually design really exciting and innovative services that reach people and are exactly what they want. But you have to have that imagination, and you have to know your community as well.
Q203 Mark Sewards: Eavan, what are the systemic barriers and how do we change them?
Eavan Mckay: A lot has already been touched on that I would agree with, but something I heard yesterday at an event on family hubs was that the system has become obsessed with systems rather than relationships, and that just feels like a consistent thread that really runs through a lot of what we have said to the Committee today. When I started talking about the workforce at the beginning, the reason is because, actually, the impact on shortages in the workforce on families and children results in reduced targeted outreach work where they are making sure they are reaching the right people and disadvantaged families in particular: rushed appointments, inconsistent support, and less opportunity to really build those trusted relationships.
If we are talking about how to improve access for the most disadvantaged families—where they might be facing financial strain or living in poverty—then our 2024 research, “Too Little, Too Late”, highlighted this. Looking at multi-agency professionals and their confidence levels in identifying and responding to neglect, the research showed a strong sense that amid rising levels of poverty, neglect was becoming more prevalent. This is because of the immense strain that poverty places on families. Reduced mental health and rising parental stress levels can all work to overload families, making parenting much more challenging and difficult when the right support is not in place.
But professionals were telling us they did not feel confident addressing what was right there in the room. This wallpaper of practice was becoming normalised, when it actually needed to be addressed to tackle those support needs, whether that meant connecting families with the right people, housing support, or other services. They were worried about increasing stigma and had all these associated concerns. Therefore, things such as poverty aware training for all staff working in places such as family hubs feels really crucial to us, so they have the confidence level to address the specific issues facing families.
David talked about innovative ways of designing services; seeking the views of families feels really crucial. There are lots of really good examples around the country. For example, Blackpool Better Start, where it has worked really closely with families from the earliest point to seek their views and to co-design the services they need.
Again, we have briefly touched on outreach work and making sure that the right families—those we want to get into these services—are coming in. Our research showed that it is often the families who need the services the most who are not accessing them, so that is a huge barrier. There is also brilliant evidence and learning around organisations with family navigator roles and their effectiveness; these are non-professionalised, non-agency specific roles that work with and alongside families. They often seek to recruit people who they feel represent the community, not the profession; that they can relate to parents on that sort of level and the evidence has shown that they really help families navigate the system.
We are pleased that it is referenced in the guidance, but there is not a designated funding pot and resource is not mandated; it is not specified as something that needs to happen in every family hub. But there is lots of interesting learning from places that we can look to address some of these critical barriers.
Q204 Mark Sewards: I am getting from this that there needs to be more flexibility and it needs to be co-designed with parents.
Christine Farquharson: You have heard a lot of expertise about service level barriers. I am going to hold up my hands: I am not an expert. But when I think about system level barriers, I start by thinking, “What is the problem we are trying to solve and what interventions do we know actually work?” There has been a little optimism bias in the early years sector more broadly, that says, “We’ll just do early years and automatically we’re going to have brilliantly educated children, we’re going to have parents who are happily working, we’re going to have families saving lots of money, basically as long as we can put an early years label on the tin.” That is a little naive. There are more fundamental choices to be made and interrogating the evidence base we have is the right place to start.
Once you have an intervention that you are confident is going to work, the next question is who is going to be eligible for that? Particularly with the funded childcare offer, we have seen a real tilt away from the most income disadvantaged, towards working families who pretty much definitionally, mechanically, have higher incomes. Once you have the eligibility criteria nailed, then the question becomes, who is actually using and benefiting from this service? Where I think the perspectives of the other panellists have been really valuable. Then, the final piece is to take a wider context. Dr Callan is absolutely right in her read on the evidence of family finances; that is an important factor. It is not the only one. But wider factors such as family stress, housing insecurity, parents’ access to employment and ability to maintain a job alongside looking after their kids if that is what they want to do. All these things are complex factors that really Government are best positioned to take a look at society as a whole and ask whether that is set up to support families.
Q205 Mark Sewards: You talked there about fundamental questions that just focusing on early years will not resolve. What are those questions?
Christine Farquharson: There are tensions here. If you wanted to design a system that is all about supporting child development, you are probably looking at, in the very earliest years, programmes such as Sure Start, home visiting programmes, and a lot of parenting and family support. The evidence base is stronger there than the evidence base for formal childcare. That is not to say that formal childcare is necessarily harmful—although some studies suggest it could be—but if we are thinking about where the strongest evidence is, parents in those very earliest years are very important. Once you hit about age two or three, the evidence base for formal care becomes a lot stronger.
Q206 Darren Paffey: Thinking about different interventions that these policies lead to, we know that Best Start family hubs are designed to bring that joined up, effective and, importantly, accessible support for families in the early years. Dr Callan, in your view, what are the core services that the Best Start family hubs have to deliver if they are going to be most effective in supporting disadvantaged children and families? What is the impact you believe those core services can lead to?
Dr Callan: There is a textbook answer to this and there is an answer that says it is bigger and more subtly nuanced, especially around relationships. The textbook answer is, the Best Start family hubs core offer has come very much from Andrea Leadsom’s “Early Years Healthy Development Review” that I, along with a lot of other people, was involved in.
She rightly highlighted—and this became the core offer—activities for children aged nought to five, which is quite general with some parenting in there: early language; the home learning environment, again, that was less emphasised in Sure Start so it is so good to see that; parenting support; early childhood education and care; financial support, including how you access tax-free childcare, which is hard to understand even when you have a PhD; infant feeding support; parent-infant relationships; perinatal mental health support. This is what the Government’s guidance covers and the metrics that will be demanded from local authorities. Obviously, if you do not bond with your child, or if you have no idea what you are doing and are just very uncertain, it can be incredibly difficult. We need to help parents get these things right from the outset.
Feeding is massive. It is so sad but people think, “If I give my child a ready meal, that is bound to be healthier than anything I can cook.” One thing I would love to see all family hubs do is teach parents how to cook. Now that sounds terribly paternalistic, but it is not actually. Anecdotal evidence shows that people have felt very empowered by learning what to do with things such as butternut squash from the food bank, rather than thinking, “Well, what do I do with that?” Learning how to cook nutritionally is giving parents huge help.
I would say family hubs were always meant to be five to 19, or 25 for special needs, and there is a need for it to be nought to 19. If you have a brand new baby and you have a 13-year-old who you think is in a gang, or you know he is in a gang and you are not sure what he is doing, you need help with that, probably more than the baby because that is the crisis in your life. If right from the word go, before you even give birth, there is conflict or abuse, what are we doing to help those parents? There is a lot of separation in the earliest years, especially if you are cohabiting, because your relationship has been hit by the truck of a brand new baby, not getting sleep, and so on. We need to do far more to help parents before, during, and after separation.
I can talk more about services such as mediation and so on, but it is so much more than mediation because you have all those other issues. It is not just the relationship problem that you are having, and so many people think the only thing they can do when the going gets very hard is reach for a lawyer. Frankly, no normal person can afford a lawyer, and the family courts are so clogged up you will be waiting for months for any kind of resolution. So family hubs are a great place to provide a family-based solution—a relational solution—when you are going through separation.
Sir David Holmes: I am really glad that Samantha has given the textbook answer because that means I do not have to. I am just going to try to build on that a bit. I would say, from our experience, that what makes the biggest difference is early, accessible and relationship-based support. There are all sorts of different interventions but essentially, interventions that focus on building strong attachments, supporting parental confidence, and improving communication and language development really matter in the early years.
But just to come at this from a different angle, we run a service called family line, which is a helpline for parents. I thought it might be interesting for you to know why parents actually ring us on that helpline; to give you the sort of top five issues. They call us about relationship issues; parenting support, particularly around managing behaviour; financial issues; a lot of people are struggling with child contact; a lot of people are struggling with SEND support for their children. Mental health, domestic abuse and housing issues arise frequently on that helpline as well. When we are thinking about interventions, we have to reflect that lived reality of people’s lives and think holistically. How can we provide a suite of services that is going to reflect that lived reality and reflects the fact that every parent and carer brings their own experience of being parented? Their own patterns of care, stress, attachment, and adversity can be repeated across generations, unless parents and carers have the opportunity to reflect, learn, and be supported during those vital early years of parenthood.
Eavan Mckay: For me, this is a really fundamental question about when and how we begin working with parents if we really want to improve the lives of the youngest children now, but also children in the future. Thinking about babies and infants now and as they grow. Samantha and Sir David have touched on lots of this in terms of, again, coming back to relationships and the real importance of strengthening parent-infant bonds and co-parenting relationships. We have talked about parental conflict. If there is parental conflict—for example, when a mother is pregnant and they are expecting a child together—that is a really crucial time to work with that family if we are talking about improving outcomes for that child, preventing harm in the future, and giving that child the best start in life. Any programme of reform and services that would truly improve the lives of babies must be one that focuses on working with those very foundations and building blocks.
When we talk about school readiness, we cannot just be talking about interventions for older infants just before they reach school age. The building blocks for those later interventions to actually have any impact—for those families to engage with services at all—are really in the earliest possible moments that we can engage and work with them.
We might get on to how that relates to the funding later in the session, but I will talk very briefly about one of the NSPCC programmes that we have called Baby Steps. It is a holistic perinatal education support programme for parents to prepare for the birth of their child that starts in pregnancy. It is really focused on parents being able to prepare for bonding with their child and bonding while the child is in utero. But also—as we have spoken about briefly already—the relationship between parents and addressing any of those issues that they have together; bringing in both parents at that point and working through those challenges to give them confidence and preparation for when that child comes.
Another NSPCC programme, Pregnancy in Mind, is a preventive mental health service designed to support expectant parents who are at risk or currently experiencing mild or moderate anxiety in pregnancy. Again, the earliest point that we can intervene is before that child is born. This programme in particular is really targeted at parents who are experiencing particular difficulties such as financial difficulties, and is designed to work around them. Those are a few things that I would point to, to begin.
Christine Farquharson: You have heard about an incredible range of interventions. Just briefly, the evaluation we did of Sure Start was not able to identify what is the one service; the point of our evaluation was that there is no one silver bullet. What matters is thinking about children’s lives as being not just about childcare or not just about health or not just about getting parents back into work, but looking across the piece. Some services are going to have a really strong evidence base backing them individually, such as parenting programmes often do. Some services such as baby massage have really no evidence and may not do anything particularly for child development, but what they might do is they might be helping with getting parents through the door. Local providers and local communities often have a good sense about a lot of these uptake and accessibility questions you have been hearing about, and it is easy for Government to sort of sit on top of that.
Devolution is a bit of a buzzword in political circles these days, but actually there is a role there for local providers and local communities to think about what they need to do to get those families to the door because if they are not coming to the door, it does not really matter what is happening on the other side.
Q207 Darren Paffey: How well integrated are the Best Start family hubs with other services such as health visiting, maternity services, early years provisions, SEND and children’s social care?
Eavan Mckay: It is incredibly varied, is the headline. We published some research specifically on safeguarding within family hubs just last month. That was a piece of research that was essentially kind of looking back at a system that is ever evolving with now the rollout of the new Best Start family hubs, family hubs that were already in place, and seeing how safeguarding kind of worked there. What we found, was that where the family hubs were well integrated with things such as children’s social care and they had really strong links with education and nursery providers, where health visitors were often working out of the hubs, it sounds obvious but information sharing was easier and there was more collaboration.
Different professionals had a greater awareness of the services that were available, so they felt confident speaking and signposting to families; outcomes were better for children, and families engaged more. But it was really patchy, and lots of family hubs were telling us that it did not work as well; that they did not have those links with children’s social care in particular. That is a really important thing to draw out here; where—in the midst of really wide-scale children’s social care reform, with the rollout of family help reforms and multi-agency child protection teams—we need to be thinking about all this in the context of what is this wider safeguarding ecosystem for children? How do these programmes interlink and connect with each other? What is the kind of formalised mechanisms of how they work together in terms of roles and accountability and all these things because at the moment it is quite varied.
Sir David Holmes: If I could just quickly add to that: I agree it is varied, but in our experience the thing that really makes a difference is really good partnership working. All the local agencies, community organisations, VCS, working together, understanding what they can each offer and then thinking about how they can wraparound what an individual family might need. Rather than offering a family a menu of services, it is more thinking about, “How can we work together to actually provide something that will meet the needs of this family in these circumstances?” Partnership working is crucial but we need to invest in that partnership working and see it as important.
Dr Callan: It really is one of the most important questions we can ask. The DFE has done several evaluations, including the family hub’s evaluation innovation fund 2022-23 and the transformation fund evaluation 2025, which was a process evaluation rather than a full impact assessment. It basically said that integration is not automatically delivered by a family hub model.
Many local authorities have only just received their funding. The first transformation fund was what I call a super pilot; where half of all local authorities were supported to build a family hub network between 2022 to 2025. While that was great, it has to be built upon. I do not think we can say that by 2029—even if GLD targets are reached—family hubs will be where they need to be. According to its biggest fans, it took about 12 years for Sure Start to get into a reasonable place; so integration depends heavily on the governance and commissioning design. Are we commissioning for shared outcomes, or is everyone delivering their own little bit?
Others have mentioned cross-agency leadership, and there is a spectrum of integration basically: co-location only, where people might be in the same building, but they are not really working together; co-ordinated services; some referral pathways; some limited joint working; integrated teams; shared assessments; joint casework. But where we are heading is system integration: the shared outcomes, the governance, the commissioning.
Essex, Doncaster, and Leeds are really good examples of system integration; where they commission for outcomes, and there is a lead provider that ensures all partners are delivering those outcomes together. HCRG, which is a private sector healthcare company in Essex, is working very well with Barnardo’s and health. Health is the key integrating partner; not because it is so important—although it is—but because it does its own thing and is very hard to bring to the table. Getting it properly integrated into the family hub model will not happen just by saying it needs to. The evidence around integration is strong but it has to be true integration, not just people sitting in the same office.
Chair: We are not making very good progress through the number of topics that we need to ask you about. This is a very big inquiry, and this is our final evidence session. We have lots of things we want to ask you about, so I really need you to be much more succinct in giving your answers to us.
There will obviously be the opportunity for you to write to us with further detail after the session if you need to. However, we are currently about half as fast as we need to be to get through all the topics so far, and we are nearly halfway through the session. I need things to speed up quite a bit, if that is okay.
Q208 Darren Paffey: You have started to answer my next question actually. What practical changes at local or national level do we need to see that would make the greatest difference to improving that collaboration that we have said is so necessary across early years and children’s support services?
In particular—Dr Callan, you started to answer this—are there examples of best practices that could be replicated more widely?
Christine Farquharson: One very quick one but something that only Government can do: practitioners really struggle with data sharing; this Government have a manifesto commitment for a unique child identifier, which would help immensely. Beyond that, getting the data sharing arrangements sorted out so that practitioners from these different organisations can much more confidently share information and support families and children through their whole life journey.
Eavan Mckay: I will try to be quick. Safeguarding needs to be a core function of Best Start family hubs. At the moment there is no national framework with a safeguarding focus and there is no standardised accountability mechanism. Quite often the hubs work with families where they are in this grey zone whereby they are not reaching statutory levels, so the universal or even the early help offer might not meet their needs; they need greater guidance on that. Alongside that I would say it is shared training, actually. Professionals, especially when it comes to safeguarding, all have different training modules; they all have safeguarding training but it can vary and they are not all doing it together. If we can bring them into the same room to do that training together and regularly, that could make a huge difference in how they work together.
Sir David Holmes: One thought from me. At national level, there needs to be really clear accountability and expectation for all partners to engage in integrated working. Collaboration cannot be optional.
Dr Callan: Having laid out the theory, I will talk some examples. In Teesside neonatal care units, they are joining up with family hubs so that people do not just leave the hothouse of a neonatal care ward then find there is no support in the community. That is really important. Prison-based family hubs are springing up. Both Winchester and Liverpool are helping this wonderful manifesto commitment of identifying and supporting children affected by parental imprisonment. A large way to deliver that would be through family hubs. The most stigmatised families in their own minds are families of prisoners, so that is a key role.
Q209 Manuela Perteghella: We have heard about some of the challenges facing family hubs. What other challenges do Best Start family hubs face in engaging and reaching out to disadvantaged families? What changes are needed to ensure those families benefit fully from the programme? I would like to address the rural gap as well. I have young families in my rural constituency; they live in isolated villages, where bus transport is very patchy and expensive. How do these families benefit from the programme? How do they get through the door?
Dr Callan: On rurality, we have to get away from this idea of a building that looks like something. A family hub can be a library; you could have a mobile family hub, like we used to have mobile libraries. We may still have mobile libraries; I am not sure.
I would go back to my point about, if you think family hubs are just about the early years but your concern is your older children, the wider service expectations laid out in the guidance show that they are actually meant to be doing so much more. You may be on your fifth child and think, “I know what I’m doing,” but it is your teenager where you have absolutely no idea how to stop them from destroying their life.
Again, part of the progress we need to see over the next few years is the bigger vision for family hubs. This includes parenting and family support right up the age range, and especially for children with special educational needs. This is something to piece together, which I know the SEND co-ordinators are starting to do, but it needs to become real for families. If it does not meet their needs very quickly, they will move on and think there is no help. I will pass over to others now because time is short.
Sir David Holmes: For me, what is crucial is having a really welcoming front door; but to take Samantha’s point, that front door does not need to be a front door in a building. It might be a digital front door, it might be a family hub set up in a local library, in a community centre, in a rural community, anywhere that people can access; just being flexible. What really matters is that however people access that support, they feel welcome, they feel listened to, it feels relational, and they then get the help they need. That they start building a relationship with somebody who they feel is in a position to help them, who understands their needs in the round and can just help them navigate the complexity of the system. This is all about how you make a complicated system work for families who are stressed.
Eavan Mckay: We did research with UNICEF on this very issue in 2024: looking at how to make sure the most disadvantaged families can access early years services. It showed that often the services were not built around the particular needs of families experiencing poverty; really practical things such as where the service is located, appointment times and not being tailored around things such as caring responsibilities.
Sometimes, digital exclusion is something that can be a barrier as well. I heard just yesterday from a family hub that was talking about wanting to increase fathers coming into the hub and do outreach work with fathers. They quite quickly realised that one of the big barriers to that was that the family hub was closed on the weekend and, actually, fathers who were working full time could not come to the hub, so they could not get them in those spaces. These are some really, really practical things.
Then, to sort of build on what Sir David just said, it is a confusing landscape for parents sometimes. How can we make it so that the front door, which does not have to be a physical one, can then be navigable for parents and families once they get through it? For me, it also comes back to some outreach roles that we know are really well evidenced to say that when they can sit alongside the family and go through the process with them, that can be really effective to help them navigate the system and get the support that they need.
Christine Farquharson: I would say start early. We know with Sure Start that take-up of the services was highest among the one-year-old age group. Then, if you are particularly focused on disadvantaged, actually do not forget the role of adult support services. That was the set of Sure Start services where there was the biggest gap in take-up between the disadvantaged and the more affluent, with disadvantaged families much more likely to take services such as employment support, help with accessing training, help with benefits, help with housing, and so on.
Q210 Manuela Perteghella: Christine, the Committee has heard that funding for Best Start family hubs is lower than what was available for Sure Start. I have to declare that my family benefited hugely from Sure Start; it was a really important part of our life as a young family. In your view, does the current level of resourcing reflect the scale of the Government’s ambitions, and are family hubs adequately funded to deliver their core services?
Christine Farquharson: The funding gap is real compared to Sure Start. On core funding, family hubs get perhaps a tenth of the funding that Sure Start had at its peak. Now there are a lot fewer family hubs, but on the other hand, as we have heard, family hubs are looking to serve a wider age range and that means potentially a different set of services in older life. That tenth figure is not fully reflective of the picture. Local authorities will top those budgets up quite a lot. Even there, you are probably looking at something like a quarter. But actually that funding structure is really important because what distinguishes family hub funding from Sure Start funding is there are lots and lots and lots of very small pots of money with very specific criteria. The hubs are spending lots of time applying for, evidencing, thinking about them, and so there is a bit of an attempt to control what these hubs are doing by really, really hypothecating or segmenting the budgets, which adds operational costs.
In terms of adequacy, the ambition here is huge. Sure Start did not happen overnight; we have to recognise that there was a 10-year period where that was rolled out and increased. There may also be ways in which family hubs can operate more efficiently than Sure Start did. The introduction of digital services is potentially a way of reaching lots more families with less cost. If what you want to do is have a practitioner with a child or a setting where parents are coming together, those things happen in the real world, they take space, and that means money.
Q211 Manuela Perteghella: What lessons can family hubs learn from the successes and challenges of Sure Start to reduce inequalities and support disadvantaged families?
Christine Farquharson: I will start just speaking to the Sure Start evaluation. The lesson I took from that evaluation was that Sure Start had really broad-based benefits. We saw on some outcomes that it reduced inequalities for some groups: some socioeconomic inequalities fell; boys tended to benefit more than girls did. But really, across most of the outcomes we looked at, we saw appreciable benefits across the range of society. For me, that speaks to the model of Sure Start not being, “We need to do this for the poor parents because the poor parents have not figured it out, but really, parenting is really hard. A lot of families need support, a lot of families need guidance, a lot of families need community.” That was a service that tried to provide that really across the piece rather than something that is a very targeted model just focused on who we think might be in need. That is, of course, always quite difficult to capture, particularly around transition points such as pregnancy and childbirth.
Q212 Caroline Voaden: I would like to just move beyond Best Start family hubs for a moment, if we could. What early intervention services and partnerships do you think are the most effective in identifying and supporting children and families early, that would improve outcomes outside the family hub? Are there any particular services out there that you think are really key to spotting these families and working out who we need to support?
Christine Farquharson: Others will be well-placed for this. One that I have worked on and know the evidence base for is the Family Nurse Partnership. That was a home visiting programme for first-time teenage mothers. It was funded by DH, so it was evaluated predominantly on health outcomes, which were not particularly wildly impressive and the narrative became, “This does not work.” It is probably appendix page 92 or something, but it evaluated the impact on good level of development and found actually pretty meaningful improvements in children’s early development. But because that is an education policy outcome and this was a health-funded policy, that really was a place where policy fell through the cracks. That underpins a lot of the focus we have had on holistic and thinking about children’s lives in the round.
Eavan Mckay: I will be brief because I have already touched on what we think is particularly crucial. When we talk about starting early, those perinatal and parenting support programmes at the earliest possible point feel really crucial.
As we were talking about the funding in relation to Sure Start, I would also add that the Best Start funding, as we have it at the moment, includes the Best Start family hubs and Healthy Babies programmes. These are two distinct strands. The best start funding is for every local area, but the Healthy Babies funding—which was previously the Start for Life funding—is only for the 75 local areas that previously received it. Within that Healthy Babies funding sits a lot of the programmes that I pointed to earlier in terms of the ones that are focused on the earliest support for the youngest children; perinatal parenting support, perinatal mental health support and parent-infant relationship programmes.
The fact is that the funding is potentially quite heavily skewed toward older infants and focused on the idea of a good level of development and school readiness, all of which is really important. But I think it is really important to highlight that the funding is not skewed to those earliest moments, where we have all been pointing to the fact that that is the place that we really need to start.
Q213 Caroline Voaden: Are you saying we have big gaps in the Healthy Babies funding because it is not funded everywhere?
Eavan Mckay: Yes. We have huge gaps. It is not funded for every area and that is a big problem. It is a postcode lottery for the youngest children.
Sir David Holmes: I am going to try to answer your question in a different way, just because it is helpful and broadens the conversation, and that is to say that irrespective of the intervention, what is essential is that families are not invisible. It is making sure that however a family comes to the notice of a service, if there is a concern, that information is then shared and the family is given the support they need. In those very early days and weeks and years of a child’s life, there are some agencies that are very likely to be seeing the child, but it is having that shared responsibility and accountability across the local network of services to just notice when things are not quite right and then to do something about them.
Caroline Voaden: It has to be a universal service offer, which would be midwifery or home health visiting. In the old days we had health visitors who visited every family.
Sir David Holmes: Exactly, but it is also something to do with the balance of funding between early intervention and prevention and crisis intervention. You asked before whether we are spending the right amount of money on family hubs. If we spent more of the available budget and rebalanced that over time in early intervention and prevention, we are more likely to pick issues up early.
Dr Callan: I was just going to mention hidden sentence training: when a family is affected by one of the parents being in prison. That is something that teachers, health workers, and surprisingly few social workers have come into contact with, and that can make a huge difference.
Just to say the family hub model is not meant to all be again about a building; it is about delivery sites in the community, especially places people feel happy going. You might go into the community centre or the leisure centre or a local church and you can get access to the family hub through that. You may never go near the family hub, but it is having lots of open doors in a community that means that we are, as David said, picking up families where they are struggling and they do not even realise or they would feel very nervous about going through a building that is a family support building.
Q214 Caroline Voaden: I would like to move on now. Do you think the early years pupil premium is achieving its intended purpose of narrowing developmental gaps and improving outcomes for disadvantaged children? Do you think that the current level of the early years pupil premium adequately reflects the additional needs of disadvantaged families, particularly as costs are rising and we have increasing demand on services?
Christine Farquharson: The early years pupil premium is currently about £1.15 per hour. That is up substantially in real terms. It is up by about 50% in real terms over a couple of years ago, so we have seen a really big change in how we think about the EYPP and its role in the funding system. That is obviously considerably less than the school age pupil premium would be. The early years pupil premium, if you are taking the full set of hours, is £6.55 a year; pupil premium is about £15.50 for a primary school child. There is a big gap there.
But what is interesting is if you look at that as a proportion of the core funding for school, it is actually about the same. It is a little less than 20% of the core funding envelope, both for school children and for three and four year olds. For two year olds, it will be a lower percentage. That actually points us to a question of, what is going on with these funding rates in general? We know that early years have tighter ratios, so the question becomes not is this supplement enough, but how are we thinking about these funding rates in the round?
In terms of whether the EYPP is effective, a real challenge is that in the early years the Government have fewer levers to control how that money is spent. In the school system we have a much better sense of what schools can do with that; the evidence base is much more mature. In the early years sector, because we have lots of private settings we have something that is operating as a market, the challenge becomes how we make sure that that funding is actually being used in ways that benefit children. There is an information gap there. There is also an incentive gap there; it is a real struggle to design a market where that becomes the case.
There is also a more fundamental gap about what do you do? In an early years setting, we know 75% of spending goes on staff costs. If what you wanted to do with your early years pupil premium was say, “I’m going to upskill my staff, I’m going to pay them better, and I’m going to use that to retain people.” Great. You could absolutely do that. But what happens when your EYPP child leaves the setting next term and you get somebody who does not have that pupil premium attached? There is a lot more volatility in the system because we are talking about smaller numbers of children. That makes it harder for settings to plan and make those sorts of whole setting investments that might make a difference, even if they had the evidence base to tell them what those investments should be.
Q215 Jodie Gosling: Continuing on EYPP, the Department said that it cannot increase funding because of the low evidence base or lack of evidence. Can you tell me about the impact of investment in the early years for disadvantaged children? I am also quite interested in the deprivation factor and geographical links of debt factor, and whether that is targeted or the system is fragmented.
Dr Callan: The quality of workforce in the early years sector is absolutely essential. It can be harder to get good quality childcare or even access to family support if you are not using childcare, although so many people need it.
You might have a degree-level practitioner but is the child getting enough one-to-one time? I liked David’s emphasis on every family and every child, but is each child getting enough one-to-one time? Is there enough continuity of care or is the child being passed along the line throughout the day? Regardless of how much money is in the system, it is what is being valued in the settings into which that money is going.
Sir David Holmes: Crucially, are all the disadvantaged children who would benefit from being in an early years setting physically there? Are they getting in? A lot of disadvantaged children are struggling to have that experience of robust early years and the development that comes through being exposed to a high-quality setting. There are accessibility issues to childcare in disadvantaged areas. If we are not actually reaching the children, then we have a problem. It goes right back to the initial point I made over equity of access: if we want the best start in life for children then that means every child.
Q216 Chair: On that question of every child, as we are thinking about disadvantage are you also thinking about children, for example, whose families have no recourse to public funds? Children who are in or on the edge of the care system? Samantha, you mentioned children who have a family in the prison system. We have talked a lot about disadvantage in very broad terms, but disadvantage is specific as well as broad.
Sir David Holmes: That is a really important question. I find it hard to distinguish between different groups of children and say that they should not be included. Yes, I am talking about every child.
Eavan Mckay: I would be keen to reframe to not talk about childcare but talk about early education. It is difficult because, as Christine said, it is not a universal service; it is a patchwork of different types of services, including lots of private sector services. There are fewer levers for us to easily pull.
It is crucial that some work is done around building the profile and workforce of early education, talking about it as early education and these being key moments in a child’s life for their cognitive and emotional development, and the real skill and importance of that workforce. We would encourage training and supervision changes to things such as the early years foundation framework to draw that out as well.
Christine Farquharson: Your first question was: what can early childhood education and care do for the disadvantaged? In principle, it can do quite a lot. We have pretty robust evidence that, to the extent children benefit, disadvantaged children tend to benefit more from these early years investments. That is a really good starting point.
We then have to ask what evidence we have that these are the right sets of interventions. In England, the evidence base is fairly thin. Studies that have looked at the impact of Government subsidising early childhood education and care—so not necessarily using childcare—tend to find pretty small benefits with not very long-lasting impacts on children. It is a little bigger for the disadvantaged, but not a tremendous impact. When we are trying to design a system, we have to decide if we want children’s development to be at the heart of it.
You also asked about early years pupil premium. The question here is, if we want to increase funding for the disadvantaged to perhaps give settings more flexibility and offer a higher quality form of support, then is EYPP the right vehicle to do that when you have this volatility of funding following the child? Is it the right vehicle for settings to make long-term planning decisions about the quality of care on offer?
What EYPP is very well designed to do is to incentivise settings to look for disadvantaged children and try to get them in the door. If you are trying to solve an access problem, and you think that settings are disproportionately likely to turn away disadvantaged children, then EYPP is a good vehicle to try to make it more financially worthwhile to get those children into place.
Q217 Darren Paffey: I am interested in what role high-quality early years provision plays in improving outcomes for children who come from disadvantaged families. We have started to stray on to that question, but this is an opportunity to say more on the evidence. What more can be done to ensure that children from those backgrounds have access to it?
Dr Callan: If we start with schools, a bugbear of teachers is that they cannot do it all. They are not social workers and need the parents to be allies. The same holds true in the early years setting. Whether you are using early years education or not, we cannot say that we do not need the parents to learn to address any parenting deficits that can be intergenerational. We need them to be on the same page so they can reinforce it all at home. Children are in early years education for even fewer hours in many cases than in school. I would keep coming back to childcare. I agree that there is a care element and an education element. It cannot be a bandage on parents not knowing what they are doing. You can be right up the socio-economic range; it is not just poor parents.
As evidence, Brown and Dench did some work in their book on informal caring. When you teach low-income young parents about child development, they think they now understand why their children will not stop crying, why they do this, and why they do the next thing. It is working with the grain of what parents want. In his poverty review, Frank Fields said why are we not making one of these free sessions of childcare education for the disadvantaged two-year-olds? Why are we not stipulating that, if you as a parent are not working, you should stay and play? Instead of taking the child away three times for five hours, at least one of those sessions should be in a setting where the parent will be learning. Barking and Dagenham council found that, if you do something with the parent and child in their children’s centres, they can track the evidence of the outcomes. Not just taking the child away from the parents was brilliant.
Sir David Holmes: I am going to talk about early education as well, because it is better. Access to really good early education is going to be an advantage for any child. For a really disadvantaged child, it may be even more of an advantage. The social and emotional skills, learning to socialise with other children, imaginative play, and access to resources that they may not have if they come from a disadvantaged background is so rich, is it not? It then comes back to that big challenge of how you make it accessible to all when the eligibility criterion is so complex. In some areas, there is often a real difficulty in accessing suitable childcare close to you. How do you cope with the extra charges of transport, meals, and so on that can make places unaffordable in reality? How do you have hours that are flexible for families, shift patterns, and so on? We have to be really practical about this. Early education is great but how do we make sure that there is a level playing field and people can access it?
Eavan Mckay: People have talked about eligibility criteria issues, the impact of good early education on children, and the benefits they can gain. I will briefly talk about how that also relates to some wider support and education as a safeguarding partner.
There are a lot of issues with education as a safeguarding partner in general but, in the earliest years, there are even more challenges because it is not a statutory service. It is not a universal service. Through our research we found that areas with family and multi-agency safeguarding hubs, where nurseries and early years provisions were heavily involved, came to the table and were part of those working relationships. They were involved in things such as multi-agency triage sessions. They regularly came and engaged, so there was better early identification of support needs for children and families. They were able to work with other agencies as well to target support for families where it was needed. If you get children into early education, and if there are additional support needs, they can then be filtered through a broader system of support.
Christine Farquharson: There was a question about the impact of quality. It is easy and straightforwardly true to say that high quality is better and makes a difference. Once you start interrogating what the word quality means, things start to fall apart.
There is no agreed definition of what high quality care is, and there is no agreed definition or common set of information between what providers think it is, what parents think it is, and what the Government think it is. We know that what we call structural quality measures, things such as staff-child ratios or staff qualifications, are easy to measure. They are easy to regulate on. They are easy to fund. They do not seem to be the most important dimensions of quality to support children’s learning. It is more about the process quality measures, so what is actually going on in that setting and the relationships staff have with children. That puts us in a little bind because, if you are the Department for Education, you need to design a funding system that is going to incentivise quality.
The funding system that we have says, “This is the price that Government are willing to pay for an hour of early childcare or education.” The Government are saying, “We want providers to compete to be able to deliver care within that funding envelope,” so that incentivises providers to try to push down their costs.
What are the things that govern that? First, it is parents. If parents think that providers are letting standards slip too much then they will move. It is harder when parents do not have a good sense themselves of what quality is, or where waiting lists are really long. Secondly, it is Ofsted and that regulatory floor. That is hard as well because if Ofsted does not have a good sense, or is only able to come every six years, then the ability of that regulatory floor to act as anything more than a floor or in a way that pushes up quality is really very limited. This fundamental lack of evidence about what quality is and how we measure it translates in a really important and direct way to the outcomes that we see in settings and the incentives settings face in delivering it.
There are really important questions here but there is so much that we do not know, making it incredibly hard for the Government to think not only about what quality is but how we measure it at national scale to be able to regulate and fund on that basis.
Q218 Jodie Gosling: Aside from the fundamental difficulties in trying to quantify quality, good quality or successful interventions in early years education make an enormous difference to the life chances of disadvantaged children. What is your assessment of the current quality of the early years workforce? Has the expansion of the childcare provision and the increased demand had an impact and implications on the workforce quality, safeguarding, or the outcomes for children?
Sir David Holmes: That is a big question. I am going to start again from the perspective of a service provider. We provide nurseries and preschools. Obviously, we are a charity and operate not for profit but it is really hard. The funding that is available only goes so far.
If you want to create a provision that keeps to the 1:4 ratio and tries to be as accessible as possible to all children, including children from disadvantaged backgrounds, it is really tough. It is easier if you have a number of nurseries in an area because you can then share resources and there is some economy of scale in that way. As a workforce, it is undervalued nationally. These are people who have the responsibility and expertise of caring for our youngest citizens. They have a profound opportunity to make a huge difference to those children and we do not value them as much as we should.
Eavan Mckay: I would completely agree with everything David just said. You asked about safeguarding; in primary and secondary education, there is keeping children safe in education. We do not have anything like that for the earliest years. We have the early years statutory foundation framework and there are some elements of safeguarding in that. It is not at all strong enough. It needs to be redeveloped to have a stronger focus on safeguarding training, safeguarding focus supervision, and to mandate things around the type of safeguarding training and supervision that professionals working in those settings need to be confident in.
Babies and infants are the most vulnerable group of children that we have. We know from serious case reviews that they are most at risk of harm because they rely on the adults around them to keep them safe as they are not able to communicate in the same way. When we talk about safeguarding in the earliest years, unfortunately there is no silver bullet. It is not about putting CCTV in place; that is not going to solve all safeguarding concerns. It is retrospective. It can be a tool in the toolbox potentially if there are other safeguarding mechanisms, and it can be valuable in finding evidence, but it does not prevent harm in the first place. Where it has been used, it has been used retrospectively for evidence of harm.
From a safeguarding perspective, what does prevent harm in those settings is strong safeguarding cultures built around things such as strong leadership, requirements around safeguarding training and safeguarding-focused supervision, strong whistle-blowing policies, and a culture in those settings that information should be shared, will be acted upon, and there are robust mechanisms to respond to concerns from staff or parents. Those things are crucial and important.
Dr Callan: We have a view in our society, maybe political system, that early education is an unlimited good. We have it from nine months now. In other words, free childcare. At nine months it probably still is childcare; you can learn a lot when you are nine months’ old. The problem with that is a genuine question: do we have enough good childcare professionals? As David said, a good childcare professional is a wonder to behold. Many of us raise children but do not think we are brilliant at it.
It is a genuine question. Given that all children are more or less expected to go into childcare, the cost of living being what it is, our individualised tax system, and so on; if that is our expectation will we ever have enough people who are suited to this task to do it? That is a rhetorical question; the IFS may have done some analysis of that. When I heard about more and more childcare being paid for by the Government, I wondered where we were going to get the people we need to do this really well, especially for our most disadvantaged children.
Christine Farquharson: We have done a little. We did it in the context of the Family Nurse Partnership programme. These are workers who are much better paid than the average childcare worker would be and who are working to a very structured curriculum. We found there was a huge difference between the most effective and the least effective workers, even after you ticked a lot of the boxes such as raising pay, raising qualification standards, systematising the programme, and really targeting the intervention. I do not think there are easy answers here.
The other thing we found is that it is almost impossible to predict who are and are not the really effective ones. That is hard. What we know about the early education childcare workforce in general is that it is very low paid. The expansion we have seen has increased the amount of childcare being delivered, but not by nearly as much as most people think. Most of the hours of childcare that parents had been paying for are now paid for by the Government instead. The Government are paying particularly for the under twos and are paying much more than those parents used to pay.
There are some opportunities where settings are better funded for those very young children than they used to be. There are opportunities to think about paying conditions. That is not the entire answer, and the FNP work really points to that. Where pay makes a difference is thinking about staff turnover; having staff see themselves and be able to afford a career as an early years educator with essentially enough to live on. That is the word that people keep using when staff talk about why they leave the sector.
Q219 Jodie Gosling: Both Government proposals look to replace the early year teacher status with qualified teacher status, the QTS. Is this something you would support? Is the change welcome? What impact do you think it will have on the workforce and the quality of teaching and learning?
Christine Farquharson: The main question is what we are going to do to build the evidence base. Graduates in settings is a popular thing, but it is a really expensive lever to pull. It is less about the qualification of that worker and more about how they are relating to children. That can be taught to some extent, but I would be a terrible early years worker even though I am a graduate. I would be absolute rubbish. There are other dimensions of skill as well that we sometimes forget about because they are harder for Government to observe and act on.
One thing that I would really welcome in the consultation is an ambition to improve the body of core knowledge for early years, as we did with the education endowment fund for schools, to get a better sense of what it is that an early years practitioner ought to know, ought to be taught, and how we bring evidence-based practice into those settings.
Eavan Mckay: Can I add very briefly to that? On what a practitioner needs to know, a really important element is baby and infant voice because of the fact that they cannot communicate in the way older infants can. How are early years practitioners trained? As it is a low-paid workforce, their status is not where it needs to be. The level of training around child and infant development, brain development, how infants and babies communicate with non-verbal cues, and all these things are really important in supporting babies and infants to develop, safeguarding babies and infants, and spotting signs of concern. That training needs to be in place and at the moment it is not where it needs to be.
Q220 Jess Asato: Do you think the Government’s target of 75% of children attaining a good level of development by the end of reception by 2028 is realistic?
Christine Farquharson: I brought this up a few years ago with officials at the Department for Education and I got my ear chewed off because it is not a target but an ambition. They were very clear on that distinction. Is it realistic? It is very stretching. We have only had one year of data since that ambition was brought in; it is improving. It is not improving especially fast.
Whether we get to 75% by 2028 for me is a lot less important than having that ambition and what we are going to do to try to get there. Where that has been very effective for the early childhood sector is in really focusing minds. There are challenges there too—particularly the fact that it is measured towards the end of reception year so there is inevitably going to be discussion and debate about whose job it really is; is it early year settings or is it family intervention services?
The final piece is that 2028 is not that far away. A lot of what we have been talking about is in the zero to two space with early family support and holistic family services, and probably those kids are not going to be old enough to feed into that target. We should make sure that we are not focusing so much on the target or ambition that we neglect the broader picture of it is pushing us to think about how we design an early year system that works.
Eavan Mckay: I will not add much but I agree with that final point. It is important not to be too narrowly focused on the target. I have spoken about the Healthy Babies funding not being rolled out to all local areas, which feels really important here. If we are so narrowly focused on the target, there is a risk that it is skewed to those older infants’ work, focusing on the school readiness element only. That foundation of working with parents and developing those early parent bonds is neglected. Why are we looking at that target alone? What is the broader picture? What are the building blocks that need to be in place to even get families to the point where they can engage with those types of intervention at a later stage?
Sir David Holmes: Governments like targets because it is something to measure progress against. I would just caution about making sure that the focus does not become on meeting the target, leaving behind the children who may be further away from that target. We need to prioritise their development, making sure that they are making the progress they can make at their own pace.
Dr Callan: I was talking to somebody who works at Thrive at Five in Stoke-on-Trent, working on all these areas of development. It is why I mentioned at the beginning communication language and personal, social, and emotional development. I am so glad they are in the GLD spectrum as it were. He said that if you grow up in a household where there is no expressive language, it is just loud, directional, and people shout do this or do that at each other—or it is more abusive than that—then you do not get expressive language that has an impact on GLD, which carries on all the way through your life.
Youth offending cohorts have speech and language difficulties because boys turn to different methods of communication. It is all externalising. My point is that we need to be quite subtle and nuanced in this, and the Reducing Parental Conflict programme is a really important part of GLD. We do not think of it automatically, but if children are not growing up in an environment where parents know how to talk kindly to each other and express themselves, then we will not get GLD on some very important dimensions.
Q221 Jess Asato: Following up a little on that, the Department has stated that around 40% of the overall attainment gap between disadvantaged young people and their peers has already emerged by the age of five. What are the key drivers of this gap?
Dr Callan: When you look at family breakdown, for example, in the age that we are talking about, seven times as many children have experienced the breakdown of their parents than in the top quintile. That comes with so many other things. It is not just mum or dad leaves but the frequent, intense, and unresolved conflict that will come with it. I know this is just one area, and there are lots of others that will be exacerbated by poor housing, debt, and all the other things that bring challenge, but that is why we are pushing the Government to do more to help families before, during, and after separation. It is such a need point. Many countries—Australia and some Nordic countries—do not expect parents of whatever aged children to go through that huge and quite traumatic, in the true sense of the word, transition without a good deal more help than they are getting now.
Sir David Holmes: I wanted to think about the 40% attainment gap you mentioned and some background family factors that might be helping to drive it such as the impact of family poverty, housing insecurity, financial stress on families and access to welfare. These factors create a family that may be stressed, anxious, worried about money, in temporary housing, or have family conflict. They impact on children living in the family who may be undernourished or have poorly developed physical skills because of a lack of access to parks, playgrounds, or gardens. How much time are parents who are focused on their financial difficulties or their own stress going to have to talk to or play with their children? These things are all connected. We cannot think about improving early education if we are not also addressing the underlying factors that are increasing family stress as well.
Eavan Mckay: Somebody before said that if we were to reduce poverty, and I cannot remember the exact statistic—
Dr Callan: It is 10%. There would only be a 10% reduction in behavioural, social, and health difficulties.
Eavan Mckay: That is really interesting and highlights the fact that poverty does not directly result in any of the family strains, struggles, or potential harm that could come later down the line. What we know from the research, and we have spoken about this already, is that poverty increases other risk factors such as poor mental health and parental stress. All these things put strain on families. There is no direct link here, that is not what we are talking about, but they impact other areas that really affect a family’s ability to be able to parent in the way that they would want to.
When we talk about families and parents being able to communicate with their child—learning about child development, the serve and return way to communicate with the child, getting those responses and how that encourages their development—then families who are experiencing some strains, unless there is really good outreach and a strong workforce capacity to do that outreach, are often the ones who cannot engage with these services in the way that could help them.
Christine Farquharson: I echo a lot of that. There is a real ambition here, which is always going to be to get that gap down to zero. I do not think any country has achieved that or even come close. There needs to be a little realism. We can improve a lot of these factors, but we are probably not going to get all the way there. Echoing what the other witnesses have said, there is no silver bullet here. Family finances are part of the picture—perhaps not the biggest direct element of the picture—but mental health, housing, insecurity, information and support, and knowing who you can talk to and learn from become really important in thinking about how we support parents.
Q222 Manuela Perteghella: Following on from Jess’s question, the Committee has heard that poverty, housing insecurity, overcrowding and other forms of family instability can have a significant impact on children’s early development and school readiness. We have also heard that many families are focusing on surviving rather than thriving. From your experience, what might this impact look like in practice for these families?
Dr Callan: Could you repeat your question, sorry?
Manuela Perteghella: What impact do the drivers of poverty, such as housing insecurity, being in temporary accommodation and overcrowding, have on early child development and school readiness?
Dr Callan: I can imagine that, if you are in a rough housing estate, you might want to go out with your baby and get fresh air but feel nervous. You might be worried about your physical safety. If you cannot heat the house, or if you cannot keep it cool enough in the sun, then you just cannot function. During the pandemic, we talked about having warm hubs and places to go. This is what I mean about there being delivery sites everywhere; it is not just the family hub building. You want there to be many places where parents can go to mitigate these issues. We are talking about policy. We forget how important peer support is: somebody to walk alongside who is not being paid anything and you can ring at 11 pm to say, “I am just so stressed. I cannot sleep, the baby will not sleep,” or, “I do not know where my son is.” We underestimate the importance of everybody having a good friend and there being peer support, say, totally locked into family hub designs. It is not just about what the state is doing; it is the genuinely free volunteers as well as the very important voluntary sector.
Sir David Holmes: I talked about some very practical impacts of being in poor and overcrowded housing on the development of physical skills. If a child is in a really stressed environment where parents are focused on trying to resolve their own problems, how is that then going to impact on the time the parents have to work with the child on speech development, for example? To what extent might family circumstances be negatively impacting on children’s development?
I also want to highlight the importance of having somebody to talk to. Some issues of family stress can be alleviated in really simple and practical ways, for example, by calling our family line or any other local source of help. That is why it is so important to have responsive and accessible services that can help people to take a moment, breathe, think about what is happening, and come up with strategies to try to move forward. If it is financial, then maximise their benefits. If it is escaping a violent relationship, then some practical advice on how you might do that. We cannot just focus on the problem; we also have to focus on what the practical things are that might help. This is where it comes back to the whole conversation around family hubs and thinking about the support families might need locally.
Eavan Mckay: Your question made me think about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. I used to be a teacher and I remember, in my teacher training, talking about what a child needed essentially to get to that point of highest level of learning. You have mentioned the very basics: housing, nutrition, if a child’s hungry, if a child has not slept well; all these things are going to be barriers to getting them to the point of being able to learn in the classroom. It is exactly the same with parents. We have talked already about how difficult parenting is for everybody. If you add in these wider stresses, then it can sometimes feel insurmountable.
We also know that the vast majority of parents want the very best start in life for their child. That is what they want yet if these stresses work to overload parents then there is a lot of shame that can come with that. Shame can lead to disengagement if the relationships are not built, they do not have people to talk to, and are unable to be brought into the system but feel outside of it. Those things feel really important to me. I come back to the relationships, the outreach work, and supporting professionals to be able to address some issues with confidence and not feel like they cannot bring them into the room. That feels really important to me as well.
Christine Farquharson: Very similar points but I think of it in terms of the resources families have. Some resources will be financial or things that money can buy, such as a more secure house or better food. Some resources will be the parents’ resources such as the skills and health—physical and mental—they have at that time. Some resources will be the information and support that families benefit from, and that is a place where the Government can have a supportive role as we have heard. Some resources will then be in support or in being able to overcome barriers, the stress factors that we have heard about so far. All those come together and the witnesses have done an excellent job in highlighting that this is not just about money, there is a lot more under the hood.
Q223 Manuela Perteghella: My next question is about support or interventions. Samantha has already talked about accessing hubs in libraries and village halls, and Sir David has talked about having someone to advise and talk to in a moment of need. Are there any other interventions you think are most effective in helping disadvantaged families overcome these barriers so that they can support their children’s development and school readiness? Can you think of anything else that you want to add?
Sir David Holmes: I want to emphasise a point I made earlier: it is very easy to think of it as a service or intervention that might have a real cost attached to it. Sometimes it is just space to think and some emotional support. It is an opportunity to think, “I have this and with a bit of help I know what to do.” I am going to read you a couple of quotes from callers to our family line because it illustrates better than I can: “I found the call really helpful. It really helped to calm me and to think about the choices I have.” “Thank you for listening and for being non-judgmental. I appreciated her listening, calm, and thoughtful responses. She has given me some great suggestions to help me move forward.” It is that as well. Sometimes it is just having somebody to talk to, somebody to share the emotional load with—particularly if your family circumstances are so hard—and some practical ideas about what they can do to move forward.
Dr Callan: I am a trustee for an organisation called Care for the Family. It talks about parental isolation. We used to raise children in communities. I am not being nostalgic, but you now parent on your own; you do not even want to admit that you are finding something difficult. That is reinforcing what David is saying.
Eavan Mckay: I would echo lots of what has been said. I do not think there is a silver bullet. We cannot talk about disadvantaged families being this monolith group where there is going to be one intervention that is going to work for them all because there are going to be a varied range of different families with different needs.
I am going to speak briefly and it might seem a strange example but, if we are talking about prevention and thinking about the wider system when prevention does not work, then families could reach a point of absolute crisis and a child could be taken into care. That is the sharpest end of where we do not want families to get to. The number of children in care is rising. There are huge societal and individual costs for that child and family. There are also financial costs to that.
To your point about interventions, we did research on children returning home from care and what support those families might need to be able to keep them at home and not risk them bouncing back into care. It is hugely cost-beneficial. It would save £300 million. The cost of supporting a family longer term was about £7,000 versus the cost of a child returning to care, which was about £100,000 per child. I make this point to say that was the cost of long-term support for families; it was not the cost of individual interventions because, for those families, those interventions could be very varied. It might be drug and alcohol support, parenting support, and education programmes. It is about tailoring that support. The cost saving was about long-term support with families. It is about how we envision working with children and families. Sometimes it may be in an intensive way, even in the preventive space, for a long-term, tailored, and flexible way. Those benefits will be long-lasting for individual children and of a cost-benefit to society as well.
Christine Farquharson: I will say something very quickly on evidence, because we have heard lots on interventions. I love evidence; I am an evidence person. It is possible to get too stuck on evaluating every single small element of a package and lose the bigger picture. A lot of what we have been talking about in terms of flexibility, not one-size-fits-all, local communities, makes it very difficult to evaluate. Thinking about what the ingredients are that go into that package, let us evaluate some good parenting programmes. Let us evaluate some good financial support. Let us evaluate some good packages around safeguarding. When it then comes to putting all that together, we can afford to let communities and indeed individual providers have much more freedom to pick and choose from that evidence-based toolkit.
Q224 Jodie Gosling: Moving on to affordability, access and availability, to what extent do childcare costs prevent disadvantaged children and low-income families accessing the decent childcare that they need? What elements of these costs create the biggest barriers? What policy changes would have the biggest impact on affordability for parents?
Christine Farquharson: Childcare costs are high. If you are looking for a full-time nursery place, that is expensive. They are coming down, not least because of the new funded childcare entitlements.
For disadvantaged families, it matters whether that family is in paid work or not. If they are in paid work and they are accessing universal credit, they are getting potentially up to 85% of their childcare costs paid for through the benefits system. That is a really big subsidy and we sometimes forget. We look at the sticker price, as do families, and think, “Oh my God.” It is much harder to think about what the actual cost is to that family.
We will come on to issues within the universal credit system and whether that offer is working well. For low-income families that are not in paid work, there is much less support available. The main policy would be the two-year-old disadvantaged offer. There is often pressure that says we should be having this earlier, we should be extending these formal childcare entitlements earlier. I would be cautious and curious about the evidence base for that. Internationally, there is much less evidence for the benefits of formal early education once you go below age two. The evidence base is quite thin on the really young ones. There are some countries and studies where that early formal education has been detrimental to children’s development.
This is a first do no harm. It is a precautionary principle scenario where it is very easy to look and say, “She’s getting something that I’m not getting, therefore she must be doing better out of it.” There is a question about whether that intervention actually works and what the right sets of age groups are to be offering that support to if you have this developmental lens rather than the childcare and working parents’ lens.
Q225 Caroline Voaden: There has been some research by the Sutton Trust that suggests that the poorest families receive little, if any, direct benefit from the 30 funded hours entitlement. Some would say they are the people who could benefit the most from it. We have a system that is pretty fragmented and complicated. Could I ask you, Christine, what changes you think are needed to ensure that the policy reaches the most disadvantaged families? Do you think there should be a universal entitlement from age two, maybe fewer hours, but for everybody to even out the playing field and make it simpler, and then offer extra hours to those who can afford it? What would you like to see?
Christine Farquharson: I could go for hours, so I need to respect the Chair on this one. It is obvious, and it is a design feature, that the 30 hours offer for working families does not benefit the lowest income families. We calculated on Budget night that the bottom third does not benefit at all. That is intentional because the policy is designed around cost of living and supporting parents who are in work, rather than targeting early education to the most disadvantaged. That is a policy choice. That is a fair policy choice to make.
In terms of how you support the most disadvantaged, that question as to whether it is a good thing or whether it is supporting children’s development is more important to sort before thinking about who gets it.
You also asked about two-year-olds and a little older; the international evidence base for formal early education is a little stronger here. We have the disadvantaged two-year-old offer in place. This has become a lot less generous. It used to serve around 40% of children but it now serves around 25% of children. Those are still going to be the most disadvantaged of that group, but there is a group in the middle of that, 25% to 40%, who would previously have benefited and are now missing out.
Some families will be benefiting through the new working entitlements, so it is a bit of a patchwork, but there is going to be a group of families who have slightly higher family income but are not working or are not working enough to be benefiting from the work-based entitlements and so are not accessing anything until age three. That is a group. How long and convoluted that answer was suggests that really there is a challenge here.
I count 11 different programmes to support families with childcare costs. It is incredibly difficult to navigate. It adds a real burden on parents and families to try to understand. I have friends who should be claiming tax-free childcare. I talk to them about it and they say, “It’s too complicated. I haven’t been able to figure out how to get the portal to work.” That is horrifying because my friends should absolutely know how to do that. We under-weigh the cost of complexity. It is a feature of an early years system that cannot quite decide, as it has all these important aims, which policies are for which aims. When there is a policy for a specific aim, such as the 30 hours in-work entitlement, there is always pressure to ask if it can serve all these other aims as well, which dilutes the original aim and adds complexity in the overall system.
Q226 Caroline Voaden: We had the report yesterday into white working-class educational outcomes, which recommends extending access to 30 hours free childcare to those disadvantaged families who are not currently eligible. If we looked at it through a different lens, and looked at early years provision as part of the school system rather than a fragmented market economy that has private providers, school-based nurseries and different people who are eligible for different things, do you think that, if it was more like the primary school system where everybody goes for the same number of hours, it would benefit those children who are currently missing out? I am not saying they should go full time, but just seeing it through that lens as preparation for school, maybe from age three in a play-based environment such as we saw when we went to Estonia.
Christine Farquharson: We have elements of that in the current system. The three and four-year-old universal entitlement is pretty well established. The take-up rates are incredibly high: somewhere around 95% of three and four-year-olds are taking up those hours. That is something that looks more like the school system. That is why we have 15 hours times 38 weeks.
What ended up happening was that, because there are also these policy aims around supporting parents with work and supporting families with the cost of living, it was felt that it was not enough and we needed additional offers around that. If we just look at that 15-hour universal entitlement, we have fallen a little between the horses compared to countries such as Canada where those hours really support mothers to work. We do not see big or really any labour supply effects compared to Scandinavian countries, and I am thinking about Norway in particular. We do not see the child development benefits that other countries would see. When you are trying to do too much within a fixed envelope and you are not clear on the targeting or what you want to achieve, it raises the risk that you are not effectively intervening or hitting any of those goals.
Dr Callan: I know this is a section about childcare, and I respect that, but we have been saying again and again that, for child development, there is no single bullet. We reach to childcare so readily. Catherine Hakim did some work at the LSE about 20 years ago on preference theory: what do mothers or parents actually want? Sometimes it might be the father who stays at home more. She said that 20% of women are work-centred. They are mainly focused on getting back to work as quickly as possible. A further 20% are home-centred. They want to be at home and they volunteer in the community; they do not just get their nails done. There is then 60% who are adaptive. We make policy for the 20% that are work-centred because the policymakers tend to be—no criticism at all—in Catherine Hakim’s work-centred 20%. We do not pay any attention to that. We just say, “You need to get back to work as quickly as possible.”
I would just end with LifeLine in Barking and Dagenham. It is a fantastic children’s centre that I visited in 2009. The minute a parent came in with a child who was maybe nine or 18 months’ old, they would start working with that parent from the word go. They would say, “When you can go back to work, what would you like to do?” They would then help them get into training. It was getting them on the runway. It was not saying, “You need to go and do the job that you are able to do now” with perhaps no training but, “How can we help you reach your goal?” They would support them and it was a community. They had peer support. They really worked hard at that. That is where family hubs can make a big difference in education, not just providing the childcare but helping people who maybe did not do very well in the formal education system think about what they would like to do with their life that will fit with their children.
Q227 Manuela Perteghella: The Committee visited early years settings in Estonia where early years childcare costs are capped at 20% of the minimum wage. Do you think a similar wage-related cap would be an effective approach to making childcare more affordable? If additional funding were available to support such a cap, would this represent the most effective use of resources or could greater impact be achieved through investment in other areas?
Christine Farquharson: I had a little heads-up that you had all been to Estonia, so I had a little Google around the Estonian system. The 20% minimum wage is actually a little red herring here. What that means is that you effectively have a system that is publicly funded with a little copay from parents. It is not necessarily related to their wage; the copay is just an amount they can cap.
I then looked at differences between Estonia and the UK. In terms of spending on early childhood education and care for three to five-year-olds, Estonia spends around 0.7% of its GDP and the UK spends around 0.55%. That is a difference but it is perhaps not as big of a difference as I was expecting it to be. That is explained by a more important difference: the Estonian system has 18 months’ of parental leave and an early childhood system that goes all the way to age seven. What that means is that those very high-cost young children, where the ratios are incredibly tight and delivering care is incredibly expensive, are not being represented in the funding for early childhood education and care because it is being paid through this parental leave policy.
Equally, you are adding in that four-to-seven or five-to-seven age group where you can afford to have much looser ratios and it can be less expensive per child to look after those older children; you are reducing the overall cost per child for the system as a whole. That highlights that you cannot just think about one of these policies in isolation.
Caring for young children is and always will be a very expensive thing to do. In the UK, if you are looking at an under two and you have one adult for every three children, the minimum wage is about £12.21. Even before you have paid your mortgage, your energy costs, your overheads, your business rates, and any of the other costs of being a business, you are looking at something north of £4 an hour. That is for a minimum wage staff member; you have not even paid their pension yet. It is a really expensive thing to do and the question then becomes how we share the burden of those costs between the Government and parents. It is actually quite difficult, certainly within the landscape we have, to think about how you reduce those costs really dramatically.
Eavan Mckay: It comes back to the question of what we are doing this for and the idea of early education rather than childcare. We cannot just begin with increasing access. It is about how we bolster the system that is already there to make a strong early education offer for all children that will help in their child physical and emotional development.
A question was asked earlier as to whether we need to rethink it in terms of it being part of the wider education system. There is a fundamental question here as to why we suddenly believe and recognise that child development and learning happens at age four. We know from the science that that is not the case; it happens from the moment a child is born. In fact, it happens in utero. We have all the evidence to tell us that. If you look at the evidence around brain development, those earliest days and months are actually the most rapid periods of development. Why do we think that this is the point we invest universally? They are really important questions for us to think about.
Sir David Holmes: Whatever your policy is, whatever your funding model, how do you ensure that no child is left behind?
Dr Callan: To end with our taxation system: we have a very family unfriendly taxation system. It is highly individualised with very few transferable allowances that acknowledge the cost of raising children. You have to be a very high single earner for a family to be able to float without a huge amount of government subsidies. That is a big problem for our overall system. As Christine says, do not look at things in isolation.
Q228 Jess Asato: Based on the evidence you have seen, how effective are the universal credit childcare support and tax-free childcare schemes in supporting families with child care costs? What changes would make these schemes work better for parents?
Christine Farquharson: We have touched a little on tax-free childcare already. That had really bad teething problems. There have been improvements as we go through. To some extent, I would focus more on the universal credit system. A big barrier has been that families are paying in advance and then receiving support only after the fact; in some cases some weeks after the fact. In theory, Budget 2023 proposed a change so that families would receive support upfront. My understanding is that the implementation of that has proved more difficult than initially expected. It is potentially a barrier for the lowest income families to move into paid work in the first place. Once you cross that barrier, you have to start thinking about certainty and what families understand and expect from the system.
An unavoidable trade-off with universal credit as a whole is that you are giving support to the lowest income and then you taper it away as families earn more. For those with more volatile incomes or those who are taking up this childcare in order to work more, it can be quite difficult to figure out what you are actually going to be left with at the end of the month, particularly if it is changing one month to the next.
Chair: We are at the end of the session, so I thank our witnesses very much for joining us today and for all the detailed evidence they have provided us with. If there are any points on which you were not able to get across everything that you wanted to say, please write to us afterward and we would welcome that. That brings our evidence session for today to a close.