Children’s Centres (Somerset)

Jeremy Browne Excerpts

Monday 3rd February 2014 Commons Chamber

[Tessa Munt (Wells) (LD)]

I have asked for this debate because I have been contacted by parents and carers, contractors, staff and members of the advisory boards connected with three of the children’s centres in my part of Somerset—Cheddar, Wells and Chilcompton.

Sure Start children’s centres are there to protect and help the youngest in our communities, to support and help families, and to invest in the future by providing the very best start for all. In a bid to cut its budgets even further, Somerset county council has acted appallingly, proposing restructuring that will put the most vulnerable at risk and plunge those in rural areas into deeper isolation. It seems to be systematically working to undermine and undervalue the amazing work that children’s centre staff are doing to help and support young families in Somerset. In its flawed consultation exercise, the county council claimed that it needed to review children’s centre provision because

“some Children’s Centres are not performing as well as we would like”.

Rather than being honest and open with the people of Somerset about the fact that it wanted to cut 40% of the children’s centre budget, the council has sought to undermine public perceptions, no doubt seeking to whip the public into demanding the closure of children’s centres.

The mainstay of the county council’s argument is that children’s centres underperform according to Ofsted’s headline data. The council claims that only 37% of Somerset’s children’s centres have received an Ofsted grading of “good” or “outstanding”, whereas the national average is 69%. The council concludes that the 37% Ofsted figure gives it good evidence that children’s centres are not delivering help to the most vulnerable. That is simply not true. Before jumping to any conclusions, I ask the Minister to ask this more fundamental question: why are only 37%, supposedly, of the children’s centres in Somerset getting an Ofsted grade of “good” or “outstanding”? When one asks that question one gets a revealing answer.

Two children’s centres, in Wells and Chilcompton, have recently had an Ofsted inspection. When they received their feedback and report, they were commended on their delivery of support to vulnerable families across a wide and rural reach. Ofsted said that the critical services they delivered to the most vulnerable were deemed as “good”. However, when Ofsted scrutinised the support and data that the children’s centres received from their county council, they were deemed as “requiring improvement”. The county council has failed the children’s centres, not vice versa. The county council’s consistent failures led to an overall Ofsted grading of “needing improvement”, which failed both the children’s centres and the children of Somerset.

Wells and Chilcompton children’s centres are not alone. Shepton Mallet children’s centre had exactly the same outcome last year. Somerset county council is using its own incompetence as a cover for cutting services to the most vulnerable families.

Virtually every improvement suggested by the improvement plan for Chilcompton and Wells children’s centres after the October 2013 Ofsted inspection requires action by the county council, and each of the four action areas for improvement has major implications for it. The first improvement needed reads:

“Sharpen the monitoring of participation rates across all services to ensure the most vulnerable and in particular potentially isolated families can access the full range of services”.

The action required states that the local authority should

“develop and disseminate tracking tools from point of access, to show outcomes and progression”.

The second improvement needed reads:

“Improve the quality of all evaluations”,

and the action required states that the local authority should

“set clear performance indicators”

and

“implement CAF and Signs of Safety in CC’s and agree protocols with partner agencies”.

The third improvement needed reads:

“Improve the impact of leadership”,

and the action required states that the local authority should

“provide clear, simple and concise data which is more accessible & understandable to staff, to support planning and to improve outcomes”

and

“develop partnership agreements where county and district boundaries exist”.

The fourth improvement needed reads:

“Improve the role that the cluster advisory board plays in the support and challenge to the cluster”,

and the action required states that the local authority should

“devise and deliver training”

and that the local authority

“demands that Advisory Board Chairs are trained to lead an AB. But as yet there is no training course available”.

Fundamentally, under the Ofsted framework, it is absolutely impossible for a Somerset county council children’s centre to get anything better than “needs improvement”, and that is not a basis for changes to the service. Somerset county council must not be allowed to blame these failures on children’s centre staff, because they are the very people who are working so hard to keep children in Somerset safe.

Under the council’s proposed structure, the village of Chilcompton will sit in a reach from Farley Hungerford to Lydford—a distance of some 30 miles from north to south—and from Shipham to Rudge, which is 35 miles from west to east, with one manager and two deputy managers. That inevitably means that some vulnerable families will fall through the net.

Generally, these are successful universal services. For example, Wells children’s centre had 539 children registered in the past three months and 332 using at least one of the services in the same period. In October alone, 195 children and 304 parents and carers came to the centre. There are eight to 10 open cases with specific interventions in place at that single children’s centre.

There have been repeated promises since November for a new consultation. I hear repeatedly that the council has not yet made a decision about individual children’s centres, but its failure to make a decision about their future means that significant numbers of referrals are falling away. Why would an agency refer parents and carers to children’s centres, possibly for a six-month programme, when the service’s existence past 31 March is under question?

The council has moved on apace with the restructuring of children’s centre services. However, it keeps having to amend and revise its plans, because it finds that its proposals will not work. Fortunately, the council seems to have started to understand the importance of supervision and management, but that adds extra staffing costs to its model, and it cannot explain which budgets will need to be cut to meet the extra costs.

[Mr Jeremy Browne (Taunton Deane) (LD)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing this important debate. She is talking about cost, and I wonder whether she will momentarily engage with this thought of mine? Everybody understands that the county council needs to be as cost-efficient as possible and, on the face of it, there may be some short-term savings to be made. If, however she looks at a town such as Wiveliscombe in Taunton Deane, which has a purpose-built children’s centre, with a new doctors’ surgery being built next to it, a whole apparatus of services are available to people in that small town and the surrounding communities, of which the children’s centre is an integral part. There may be some short-term savings, but my suspicion and fear is that, overall, there will be long-term costs that are not just social, but financial, from having buildings empty and services not fully utilised.

[Tessa Munt]

I could not agree more. In a number of cases across Somerset, children’s centres are next to surgeries and schools. With a universal service, it is very easy for children and parents to get used to accessing the services that they need on an ongoing basis. Children get used to going into the surgery or the school, and it is an easy move for people to access everything that they might possibly need.

A county council report has revealed that, as many contracts are due to end in March, there is not enough time to investigate any alternative provision. Incompetence and a lack of planning mean that provider agencies are pulling away, and are quite rightly refusing to deliver services on a month-by-month extension. No one can be expected to work with such a level of uncertainty. I understand that the agencies are handing services back to Somerset, which means further costs, because partner agencies pay their family support workers more than the council does and such transfers mean that salary arrangements have to be honoured.

One of the main planks in the argument for change was the promise that there would be 30 more front-line family support workers. However, the proposed job description has added a new line, stating that family support workers are to work with children and young people between the ages of nought and 19. The county council had promised 30 more support workers for children between the ages of nought and four, but it is now watering down that service even further. The council promises one thing, and then once again cuts back on its promises behind closed doors.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Browne]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for indulging me for a second time. On those promises, it seems extraordinary to me that elections for Somerset county council were held only just over six months ago, and I do not recall that any leaflets came through my door from the party that now runs the county council promising that if it had a majority, it would close children’s centres. That seems to have been sprung on the people of Somerset, after we had the opportunity to vote, when I assume that most people in the county thought that they were voting for a programme for four years, and we are now only six months after the election.

[Tessa Munt]

I have to agree again. It is fair to say that from what one can discover, the plans to cut £1.4 million from the children’s centre budget were brought forward in January or February last year, but were suppressed prior to councillors achieving re-election to the county council. It was only—very shortly—after that that the plans became evident. It seems desperately unfair on the electorate, and on the most vulnerable people who need to access the services.

Family support workers need a different skill set when they work with older children and young adults. Although I acknowledge that working with such young people is terribly important, to ask a family support worker who is gifted, skilled and qualified in working with nought to four-year-olds to work across a much larger age range dilutes their expertise and devalues their work.

It has been suggested that the decisions have already been made and that councillors have instructed officers not to work on extending the contracts because the children’s centres are likely to close. I wonder how the county council can say that it is putting £1 million into front-line services, while at the same time it is making a cut in funding of £1.4 million. Savings are being made by cutting senior service managers, children’s centre managers, day-to-day line managers and lead centre officers, as well as by reducing the number of buildings that are used. As my hon. Friend the Member for Taunton Deane (Mr Browne) pointed out, many of those buildings were specially designed and are adjacent to schools and doctors’ surgeries so that children are familiar with where they will start their education and become used to popping into the surgery.

Not even the data quoted by the council are accurate. The council’s report states that the new Mendip east area will have 1,655 children aged nought to four. However, the data provided by the county council to the children’s centre state that there are 2,189 children of that age. Either the county council has lost 534 children in one district or the council is over-reporting the number of children in a district to the children’s centre, making it utterly impossible for the centre to reach its 80% registration target.

--- Later in debate ---

[Elizabeth Truss]

I want to come to the point about Ofsted. Last week, I spoke at a meeting of the all-party group on Sure Start children’s centres. At the moment, there is an issue with Ofsted inspections—not with their quality, but with how children’s centres are inspected. I am in discussions with Ofsted, but I think it would be more sensible to look at the overall early years support services provided by local councils through children’s centres, rather than at centres individually. A lot of councils are moving towards more of a network model, but the important thing is that parents and children can access centres and good services, and that centres reach as many people as possible. The current model—where statutory children’s centres, but not branch centres, are inspected by Ofsted—is probably not as effective as a council-based model, and I think that that is pertinent to my hon. Friend’s point. We are working on a slightly different inspection model for precisely the reasons she outlined.

I was asked where budgets were coming from. We have increased funding for early intervention from £2.1 billion to £2.5 billion in this Parliament, while the Department for Communities and Local Government has a fund for which local authorities can bid to reconfigure services in a way that suits local communities, although I have been told by Ministers that not many applications have been received from children’s services looking to reconfigure. This is an opportunity for forward-looking councils to think about how they can do things in a way that suits families, including though better co-location with GP surgeries, schools and local community facilities.

[Mr Browne]

Will the Minister clarify that point? I accept that councils across the country need to find financial efficiencies—everybody is realistic about that—but is she saying that there is no financial necessity on Somerset county council to close any children’s centres? Is she saying that, because more money is available to them, the decision to close a centre is a political decision, not a financial requirement?

[Elizabeth Truss]

I know that my hon. Friend is a voice of reform and that he wants councils to be as efficient as possible. The point is that we have increased investment in early intervention.