Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, with reference to the report entitled Closed Doors: children’s centre usage between 2014-15 and 2017-18, published in June 2019 by Action for Children, what steps he is taking to ensure that local authorities submit data on children's centre use in the early years to enable children’s centre provision to meet local need.

In 2013 the department published the children’s centre core purpose, which focussed on improving outcomes for children in greatest need of support. This can be found at the following link: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/sure-start-childrens-centres.

In July 2018 we set an ambitious goal to halve, by 2028, the percentage of children leaving reception year without the communication, language and literacy skills they need to thrive. We have been clear about the outcomes that we are looking to achieve in the early years and it is for local authorities to decide how best to deliver local services.

To help local areas monitor and improve these outcomes, we published on 6 June 2019 the Early Years Outcomes Dashboard: https://department-for-education.shinyapps.io/smapey-dashboard/. This dashboard makes the most important early years social mobility metrics easily available and will allow local authorities to benchmark their outcomes against their statistical neighbours. This is in addition to the extensive range of data made available to local authorities by Public Health England through its Child and Maternal Health profiles: https://fingertips.phe.org.uk/profile/child-health-profiles.

In line with this emphasis on outcomes, the department has no plans to require local authorities to submit data on children’s centre use. The decision to reduce burdens on local authorities and stop requiring them to submit usage data was set out in paragraphs 5.28 and 5.29 of the Sure Start children’s centre planning and performance management guidance in 2006: https://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20100210171222/http://www.dcsf.gov.uk/everychildmatters/_download/?id=4974.

The department believes this is still the right approach. Local authorities should be reviewing data on service use and outcomes in order to ensure that they are meeting the duty to have sufficient children’s centres to meet local need and their commissioning decisions are informed by evidence of the impact of their local services. We will continue to work with local authorities to achieve the Secretary of State’s social mobility ambition, including through our £8.5 million early years local government programme.