Field Review on Poverty and Life Chances

The Review recommends that government, national and local, should give greater prominence to the earliest years in life, from pregnancy to age five, adopting the term Foundation Years. This is for several reasons: to increase public understanding of how babies and young children develop and what is important to ensure their healthy progress in this crucial period; to make clear the package of support needed both for children and parents in those early years; to establish the Foundation Years as of equal status and importance in the public mind to primary and secondary school years; and to ensure that child development and services during those years are as well understood.

The Review recommends that the Government gradually moves funding to the early years, and that this funding is weighted toward the most disadvantaged children as we build the evidence base of effective programmes. The Fairness Premium, introduced in the 2010 Spending Review, should begin in pregnancy.

No longer should governments automatically increase benefits for children but in each financial year consider whether the life chances of poorer children will be increased more by transferring any benefit increases into building the Foundation Years.

The increased funding should be targeted at those factors we know matter most in the early years: high quality and consistent support for parents during pregnancy, and in the early years, support for better parenting; support for a good home learning environment; and, high quality childcare.

Government should start now to develop a long term strategy, to increase the life chances of poorer children by narrowing the gaps in outcomes between poorer and richer children in the Foundation Years. This will prove the most cost effective way of addressing inequalities in adult life outcomes. We hope that the Government's social mobility strategy, to be published in the New Year, will reflect this recommendation.

The strategy should include a commitment that all disadvantaged children should have access to affordable full-time, graduate-led childcare from age two. This is essential to support parents returning to work as well as child development.

The Review has focussed on the early years, but recognises that important changes can and do take place later in children's lives and that investment in the early years will not be fully effective unless it is followed up with high quality services for those who need them most later in childhood. The Review therefore recommends that the Government extends the life chances approach to later stages in childhood.

Sure Start Children's Centres should re-focus on their original purpose and identify, reach and provide targeted help to the most disadvantaged families. New Sure Start contracts should include conditions that reward Centres for reaching out effectively and improving the outcomes of the most disadvantaged children.

Local Authorities should open up the commissioning of Children's Centres, or services within them, to service providers from all sectors to allow any sector, or combination of sectors, to bid for contracts. They should ensure services within Children's Centres do not replicate existing provision from private, voluntary and independent groups but should signpost to those groups, or share Centres' space. This should encourage mutuals and community groups to bid and help ensure that efficiencies are made. Non-working parents should spend one nursery session with their children. The pattern of provision that has been developed in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland in order to meet local needs of the most vulnerable children should act as a template to those providers in England who have successfully won contracts.

Local Authorities should aim to make Children's Centres a hub of the local community. They should maintain some universal services so that Centres are welcoming, inclusive, socially mixed and non-stigmatising, but aim to target services towards those who can benefit from them most. They should look at how they could site birth registrations in Centres, provide naming ceremonies, child benefit forms and other benefit advice. Children's Centres should ensure all new parents are encouraged to take advantage of a parenting course. Midwives and health visitors should work closely with Centres and ensure a consistency of service is provided, with continuity between the more medical pre birth services and increasingly educational post natal work. Children's Centres should seek to include parents' representation on their governance and decision-making bodies.

Local Authorities should consider joining with surrounding authorities to establish Poverty and Life Chances Commissions to drive policy in their localities like the Liverpool City Region has pioneered.

The Department for Education, in conjunction with Children's Centres, should develop a model for professional development in early years settings, looking to increase graduate-led pre school provision, which mirrors the model for schools. The Department should also continue to look for ways to encourage good teachers and early years professionals to teach in schools and work in Children's Centres in deprived areas, through schemes such as Teach First and New Leaders in Early Years.

Local Authorities should pool data and track the children most in need in their areas. A Local Authority should understand where the children who are most deprived are, and how their services impact upon them. Central Government should review legislation that prevents Local Authorities using existing data to identify and support families who are most in need with the intention of making use of data by Local Authorities easier, and provide a template for successful data sharing which respects data privacy issues. In particular, Department for Work and Pensions should ensure that new legislation on the Universal Credit allows Local Authorities to use data to identify families most in need.

Local Authorities should ensure use of services which have a strong evidence base, and that new services are robustly evaluated. Central Government should make a long term commitment to enable and support the bringing together of evidence around interventions, learning from examples such as the National Institute for Clinical Excellence and the Washington State Institute. We understand this will be covered in more detail by the Graham Allen Review on early intervention.

Ofsted ratings for childcare and schools in disadvantaged areas compared with more affluent areas should be included as one of the Department for Education's indicators in its Business Plan and government policy should aim to close the gap. Ofsted should continue to report on schools and childcare settings' engagement with parents. This is a particularly key area, for which settings should consistently be held to account.

The initiatives for the wider society should be taken up by the Behavioural Insight Team based in the Cabinet Office. This Review recommends that it leads, along with key Departments, an examination of how parenting and nurturing skills can be promoted throughout society.

A Cabinet Minister should be appointed for the Foundation Years, at the next re-shuffle.

The Department for Education should ensure schools are held to account for reducing the attainment gap in the same way they are for improving overall attainment. Where a school has a persistent or increasing attainment gap, this should have a significant bearing on the inspection for the school, ultimately this should be a major factor in a decision on whether the school is judged inadequate.

The Department for Education should continue to publish and promote clear evidence on what is successful in encouraging parental engagement in their children's learning.

The Department for Education should ensure that parenting and life skills are reflected in the curriculum, from primary school to GCSE level. This should culminate in a cross-curricular qualification in parenting at GCSE level which will be awarded if pupils have completed particular modules in a number of GCSE subjects. The Manchester Academy is currently developing a pilot scheme which could be used as a basis for this GCSE.

The Review recommends a new suite of measures to run alongside the existing financial poverty measures. The new measures will inform and drive policy, as well as spending decisions aimed at narrowing the outcome gaps between children from low and higher income families. The Review's primary measurement recommendation is that the Government adopts a new set of Life Chances Indicators. These indicators will measure annual progress at a national level on a range of factors in young children which we know to be predictive of children's future outcomes, and will be created using national survey data.

Existing local data should be made available to parents and used anonymously to enable the creation of Local Life Chances Indicators which can be compared with the national measure. In order to make this local data as useful as possible, information collected by health visitors during the age two health check, which this Review recommends should be mandatory, and information collected as part of the Early Years Foundation Stage (following the results of Dame Clare Tickell's review) should be as similar as possible to the information used to create the national measure.

The Government should develop and publish annually a measure of 'service quality' which captures whether children, and in particular children in low income families, have suitable access to high quality services.

This Review is about ensuring that the life chances of the very poorest children are enhanced. We suggest that a new measure of severe poverty should be developed. This will focus attention on prolonged material and financial deprivation and we recommend the Government begins to develop a strategy specifically to help the most disadvantaged children.