Measuring what matters: A guide for children’s centres

The early years are critically important for creating ‘solid psychological and neurological foundations to optimise lifelong social, emotional and physical health, and educational and economic achievement’. A number of government reviews have reinforced the importance of early intervention and supporting families in the foundation years, and have set out a strong economic case for investing in the early years to improve outcomes for children in later life.

Children’s centres play a key role in early intervention and are a vital source of support for young children and their families, particularly the most disadvantaged. They offer a range of activities, family services and advice, to promote school readiness, improve family outcomes and reduce inequalities in child health and development, and are highly valued by communities. However, children’s centres require considerable investment and their overall effectiveness – in terms of improving outcomes for children and providing value for money – is regularly debated

The Sure Start Programme begun in 1998 as Sure Start Local Programmes, before many developed into children’s centres as we now know them. Centres were originally set up to serve small areas, with no clear administrative boundaries and no systems in place to ease the collection of information to evidence impact.

Another challenge that children’s centres face is that their impact can take many years to manifest, and staking claim to that impact can be problematic. The Evaluation of Children’s Centres in England (ECCE) study aims to publish its main report on the impact of children’s centres on families’ outcomes in 2015.

During field visits for this research, it emerged that children’s centres attempt to overcome these measurement hurdles by demonstrating their success in
terms of:

I. Outputs, such as the number of families reached and engaged by services
II. Case files that track and demonstrate the improvements made by individual families
III. ‘Soft outcome’ data, such as whether a parent feels like they and/or their children have benefitted from a service.

This is important information that can help children’s centres to show the ‘distance travelled’ by families and the ‘stepping stones’ towards achieving impact. However, inspectors, investors, commissioners and managers, as well as the Government, need to see clear, comparable data that demonstrates the ways in which children’s centres ‘improve outcomes for young children and their families and reduce inequalities between families in greatest need and their peers’6: the core purpose of children’s centres. Failing to evidence the positive difference children’s centres make to families’ outcomes will make it difficult for centres to improve their offer, and leaves them vulnerable to criticism, cuts and closures.