What joined-up support means
Sure Start centres put several services in one place. A parent could see a midwife or health visitor, a parenting worker, an early learning teacher and an employment adviser without travelling between offices. The professionals could also talk to one another about the same family. Where a family needed more than one service, they could share what each knew, agree who would do what, and review the plan together.
Local authorities in England describe this way of working as a Team Around the Child: a group of practitioners set up case by case, with a lead professional as the single point of contact, a shared assessment, the family at the centre, and regular reviews that the family can attend. The centres put many of the people who might form such a team in the same building.
Why it matters for safeguarding
Victoria Climbié was an eight-year-old girl who died in 2000 after months of abuse. The statutory inquiry into her death, chaired by Lord Laming and reported in 2003, listed failure of communication between staff and agencies among its main findings. The government’s Every Child Matters green paper, published the same year, named poor co-ordination and a failure to share information among the problems behind such failures.
The same point has kept returning. Looking back, more than twenty years after his report, Laming told Community Care that poor communication between services was the catalyst for the failure to save Victoria, and that reports since have highlighted “some of the same issues about not sharing information”. The national analyses of serious case reviews, the local reviews held after a child’s death or serious injury, tell a similar story. The 2003–05 analysis (Marian Brandon and colleagues) was reported to have found inter-agency communication problems, as in all earlier studies, and the 2011–14 analysis found that in many reviews important information was not passed on. A later analysis, covering 2017–19, adds a distinction: the exchange of information is “necessary but not sufficient for effective communication”. Professionals also need chances to discuss cases and to explain what they know to colleagues from other disciplines.
What the evaluations found about it
Ofsted, the inspectorate, visited 20 children’s centres in six local authorities in 2008. Its July 2009 report found education and care, health and social care working together in all but one centre, but only the three centres it judged outstanding had all three working very effectively together. Parents valued having services under one roof. The head of centre played a crucial leadership role: centres without a permanent head were judged no better than satisfactory. Leaders did not yet have hard data on outcomes. The centres visited were not a representative sample.
The Oxford-led Evaluation of Children’s Centres in England later reported that multi-agency working takes time and commitment to develop. Its 2015 brief on how centres were organised found tensions with particular partners over communication and data-sharing, and staff rated multi-agency working as needing improvement. Another report from the same evaluation (Pam Sammons and colleagues, 2015) found that centres offering more named programmes and working across agencies were linked with better outcomes for families.
The Institute for Fiscal Studies’ long-run evaluation cannot separate the effect of joined-up working from the rest of what centres offered, because records of what each family received are lacking.
Why a fair test takes time
Joined-up working does not arrive with a building. It has to be built: relationships, shared records, agreed roles. The first national evaluation of Sure Start noted that programmes typically took about three years to offer their full range of services. Naomi Eisenstadt, the first Director of Sure Start, wrote in 2011 that much of that time went on commissioning construction, while outcomes were expected within months.
A fair test of any slow process needs three things: a measure suited to the stage it has reached, enough time for it to mature, and a baseline and comparison fixed before the results arrive. Take any one away and a judgement can still be made, but it is not a test.
Two everyday pictures show the logic. They are not evidence about Sure Start. A soufflé taken from the oven after ten minutes is liquid in the middle, which says nothing about the recipe, and a cook knows when to look. Fruit picked in July from a tree that crops in October is hard and sour, and nobody concludes the tree is barren. A grower knows roughly when colour, firmness and sugar will show.
The pictures break down in one place. The cook and the grower know the timing from many repeats. For a new programme, nobody did. The time to maturity was itself unknown, and the only way to learn it was to measure at several ages and keep measuring. A defence of patience with no test points also proves too much, because “wait longer” can excuse any programme. The argument is strong only if it names in advance what would be measured at each stage and what would count as failure.
What a staged test could look like
Infancy and early childhood. Parent and home measures, early contact with services, school readiness at five.
Primary school. Attainment, special educational needs support, attendance.
Adolescence. GCSE results, hospital admissions, mental health, offending.
Adulthood. Earnings, health, and the next generation’s outcomes.
These stages are an illustration, not a design anyone proposed for Sure Start. Its evaluations followed roughly this order. The published evaluations do not show whether a commitment to follow the children through every stage was made in advance. Long follow-up can change the answer. The RAND Corporation’s 2005 review of early childhood programmes (Lynn Karoly and colleagues) found the largest returns for programmes followed the longest. It also found one costed programme that was not effective, so long follow-up does not guarantee a good result.
A railway as a comparison
The Elizabeth Line shows the short end of the same lesson. The National Audit Office reported in 2019 that the project’s funding had been raised and that the central section could not open as planned. The line opened in stages between May 2022 and May 2023, about three and a half years late. The overspend and the delay were real. What changed after opening is that the judgement could include how the line was used: Transport for London reported more than 350 million journeys by December 2024 and a benefits-to-cost ratio of 1.9 to 1. Those are its own figures, it calls its findings early, and it still describes £18.9 billion as an estimated final cost.
A railway’s use can be counted within weeks of opening. A child’s main outcomes appear over a childhood.
What this does and does not show
It does not show that joined-up working was what made the difference in Sure Start, because the evaluations cannot separate it from the rest. It does not show that a longer wait would have produced a better verdict: crime, numbers in care and employment did not show clear gains even with time. It does show that cost was judged years before the first children could be assessed at 16, and that a fair test of joined-up working needed time to build it, time to run, and measures named in advance.
YFL presents this as a reading of the published evidence at this date. Later work may change it. The YFL essay Sure Start: What Was Promised, What Was Measured, and When It Was Known sets out the sources behind each figure.
Topics: #InOtherWords #SureStart #JoinedUpWorking #TeamAroundTheChild #Safeguarding #EvidenceAndPolicy
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In Other Words... What the Evaluations for Sure Start Found, Year by Year — the evaluations in the order they were published
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After Munro. Who is listening now? — a recent reform in children’s social care rolled out after short trials: the timing question seen from the other direction
In Other Words... What Was Cut From Sure Start, and What That Did — the fall in funding and centres after 2010, and what the evaluations can and cannot say about it
Examining the Evaluators: Why Are They Listened To? — who supplied much of this evidence, how each body is paid for and who checks it