What changed in 2011
Until 2011, money for children’s centres came with a ring-fence: it could be spent on centres and little else. The coalition government, which took office in 2010, removed the ring-fence in 2011 and folded the money into the Early Intervention Grant, which councils could spend across a wider range of services.
The Sutton Trust, a charity, later reported on what happened to the wider early intervention money that councils received. It fell by more than 64%, from £3.28 billion in 2010/11 to £1.17 billion in 2017/18. Children’s centres were only one part of that total, so the figure is not a measure of centre funding alone. It also leaves out councils’ other income. Spending on children and young people’s services as a whole fell by a smaller 16% in real terms between 2010/11 and 2015/16.
The Trust also surveyed local authorities. Of those that replied, 69% said their children’s centre budget had decreased over the previous two financial years, and 84% said financial pressure was the main driver of change.
How many centres closed
The Trust counted 3,632 centres at the peak in August 2009. The count since then depends on what is called a children’s centre. The national database showed a 14% fall by October 2017, and the Trust’s own survey of councils found 16%. Counting only registered centres, the fall was more than 30%, which suggests more than 1,000 centres may have closed. The report itself says the true figure lies somewhere in that range, because the term had no clear definition.
Closure was only part of the change. Many centres that stayed open became part-time, merged into clusters, or worked mainly with families who had been referred. National guidance in 2013 moved the focus to families in greatest need and dropped the requirement for full daycare and qualified teachers in the most disadvantaged areas.
What the evaluations can say about it
The evaluations were mostly looking at the earlier, better-funded period. The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), whose 2025 report is the most recent long-run evaluation, found that the original local programmes kept much higher budgets than the centres that came later. Spending per centre in 2010 was less than a third of the 2003 level.
The IFS also found that the effects of the original programmes and of the later children’s centres “seem to be similar” on test scores at ages 5, 7 and 11. At age 7, children living near an original local programme improved about twice as much. Results at GCSE, the exams taken at 16, are available only for children who grew up near programmes opened by 2003. The estimates of lifetime earnings rest on those children.
The Oxford-led evaluation of children’s centres, published in 2015, noted that centres were being cut and restructured while the study was running. That is a caution about the findings of that study, not a measure of what the cuts did.
One reading of the thinner funding
Naomi Eisenstadt was the first Director of Sure Start. In a 2024 Health Foundation podcast she said the Coalition “spread it thinly across and that made a massive difference to impact”. She described the results as coming only from the first 500 programmes, which were very well funded.
That is her reading, recorded a year before the IFS report. The 2025 report qualifies it: the two types of centre showed similar effects on test scores, and both were effective on special educational needs support. In the same podcast she defended the expansion. If Sure Start had stayed with the original 500 programmes in poor areas, she said, it would have been cut immediately.
What has not been observed yet
A child who was one year old in 2010 reached GCSE age in the mid-2020s. The 2025 IFS report does not follow children through the years of reduced funding to the age of 16. This is arithmetic, not a finding.
The IFS work compares children with different access to centres. On YFL’s reading of the report, it does not isolate the effect of the funding cuts, and it cannot show what would have happened to the same children had the money stayed. The question in the title, what the cuts did, has therefore not been answered by the published evaluations.
A later programme gives one sense of scale. Family Hubs and Start for Life began in 2022–23. The IFS noted that its spending was under £600 million in a recent year, against £2.7 billion in Sure Start’s peak year, 2009–10, in 2023–24 prices.
Critics of the design, supporters of the purpose
Several people who criticised Sure Start’s design supported its aim. Speaking at a Conservative Party conference fringe event in 2013, Eisenstadt said centres had been asked to do too many things. She argued for concentrating them in the poorest areas, with schools and health centres covering the rest. Frank Field, a Labour MP who reviewed poverty and life chances for the Prime Minister in 2010, wrote that the Foundation Years could not succeed without Sure Start, but that the concept of the centre needed radical reform.
Sure Start’s future was also argued in election campaigns. A Nursery World report of April 2015 quotes Tristram Hunt, then Labour’s shadow education secretary, warning that the Conservatives posed a threat to Sure Start. The report says David Cameron, then Conservative leader, had said before the 2010 election that he would protect it. These are two sources. They do not show how far Sure Start was treated as a political target, or by whom, and they do not show that criticism caused the cuts. The mechanism documented in the sources cited here is the change in how funding was allocated and ring-fenced.
What this does and does not show
Shows: that the funding allocated to early intervention fell sharply after 2010, that the number of centres fell by an amount that depends on how a centre is counted, and that many surviving centres changed what they offered.
Does not show: what the cuts did to children’s outcomes. The strongest evidence on outcomes concerns the earlier, better-funded period, and the 2025 IFS report does not follow the children who grew up through the reductions to 16.
Does not settle: whether Sure Start would have done better or worse with steadier funding. YFL presents this as a reading of the sources at one point in time. 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 #ChildrensCentres #EarlyIntervention #PublicSpending #EvidenceAndPolicy
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