Labour Life Chances campaign: We need to focus on early years investment

Our new Labour Life Chances Campaign asks the Labour party to pledge to introduce a children’s life chances bill, with dedicated funding for the first five years of life. The government’s new schools funding formula is rightly raising hackles throughout the country, but investment in the early years also urgently requires our focus, as it has the greatest impact on children’s life chances.

In 2011, the coalition government removed the ring-fencing of local authority funds for non-schools education budgets. What followed, during the years of austerity and swingeing budget cuts, has had an adverse effect on children’s life chances through the impact on children’s centres. Hundreds of children’s centres have been closed, others have become almost unsustainable; many limping on with their previous funding halved, with fewer staff, only open a few hours a week. This despite a 2015 University of Oxford study evaluating children’s centre outcomes, which demonstrated that the better funded children’s centres were more successful both in boosting the social skills of children and improving family functioning compared with centres where staffing levels or services were reduced.

Set up under the last Labour government’s sure start programme to provide a range of services for parents and carers, children’s centres provide families with advice and support from conception onwards, helping resolve issues with breastfeeding and speech and language or post-natal depression. They source the best help for children with disabilities or provide a friendly ear for a parent who may feel isolated and under pressure. Angela Rayner, the shadow education secretary has said: “Labour’s Sure Start centres gave me and my friends, and our children, the support we needed to grow and develop.” Yet this vital support for families is gradually being worn away.

One of the main consequences is that the educational progress of young children is being hindered. A large gap remains between the numbers of young children at age five who are “school ready” and their disadvantaged peers who are not. Despite this, many local authorities have introduced a closing the gap strategy, rather than recognising it would be more effective to invest in an early years strategy to prevent the gap.

Research demonstrates that disadvantage starts in the earliest years of a child’s life, indeed before birth. From conception to around the age of two is when a child’s brain is developing at its greatest pace. By the time a child reaches two years old his or her future life course will have largely been determined through the extent of the nurturing process, or lack of it, that has taken place. Families need the greatest help during these first 1001 days, as recognised by the cross-party all-party parliamentary group’s first 1001 critical days manifesto, but also right through their children’s first five years of life to give them the best possible start in life.

We believe that funding for these important first five years of life should be increased and ring-fenced. Furthermore, we believe that this investment should be the foundation of a life chances bill, which would include funds earmarked for specific programmes which would best aid children’s life chances: a nationwide programme for the first 1001 days from conception to age two; a parent-child engagement and family mentoring programme; support for a local, accessible, children’s centre in every community.

This dedicated investment for early years would not only go a long way towards righting inequalities in our society, but it would also be economically effective. Early investment not only works but it saves money, as demonstrated by the work of Nobel Prize-winning University of Chicago Professor James Heckman. His research shows that quality early childhood development heavily influences health, economic and social outcomes for individuals and society at large, and that there are great economic gains to be had by investing in early childhood development. This is borne out by the removal of one million children from poverty by the four-fold increase in early childhood investment by the last Labour government, which transformed many families’ lives.

We want the Labour party to commit to once again being at the forefront of transforming lives. Our plan sets out a way to achieve this.

Cllr Jenny St John (@jennyastjohn) and Ben Wesson (@benwesson)
Co-Chairs, Labour Life Chances Campaign (@LabLifeChances)