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Labour will aim to embed a Sure Start-type system of help for deprived children and families so deeply and completely into the state that a future Reform or Conservative government would not be able to dismantle it, Bridget Phillipson has pledged.
Arguing that efforts to close the attainment gap between poorer and richer children was the government’s “moral mission”, the education secretary promised to build on this weekend’s announcement of a new wave of family hubs across England, an effective successor to Sure Start.
Sure Start, a network of centres offering integrated services for the under-fives and their families, launched in 1998 under the last Labour government, and was seen as one of its major successes, with one study saying it generated longer-term savings worth twice the system’s cost.
But much of Sure Start was dismantled amid massive spending cuts by the Conservatives. The new policy of family hubs will commit £500m to opening 1,000 centres from April 2026.
In an article for the Guardian, Phillipson said the centres should become part of a wider network of help for families, one that would not just be impossible to take apart, but that would become so popular that they would become an untouchable “third rail” of British politics.
The family hubs strategy was “a watershed moment” for both government and families, Phillipson wrote.
She went on: “To make it a reality we will begin unprecedented collaboration between parents, councils, nurseries, childminders, schools and government, enmeshing family support, early education, and childcare so deeply that no rightwing government can ever unpick it, as the Tories did with Sure Start over 14 long years.
“We will ensure any such assault on the system will become the new third rail of British politics.”
In a follow-up announcement to the plan for family hub centres, which are intended to be created in every council area in England by 2028, Phillipson’s department has also announced plans to pay qualified early years teachers to work in the most deprived areas, where their work could have the greatest impact.
Currently, the Department for Education says, just one in 10 nurseries have a qualified early years teacher. The incentive scheme will involve a tax-free payment of £4,500 to early years teachers who take a job in a nursery in one of the 20 most disadvantaged communities in England.
In another change, the education watchdog Ofsted will inspect any new early years providers within 18 months of opening, with subsequent inspections taking place at least once every four years, rather than the current six.
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Sure Start and its successor programmes have a near-totemic role in the narrative of the modern Labour party, with Angela Rayner, its deputy leader, saying her life as a teenage mother and that of her son were turned around by her local centre, which offered her a parenting course.
In her Guardian article, Phillipson recounted working closely with the first-ever Sure Start centre in Washington, Tyne and Wear, when she ran a refuge for women fleeing domestic violence, before she entered politics.
“It was a lifeline for those women who, despite everything, were determined to give their children the very best start in life,” she wrote. “The gap in achievement we see between our poorest and most affluent children at 16 is baked in before they even start school, creating a vicious cycle of lost life chances that’s all too visible in the shameful number of young people not earning or learning.”
Speaking in interviews on Sunday morning, Phillipson said Labour was also committed to tackling child poverty, but said the fiscal cost of Downing Street’s U-turn on changes to welfare last week would make it harder to implement other policies such as potentially scrapping the two-child benefit cap.
