What a time to announce it, just as evidence grows that children are under extreme stress as they return to school next week. Suffolk county council – with 50 out of 75 councillors Tory since time immemorial – is shutting most of its children’s centres. There are 38, built and paid for by the Labour government, but only 17 will stay open full time.
There’s a fine photo of Ben Gummer, the Ipswich Tory candidate in 2010, with his supporters waving posters reading: “Sure Start SAFE with the Conservatives”. But as everywhere, children’s centres vanish under councils stripped of funds.
Suffolk puts up plentiful excuses: “buildings do not serve communities”, outreach workers will contact families instead. But buildings do matter, as meeting places, as refuges and advice centres for families in any kind of trouble, as support for all young parents – the better-off also contend with postnatal depression, and drink, drug or gambling addictions at home. Children’s centres are local welcoming places that catch problems from birth, where health visitors do the baby checks, weighing and vaccinations. Instead the buildings will be hired out to private and voluntary nurseries, which only see children from the age of two and have no social back-up. Besides, 71% of nurseries are in dire financial straits, according to the National Day Nurseries Association.
Suffolk’s 17 remaining “hubs” will be far distant to many of the county’s families, and are now nominally for children up to the age of 19. The implausible plan for teenage support, covering areas as serious as self-harming, is for it to be magically provided by unspecified “volunteers” with no funding. That’s no replacement for the Connexions service for teenagers, which offered advice on everything from careers to personal and family troubles, but which Michael Gove dissolved, as councils everywhere were forced to demolish their youth services. The number of children in care is up by 28% since 2010. Forget prevention, everything is firefighting.
A decade of dismantling children’s services has taken its toll, and the evidence is there in report after report. Tomorrow, expect a devastating annual survey of children’s wellbeing from the Children’s Society, while today a YMCA study finds children weighed down with fears for the future. As they go back to school, more than half are anxious that they have fallen behind in schoolwork, especially those with exams next summer. They worry about getting a job, with a quarter changing their plans. Nearly 60% worry about members of their family losing their jobs. Denise Hatton, the YMCA’s chief executive, has warned that a lack of funding is “condemning young people to become a lonely, lost generation with nowhere to turn”.
Submitting evidence to the Commons women and equalities committee inquiry into body image, Girlguiding’s survey finds girls overwhelmed by impossible role models and YouTube “influencers”. Pandemic days when they have been left alone with little but social media will have made things worse.
As for “levelling up”, this generation’s social and educational gap has widened, according to this week’s Educational Policy Institute report. Disadvantaged pupils are an average of 18.1 months behind their peers, with those on free school meals behind by 22.7 months at GCSE, with “persistent poverty as a contributory cause of the lack of progress”. And that’s before the effects of lockdown have been measured.
A survey of 45,000 pupils, parents and teachers this week also shows the gap widening, and that everyone thinks children will need intensive extra help: yet there is no sign of the government providing anything like what’s needed. There’s no sign of any rethink of exams after this year’s calamity, and the disadvantage for next year’s GCSE and A-level entrants. Why not spend the astonishing £2bn schools spend on GCSE entrance fees on more teaching and less testing?
The pandemic has opened eyes, raised questions about how we live and lifted hopes that we might do things differently. But it has shone the most brutal light on how for the past decade children have come last in government priorities. The pieties are mouthed – “children are our future” – but children took the heaviest austerity hits, from cuts to their benefits and school funding, to loss of their services and neglect of everything that might protect them – 58% more children are at risk on child protection plans, and social workers are overwhelmed.
It’s no surprise that birth rates are plunging. But the loss of children’s centres causes most despair: decades of research has shown that supporting every month of a young child’s development lasts through life, even improving earnings for disadvantaged children.
Though “levelling up” should start at birth, no order nor money comes from Boris Johnson to tell Suffolk or any other councils to invest in their children’s centres. Labour did put children first, in education, Connexions, Sure Start and child tax credits. We are now in the year by which Tony Blair pledged to end child poverty altogether. Instead, watch how Johnson’s cynicism means he will “level up” only with physical, visible symbols in target seats: children and young people don’t vote. The question for Labour is how to turn its natural instinct for prioritising children into election-winning gold, when older voters seem to care too little.