Like many people, I was delighted to see the announcement by Devon County Council about the creation of the new Family Hubs network.

The Council made the decision last week to develop and extend their existing Children’s Centres;

‘The transition from Children’s Centres into Family Hubs offering a broader range of support to a wider age group of children and their families, accessible to all without a need for professional referral, was generally welcomed by parents and professionals…’

The links with SEND (special educational needs and disabilities) policy and practice is important.

As part of a broader campaign many Conservative Party MPs and councillors campaigned for an extension of the Family Hubs scheme, and in 2021 Jeremy Hunt announced a £300 million boost to funding. But, this is of course, catch up time. After 2010 the Coalition Government; (yes, them again) ended the existing Sure Start initiative, and with the cuts in children’s benefits, created widespread problems for poorer families in particular.

There have been several Family Hub type initiatives since 1949, following the 1948 Children Act, which, as part of the ‘Welfare State’, focused much needed attention on the care and development of children. Of course a great deal was learnt by the War time initiatives to support families as so many mothers were working fulltime.

The 1989 Children Act stated that ‘Every local authority shall provide such family centres as they consider appropriate in relation to children within their area.’ So here yet again is a half-hearted commitment to the idea that every child matters, that was not really put centre-stage until the 2004 Children Act, which I have discussed before in these pages. This Act had five key aims; to create a safe, and healthy environment for children, in which they could enjoy and achieve. Children should also be economically secure and encouraged to make a positive contribution to their community.

In between these two Acts the Labour Government elected in 1997, announced in 1998 the creation of ‘Sure Start’. This area-based policy and practice initiative was launched in 1999 to deliver services and support to young children and their families. However, then as now, despite ‘Every Child Matters’, the focus of Sure Start and most other initiatives to this day have tended to focus on the 20% or so poorest neighbourhoods. The assumption being that most families could afford to take whatever initiatives they considered to be appropriate and necessary.

Devon County Council (DCC) have since 2017 outsourced their Children’s Centres programme to Action for Children, a national children’s charity, with earlier links to the Methodist movement. DCC has also decided to bring the

delivery of Family Hubs back ‘in-house’ with the possibility of existing Action for Children practitioners joining the staff of DCC.

Not surprisingly many reports by research bodies, including the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), have routinely emphasised the significant benefits for families, their children and society in general of schemes like Sure Start and Family Hubs. The improvements in academic attainments by children and young people involved in these schemes over many years of their lives has been highlighted of course. We have all noted that the recent GCE results have shown that the gap in ‘achievement’ in this narrow measure, has widened again. Many people, especially MPs and Governments, still invest a good deal of faith in the idea of social mobility. Primarily this mere aspirational political ‘window dressing’. My generation growing up in the post 1945 ‘welfare state’ (sorry to mention it yet again) were the beneficiaries of significant social mobility as a direct consequence of our access to a better standard of living, and access to schooling and wider educational opportunities that had previously been the preserve of wealthy people. It has been shown over many years that the links between ‘origins and destinations’ is real, and matters.