A False Start For Sure

The government's Sure Start programme was a wasted opportunity, says PROFESSOR GARY CRAIG

Readers of The Oxford Forum may not need to be convinced that child poverty is a particularly problematic issue for children from most black and minority ethnic (BME) families. However, it may be helpful to place it in a wider context of racism within welfare.

The issue of racial discrimination within welfare services is very much on the public policy agenda. Since the McPherson inquiry, set up to investigate the death of Steven Lawrence, there have been numerous investigations into the treatment of BME populations in the NHS, the police and the mental health care system. In 2007 Trevor Philips announced that the Commission for Human Rights and Equality would be pursuing many government departments for failure to promote racial equality. In this context, the Sure Start programme - probably New Labour's most generously financed and targeted social policy initiative - might be expected to give ethnicity a central place.

Astonishingly, however, an analysis of the policy documentation shows that ethnicity was rarely a consideration in the way the programme as a whole was developed, put into practice and evaluated. Given that there was a disproportionally high level of ethnic minorities living in the first 250 Sure Start local programmes (SSLPs), policy-makers were well-placed to build a strong focus of ethnicity into their local work. That most of them did not represents a wasted opportunity.

This link between poverty and minority ethnic status reflects high unemployment levels, racism and discrimination in the selection of people for jobs or redundancy; greater likelihood of being in low-paid work, difficulties in accessing welfare services and restrictions on state financial help for refugees and asylum-seekers. Levels of poverty amongst children of minority ethnic origin are particularly horrifying: for example the Greater London Authority discovered that Bangladeshi and Pakistani households together had the highest percentage of children living in income poverty (73%) and that half of all black children were living in income poverty.

In BME comunities there may be different forms of household structure, child-rearing practices, levels or forms of employment. These differences were all relevant to the aims of the SSLPs, more than 500 of which were already operating by 2004. SSLPs were intended to address disadvantage in early childhood to improve outcomes for all children in the SSLP area.

Both the national programme and the national evaluation, which examined the performance of the first 260 SSLPs, had a historic opportunity to examine the effectiveness of an intervention in addressing disadvantage amongst BME communities. Because the indicators used to target SSLP areas were strongly linked to poverty, by definition they included relatively high proportions of minority ethnic children. Despite this apparently unique and extraordinarily well-resourced opportunity to identify what works for BME families and children, a research study I led concluded that the dimension of ethnicity remained marginal both to the national programme and the national evaluation.

We examined 12 case study SSLPs scattered across 5 regions. Most had BME populations substantially in excess of the national average although we also chose a few, including two in rural areas, to see how the issue of ethnicity was treated in areas where the BME population was small. Furthermore, we reviewed the literature and policy guidance documents, which identified childcare, household income, household size, incidence of poverty and inability to make effective use of services as important factors amongst BME families, shaping their experience of SSLPs.

The review of data and policy guidance suggested very strongly that the treatment of ethnicity as a dimension of the work of Sure Start was fragmented, partial or lacking altogether. Ethnic categories were conflated in a way which did not reflect different outcomes for differing groups and initial national guidance lacked any monitoring of its usefulness by the national Sure Start Unit or government regional offices. As a result, most SSLPs lacked any clear structural approach to the dimension of ethnicity and where good practice existed, it often depended on one or two key staff members experienced in working in multi-ethnic neighbourhoods.

Our review of national and local evaluations gave no better an overall picture. The national evaluation was hampered by the use of the crude categories of black, white and Asian. The position of the most disadvantaged groups - those of Bangladeshi origin, travellers, refugees and asylum seekers - fail to get a single mention. Similarly, local evaluations very rarely mentioned these marginalised groups, and less that 10% had any focus at all on the position of ethnic minorities.

There can be little optimism, based on this study, that children's centres, which are picking up the work of SSLPs, will be any more effective at addressing the needs of BME children. More widely, if government cannot give a lead in combating racism, it is hardly surprising that the incidence of racist attacks across the country is on the increase.

Gary Craig is professor of social justice and associate director of the Wilberforce Institute for the Study of Slavery and Emancipation at the University of Hull.