Improving Services for Young Children: From Sure Start to Children's Centres

This book is a welcome addition to the field of Early Childhood studies and would appeal to both students and professionals working with children and families in any area. The format of the book is clear and the style of writing is very readable and engaging. Chapters are grouped in four parts and the chapter authors draw on both national evaluations and recent research findings to inform an interesting and contemporary debate. The glossary at the beginning of the book is very useful and clarifies a number of key terms that are built on later in the book.

The first chapter serves as an introduction and gives a good historical perspective highlighting the links between the Sure Start Local Programmes (SSLP) and Children’s Centres (CC) today. The discussion sets the recent changes in social policy within a historical context and it points to the other relevant policy and legislation that informed the current context. Following this, Part 1 focuses on early sites of service delivery with two chapters that discuss the setting up of SSLP and the importance of appropriate buildings and venues for service delivery.

Part 2 takes this further with an interesting discussion about ethical considerations related to social engineering. The two chapters in this part deal with issues including the needs of ethnic minority communities and the important area of empowering parents. Both chapters encourage the reader to engage critically with current issues including poverty and community cohesion. The next part of the book gives an overview of maternity services, early learning, speech and language and employability services for parents. These four sections, especially the speech and language and employability for parents, are a welcome addition and give a clear overview of service provision and many of the issues raised could be applied to any aspect of service delivery.

The final part of the book tackles the area of safeguarding children and includes family support services and domestic abuse. Following this the final chapter draws together the main threads from earlier chapters and makes a number of suggestions for building on good practice and touches upon the very current issue of workforce reform. Overall the book focuses on the successes of SSLP and although discussion of these positive outcomes can be a good basis for future development, greater exploration of the failures would also have been useful.

Chapters are drawn from a wide range of contributors with varied backgrounds and this ensures that the book engages with some of the real issues faced by students and professionals in the changing landscape of children’s services. The use of positive language when discussing parents and families, avoiding the trap of ‘labelling’ families as ‘hard to reach’, is one of the strengths of this book. The chapters do engage the reader with a number of critical discussions but in some the critical debates could have been extended to include the multi-faceted issues faced by workers in CC today. That being said each chapter uses a number of key questions at the beginning to focus the reader and each chapter offers very helpful suggestions for further reading at the end.

Overall the book would appeal to a wide range of people and it does offer an appropriate introductory text to the new and expanding field of work in Sure Start Children’s Centres. The structure of the book ensures that each chapter could be used by a range of students, including the possibility of post graduate students using it as a starting point for further reading. For undergraduate students and professionals the book encourages the consideration of a range of critical debates including the impact of social engineering, the design of services to maintain quality and the interface between specialist and generic skills linked to workforce reform.