Giving kids a sure start is no simple business

With such savage cuts affecting all services, maybe it’s surprising that Michael Gove has fought to ringfence children's services for all, declaring, “on Sure Start children's centres, we want to ensure that the funding is there to maintain the current network.”

Meanwhile, the £7bn "fairness premium," announced by Nick Clegg, is going to increase state-provided pre-school activities for disadvantaged three to four year olds, and introduce them for two-year olds. Currently, all three to four year olds in England receive 15 hours of preschool activities each week; this figure is set to double to 30 hours per week, with an expected overall cost of £300m by 2014-15.

By embracing Sure Start, the coalition has treated early intervention as a way of highlighting Labour’s failure to tackle deprivation. However, if the Lib-Cons intend to use early intervention to fix society, they will be following in the previous government’s footsteps. It was Labour who originally intended Sure Start as a way of teaching poor parents to parent.

Under Labour, deprivation came to be understood in psychological terms. Social exclusion apparently led to poor mental health, and behavioural problems were passed on from parents to children. Eventually, Labour resorted to housing problematic mothers in residential units.

The coalition government has taken this notion further, with a more intensive focus on parenting. Poverty tsar, Frank Field, has called for the "Foundation Years" stage of education, which currently applies from birth to the age of five, to begin much earlier—at the moment when a woman registers as pregnant. Along with his proposals for a GCSE in parenting, Field is proposing a kind of cradle-to-cradle curriculum.

Yet the government underestimates the extent to which early intervention may undermine the autonomy of the community it seeks to restore. Take “attachment”: the theory that babies who don’t form a bond with a carer are unlikely to develop empathy. Attachment theory is a central part of the evidence underpinning early intervention. But there is a lack of consensus about which children this affects.

Brain scans seem to show that children who are neglected have less developed brains at the age of three than normal children. However there are different degrees of “neglect.” There’s “neglect” in the extreme way that Baby P was neglected and then “neglect” in the sense that working mothers leave their children in day-care. So day-care can become a morally fraught issue, and certainly a source of guilt for parents, despite the fact that experts disagree on its effects. The irony is that in so far as Sure Start has been popular among parents it is because it has given them free day care—the very opposite of what proponents of early intervention deem to be good for children.

Martin Earnshaw is the reviews editor of the Future Cities Project. He is leading the session “Early intervention: saving children from their future?” at the Battle of Ideas festival on Saturday 30th October