Labour plans to fund 400 more one-stop family hubs

Bridget Phillipson, the education secretary, will this week announce plans to fund an additional 400 Best Start family hubs, taking the total number to 1,000 by 2028.

The initiative, which is based on the Sure Start early years programme introduced by Tony Blair’s government, is backed by £500m funding and will initially be targeted at the most deprived areas.

Drop-in centres offering playgroups, parenting classes and health advice for pre-school children, will go alongside a new national digital family hub linked to the NHS app.

There will be at least one Best Start centre in each local authority, giving half a million more children access to services. All of the hubs will have specialist staff trained to diagnose and help children with special educational needs.

There are currently 600 family hubs, but more than 1,300 Sure Start centres closed between 2010 and 2020. One in four families with children under five cannot access local children’s centres, rising to one in three in lower-income families.

Sure Start centres, introduced in 1998, brought together services for young children and their families. By the programme’s peak, in August 2009, there were 3,632 centres.

Research by the Institute for Fiscal Studies found children who lived within a short distance of a Sure Start centre for the first five years of their lives were 0.9% more likely to achieve five good GCSEs at 16. The scale of the new initiative is smaller than Sure Start’s but is separate to the breakfast club provision already introduced.

Phillipson said: “It’s the driving mission of this government to break the link between a child’s background and what they go on to achieve.”

She added: “I saw firsthand how initiatives like Sure Start helped level the playing field in my own community, transforming the lives of children by putting in place family support in the earliest years of life.”

The family hubs will offer activities for children aged up to five, as well as support with language, nutrition and mental health. They will also give debt and welfare advice for parents.

Before the election the Phillipson visited Estonia, where early years education is seen as critical to a child’s future success. Experts compare education to a tree in which pre-school provision forms the crucial roots.

Angela Rayner, the deputy prime minister, described in an interview a few years ago the profound impact that the Sure Start programme had on her after she became pregnant at 15. Having not been shown love as a child, it was only when she went to a Sure Start nursery that she learned to hug her son, Ryan. “I thought being a parent was just making sure your children were clean and fed,” she said.

When she saw her son pick up his own daughter and cuddle her, “I got really tearful. It was so natural for him just to scoop up his daughter and say all the things like ‘I love you’ and ‘you’re amazing’. And I thought ‘You’ve broken that link.’ ”