By Pedro Carneiro, Sarah Cattan, Gabriella Conti, Claire Crawford, Elaine Drayton, Christine Farquharson, Nick Ridpath    

Introduced in 1999, Sure Start was an ambitious, large-scale early years programme in England aimed at improving the life chances of children, particularly those growing up in poverty. The programme’s reach peaked in the late 2000s, with a network of around 3,300 centres operating as ‘one-stop shops’ for families with children under 5. Sure Start centres offered a wide range of services, from baby weighing clinics to childcare provision to employment support for parents. These services were designed primarily to target school readiness and children’s health, and recent evidence suggests the programme was successful in achieving these aims: in a series of reports, Cattan et al. (2022) and Carneiro et al. (2024a) document positive impacts of Sure Start for child health and school attainment, particularly for children from the most disadvantaged backgrounds.    Given the efficacy of the Sure Start programme for health and educational outcomes, a natural question is whether it had broader impacts on children. This report details the findings from a robust evaluation of the impact of access to Sure Start on children’s absence and suspensions at school, youth offending and contacts with the children’s social care system. Missing school, committing a crime or experiencing social services involvement can entail significant welfare costs for children. There is a case that investment in joined-up services and early intervention can prevent children from experiencing these poor outcomes. For instance, the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care (MacAlister, 2022) highlighted the potential of tailored services based in community settings to contribute to earlier identification of families in need and reduce social services intervention. It is important to understand whether an integrated early years programme delivered in local neighbourhoods, such as Sure Start, was able to influence the need for costlier interventions, such as those delivered through children’s social care and the youth justice 

Key Findings

1. Access to a nearby Sure Start centre between ages 0 and 4 significantly reduced youth crime that resulted in convictions or custodial sentences. Living within 2.5 kilometres of a Sure Start centre reduced the share of 16-year-olds who had ever received a criminal conviction by 13%. Meanwhile, custodial sentences – the most severe sanction – fell by a fifth due to access to Sure Start. Reductions in youth offending were concentrated on convictions for theft, the most common category of offence (20% reduction), and for drug offences (20% reduction).2. While access to Sure Start reduced serious youth crime, it had more mixed impacts on less severe contact with the criminal justice system. Those with access to Sure Start committed offences earlier – a 10% increase in less serious misdemeanours by age 12 – and saw rises in cautions for criminal damage and violent crime, although overall numbers of young people experiencing cautions by age 16 were unchanged.  3. Misbehaviour also increased within school settings: the proportion of children suspended from secondary school increased by 10%, and absence rates increased by 7%. Part of the increase in poor behaviour, both in schools and for younger adolescents in the criminal justice system, may reflect a diversion of children away from more severe offences towards lower-level infractions, but it also likely represents an increase in misbehaviour for some children. This could align with evidence that group-based childcare, a key component of Sure Start’s services, can adversely affect the behavioural development of some children.4. Access to Sure Start had no significant effect on referrals to children’s social services or on receiving support as a child in need (CIN) or as a child looked after (CLA) between ages 7 and 16. Children in care during late primary school (age 7 to 11) did spend around 13% less time being looked after if they had access to Sure Start during their first five years of life, potentially indicating that children’s needs were somewhat less severe or that they benefited more quickly from support from social services. 5. The youth justice system and children’s social care involve significant costs for government, as well as the individuals involved. We estimate that for every pound spent at its peak in 2010, Sure Start averted approximately 19 pence in public spending on youth justice and children’s social care, equivalent to £500 million (in today’s prices) of savings per cohort attending at the time. Savings mostly come from costs of youth custody and children looked after, reflecting the high costs of these intensive interventions (and so the large financial benefits of reducing need for these institutions). Future work will provide an overall cost–benefit analysis of the programme, incorporating the effects on educational achievement and health identified in our previous work, while taking account of how these different domains relate to one another to avoid double-counting benefits.

IFS Report R338 London: The Institute for Fiscal Studies, October 2024, 75p.