‘I’m mother who was given a lifeline by Sure Start – now I’m studying for a PhD’
A mother who grew up in one of the most deprived areas of the country has hailed the impact the Sure Start initiative had in allowing her to resurrect her education and put her on course to earning a PhD.
The pioneering Sure Start programme began in 1998, creating centres or “one-stop shops” that brought together health and family support services under one roof for children under five and their parents. It is widely regarded as one of New Labour’s most successful policies, although many centres have since closed.
Caroline Keep, who lives in Halton near Runcorn in Cheshire, told i that living near a Sure Start centre throughout pregnancy and motherhood not only transformed her daughter’s life by giving her a better start, but gave her the opportunities to change her own future.
“My childhood was tough as Halton is one of the most deprived areas in the country. I grew up in a council house with a disabled mum who is deaf,” said the now 43-year-old. “My mum met my stepdad and married him when I was 11 and we spent most of my childhood in council housing.
“I suffered abuse when I was younger and went to court when I was 15, went through the court and social services system. Even though my mum and stepdad were amazing and very supportive, it didn’t feel like there was any other support in those days.”
At the age of 16, Ms Keep got a job in retail with the Children’s Society and spent three years working for them. She then became an air hostess and did that until the age of 25. During that time, she met her now ex-husband, a plane engineer from Iceland.
When Ms Keep was 25 and pregnant with her daughter, she moved back to Halton to be near her mum for support; her marriage collapsed soon after. She did not realise it at the time, but she was an undiagnosed autistic, which wasn’t picked up until many years later when her own daughter was a teenager.
Ms Keep recalls she felt bewildered and confused about having her first baby and “didn’t know how to do it”. She added: “I went back to my hometown of Halton to be near my mum, but apart from that, I didn’t know anyone and felt isolated.
“Having had a tough upbringing myself and a troubled past, I wanted to do everything right with my own pregnancy and do a good job of being a parent, but I didn’t really know how to do it.
“Then in the early stages of my pregnancy, I was sent to what was then called Brookvale Sure Start children’s centre in Halton, and it ended up being such a profound moment in my life.”
Ms Keep remembers staff and services at the Sure Start centre supported her through pregnancy itself with everything from what she should be eating to looking after herself and her unborn baby.
After her daughter Arora was born, Ms Keep attended lots of mother and baby groups and activities at the centre, which allowed her to make friends and not feel as isolated.
Ms Keep firmly believes the early years education Arora received at Sure Start gave her the essential grounding she needed to perform at her academic best.
Sure Start also gave Ms Keep the opportunity to resurrect her own education after a disrupted school life and thanks to a heavily subsidised neighbourhood nursery run by Sure Start, she was able to go to university and achieve a degree.
“I was the first of my entire immediate family to go to university,” said Ms Keep. “With the help of the Sure Start nursery and my mum, it allowed me to go to university and get my education, as the childcare was so subsidised.”
Ms Keep did a degree in geology at Liverpool John Moores University. Having seen the transformative power of early education on her daughter, she did a postgraduate certificate in education (PGCE) in physics and became a teacher.
She has won numerous national awards for her teaching, including the TES New Teacher award, and she is now a doctoral researcher developing digitalisation tools in education using machine learning and artificial intelligence.
Ms Keep is still teaching alongside doing a PhD, but says she knows she wouldn’t be doing this today if it wasn’t for the impact Sure Start had on both her and her daughter, who just this week achieved an A in her Psychology mock A-Level exam.
“There is no way any of this would have happened for us if it had not been for there being a Sure Start centre near where I lived,” she said. “All the support and opportunities Sure Start gave me made a huge difference.
“After having a childhood in the ’80s and ’90s myself, when there was nothing to support families like ours, this was the first time I experienced government support, which actually made a massive difference to my life.
“It was mind-boggling at the time that there was all this support and all these free classes and subsidised childcare.”
Children from low-income families who grew up near a Sure Start centre performed better than their peers at GCSEs, new research from the Institute for Fiscal Studies revealed this week.
The research showing the transformational impact of the scheme has prompted calls for Labour leader Keir Starmer to put a new Sure Start style programme at the heart of his election manifesto.
With the analysis by the Institute for Fiscal Studies showing “big improvements” in the GCSE results of children who were living near a Sure Start centre at the age of five when looking at their performance 11 years later, especially those from lower income backgrounds, Ms Keep says in their experience, this is overwhelmingly true.
“With my ex-husband living in Iceland, Arora spent the first 12 years in the UK with me and then she lived in Iceland for five years. She is fluent in English and Icelandic and now has two sets of qualifications.
“She has an Icelandic High School Diploma, and when she came back to the UK, she did six GCSEs in six months and achieved 8s and 9s in them.
“She is now doing her A Levels and doing brilliantly, and has ambitions to go on to Stirling University to study clinical psychology.
“But if she hadn’t had that early years education from Sure Start, I think things would have been very different.”
With the majority of Sure Start centres having closed and calls intensifying for Labour to prioritise a childcare support scheme in their upcoming manifesto, Ms Keep completely agrees with this – but says Sure Start centres should never have been closed.
“The Sure Start centre I used is one of the few that has limped on, but it is owned by a different company now and run as a children’s centre hub,” she said.
“There were at least 10 Sure Start centres in Halton at one time, but now there are only about two left as they have all closed.
“Sure Start totally changed my life and there’s nowhere like that anymore. You knew you could just turn up there and say: ‘I am struggling’ and there would always be someone to help you.
“They should never have closed Sure Start centres, as they made financial sense. Early intervention and access to opportunities gave me the opportunities I needed to get an education and into employment; give my daughter a future and allowed me to contribute to society.
“It made the difference between my daughter growing up the same as I did and having the struggles, living on council estates and surviving on benefits. Instead we both had an education, a good income, and are doing alright for ourselves.”
A Department for Education spokesperson said: “As this report sets out, spend on Sure Start at its peak would represent just a quarter of current overall spending on early years.
“Current spend includes the largest ever investment in childcare in England’s history, which will be transformative for children and families.
“We continue to invest in Family Hubs, which now cover half of all upper-tier local authorities and provide a number of advantages over the Sure Start model, including access to support up to when children turn 19 or 25 if they have special educational needs or disabilities, a wider range of support and an evidence-led focus on the crucial 1001 days of a child’s life.”
