The hon. Member shakes her head; I appreciate that the Labour party and the previous Labour Government were enormously attached to that, but it is right that it has been subject to scrutiny. For something intended to be a flagship, it was clear that the Sure Start programme did not reach the parts that other programmes could not reach, which was the crucial and core purpose for which it was set up. That is backed up by research from the United States.
The right hon. Member for South Northamptonshire (Dame Andrea Leadsom) referred to the Early Intervention Foundation. I urge the Government to make the best possible use of the now merged What Works centres, whose chief executive, Dr Jo Casebourne, was previously chief executive of the Early Intervention Foundation. The use of randomised controlled trials was strongly advocated at the outset of Sure Start, and was resisted by the then Government. There was a lot of debate about why that was, and certainly an active suspicion among researchers that the Government did not want
any of that research to come back and point out that some interventions were not very effective and not a good use of taxpayer money.
An emerging substantial evidence base demonstrates that although some of the things that we spent money on in Sure Start did not achieve any useful purpose for the children who were supposed to be the beneficiaries, other programmes were effective. Commissioners, whether in the Department or in the local authority, need that information so that, given a choice to spend a given amount of taxpayer money, they can spend it on what will make the biggest possible difference in the life of a child. Evidence week is coming up in Parliament soon, and I hope that the Department and Ministers will have the opportunity to celebrate the use of evidence in the distribution of the funding that we are debating.
Let me give a good example. Several hon. Members have mentioned ratios, which Governments in the past have addressed. There is an enormous amount of guidance for local authorities and providers about how things are to be done, and it is a dull but worthwhile exercise to read the Department’s guidance on calculating ratios. It makes it very clear that, depending on how we choose to calculate them, we can produce very different figures suggesting very different things about the ratio of children to staff at a given site.
A setting can arrive at a number by dividing the total number of staff, or the full-time equivalent, by the number of children on the roll. Ofsted would probably encourage it to think instead about how many appropriately qualified adults per child are in the room—a different figure. Both approaches are fine within the DFE guidance, however, so those who believe that changing the ratios can completely transform the early years landscape and resource spread are perhaps barking up the wrong tree. It may well be that adjusting the guidance would help to address the issue.