Some people get very angry when everyone in the room agrees on what the problem is but nothing is done to fix it. It’s kind of like how people in Britain’s early years sector feel right now. The proof is here. The interventions do their job. And the cuts are still going on.
Researchers went all over the UK earlier this year to talk to grant recipients, local governments, and groups that work directly with young families. It wasn’t really surprising what they told them, but it did make them think. The need is getting bigger. For more than ten years, the statutory funding has been going down. And the community and charity groups that are filling the gap are doing so with fewer and fewer funds and no idea what will happen next.
Local governments spent less on children’s services from 2010 to 2020, going from £3.6 billion to £1.8 billion. During the same time period, the central government cut councils’ money by 24%. Cutting these programs hurt families with kids younger than five the most. This group was already the least helped by charities, getting only 6% of the money meant for kids and teens.
If you go to any family hub that’s still open, you’ll start to understand what’s really at stake. You won’t just find playgroups here. They’re often the first place a parent who is having a hard time feels safe enough to ask for help. Families can get in touch with health visitors, speech therapists, and debt counselors through them. They make people feel less alone, which has become its own quiet crisis since the pandemic. A generation of toddlers’ social and emotional development was slowed down by lockdowns. Many of their parents were already having a hard time with money, and now they felt even more alone.
There has always been a strong case for getting help early on paper. It has been shown over and over that the sooner you act, the better off children, families, and public services will be in the long run. It’s possible that policymakers have known this all along and have chosen to focus on other things. It’s also possible that the benefits of prevention are hard to get political support for because they show up years later in things like better test scores and fewer hospital stays that don’t happen.
The new study clearly shows that the integrated services model, which links government-run health and early learning services with community groups from the third sector, works in real life as well as in theory. Instead of expecting parents in crisis to figure out a broken system on their own, holistic family support that includes many services around a family works much better. The problem is that it needs coordination, long-term funding, and a clear national strategy, but none of those things exist at the level that is needed right now.
Almost a quarter of English five-year-olds have cavities. In the poorest places, the death rate for babies has gone up. In 2022, one in five kids did not meet basic goals for breakfast, lunch, and learning. This is not just a bunch of numbers. They are the results of ten years of not investing, and they are hurting families that aren’t ready to handle them. Families from Pakistan and Bangladesh, Black Africa, and children with special educational needs all face problems that are made worse by general policy responses that don’t help.
When people who work in this field try to make the case that doing more with less is not sustainable, they feel like they are being asked to do more with less. You’ll feel tired being there. Organizations with roots in the community work well because they are trusted, local, and responsive, which is something that centralized systems can’t do. But the same things that make them hard to scale also make them easy to miss when funding decisions are being made.
The 1001 Days Movement wants a big plan from all three levels of government to make sure that all efforts in the early years are focused on the same goals. All the signs point to that kind of coordination. The hard part starts with getting there: politically, financially, and structurally.
