I am delighted to be speaking to Bright Blue today on the important topic of childcare, family support and early education, and the reforming approach this government is taking.
I know Bright Blue have long had a policy interest in supporting families, but I also value your role in creating space for debate in the centre ground of British politics.
A space that is even more important now, as the Conservative party seem determined to vacate the pitch and chase off after Reform.
And as our politics stretches to polarised extremes, we find ourselves once again needing to articulate the case for family support.
Because we already know where Reform stands when it comes to supporting families.
Not only do they want to slash the state, the only content on children and families in their 2024 manifesto was a benefit incentive to support mothers to choose to stay at home. Childcare and early education weren’t even mentioned.
And we know where these roads lead because we have travelled them before.
The cuts made to Sure Start by the Coalition and Conservative governments may have handed the Treasury some cash in the short term, but they derailed a decade of progress.
Sure Start improved outcomes far beyond the early years.
It reduced hospitalisations, improved GCSE results, boosted physical health, boosted mental health, and strengthened families. Crucially it strengthened our communities, creating spaces where families could meet and support one another.
That meant better educational and employment opportunities, greater financial security, and genuine social mobility.
And cutting Sure Start remains one of the most damaging public policy mistakes of recent decades.
1,300 centres closed between 2010 and 2022.
By 2022, funding for family services had fallen by around 75%.
By 2024, one in three lower-income families with young children couldn’t access a local children’s centre.
All while child poverty soared and school readiness flatlined.
At the same time the Health Visitor workforce declined by over 40% after 2015.
Combined spending on early intervention services was 44% lower in 2024 than in 2011, while late-intervention spending on youth justice, safeguarding intervention and children in care rose by more than 50%.
And we don’t have to look particularly hard to find the real-life consequences.
We have one million young people not in education, employment or training.
And as Alan Milburn noted in his recent report this starts early. Building opportunities for our children starts with strong foundations in the early years but too often these have been stripped away.
So this Labour government is clear: family support is vital. We are building it back. We want to see support for every family in every community.
But what I talk to you about today is how we are doing it differently.
Sure Start is totemic for the Labour Party. It is one of the things we are proudest of. Rightly so. But those who call simply to bring it back miss the point.
Because we are operating in a totally different time.
Many of today’s young Mums and Dads have never even heard of Sure Start.
And the context in which they are raising their children is totally different.
In the 2000s the internet was a desktop experience. Today we are navigating how to keep children safe in a world of persistent connectivity.
More children than ever before are now in formal early education and childcare. Families are interacting daily with nurseries, childminders and early years settings in a way that simply wasn’t the case before.
At the same time, in the absence of Sure Start, a rich and diverse social infrastructure has grown up around families. Voluntary and community organisations have stepped in—often heroically—to fill gaps in provision.
Charities, local groups, and early years providers are now deeply embedded in communities, offering everything from parenting support to employment advice.
And alongside this, the fiscal context we are working in is much tighter. Every pound must work harder. We cannot rely on recreating a model that depended on a very different level of public investment.
So I’m clear: we cannot simply plug and play the old Sure Start model.
We need something different.
And that is exactly what we are building.
Our approach to Best Start Family Hubs is rooted in the very best of Sure Start—particularly its most important quality: the sense of community it fostered for parents and carers.
That feeling of walking into a space where you are known, where your child is welcomed, where you can ask for help without judgement, and where you might simply have a cup of coffee with someone going through the same experience as you.
That is what we must hold onto.
But how we deliver that community must evolve.
And our new approach is distinct from Sure Start in several crucial ways.
First, it is digital as well as physical.
Sure Start ended up as a bricks-and-mortar programme. In a time when screentime challenges and online misinformation weren’t even dreamt of.
But today our best start in life website, our early years screen time guidance, our social media campaigns play just as an important role as the hubs themselves.
Second, our new approach is not about putting up buildings and expecting people to come to us. Instead, it is about taking services to where children and families already are.
That might be in brilliant voluntary settings – like Babyzone where everyday hundreds of families get amazing provision.
Or it might be in childcare providers, fantastic childminders or PVI nurseries – who are already going above and beyond to provide help and support to their families.
Where most children already are.
We don’t want to replicate all of this. We want to welcome it into our best start infrastructure.
Third, and critically, our approach is about connecting services together.
One of the most consistent things parents tell us is how fragmented the system can feel.
Too often, they are passed from one service to another, having to repeat their story, navigate new systems, and figure out for themselves where to go next.
That is not good enough.
So Best Start Family Hubs are not designed to be another addition to that system.
They are designed to knit it together.
To create connections – between health visitors, early years providers, social care, employment services, the voluntary sector – so that families experience support as something joined-up and intuitive.
It won’t be easy to embed these shifts in local authorities. We are asking for a totally different way of arranging early years services.
But we’re driving forwards with our reforms.
In addition to our 1000 new hubs in every local authority by 2028, we are now also requiring 2000 network sites. Best Start branded family support provision in libraries, or nurseries, or local schools.
In our best start in life guidance, published in March, is crystal clear:
Local authorities should work with families, communities and partners to join up services, to innovate in how they deliver them, to work in partnership.
Local authorities are now developing clear plans to set out how they will deliver in practice.
And we are going further to support them to meet that challenge.
I can announce that new Test, Learn and Grow Accelerators are now underway in Manchester and Northumberland.
They are trialling practical ways of delivering this — bringing together Best Start Family Hubs, schools and early years settings to ensure families can access the right support earlier, and in one place.
By sharing this learning, we will help shape the future of Best Start services nationally.
This is exactly the path to change — working in partnership, locally and nationally, to deliver.
Because all parts of society have a role to play: central and local government, charities, businesses and philanthropy. We need coalitions for change.
And I will have more to say soon about how the Government is driving this forward.
We want to move from a system where support is something families seek out, to one where it is woven into the fabric of their everyday lives.
That is the transformation we are aiming for.
Not a return to the past.
But a modern, connected, accessible system of family support
Rooted in community; delivered where families are; joined up around their needs.
That is what our new Best Start Family Hubs are all about.
Before I finish, I also want to speak briefly about the wider early education infrastructure, in which family support sits.
At the Budget last autumn, the Chancellor announced that this government will conduct a full review of early education and childcare.
Not just to tidy up what is a complex and confusing system for parents and providers,
but because we believe something more fundamental: that it is time for a renewed vision of what early education and childcare should be in this country.
Because however proud we are of what has been achieved: good enough isn’t enough.
Conservative governments treated family support and childcare as two separate things.
Family support was something targeted—often narrowly—at so-called “problem families”.
And childcare was something else entirely: a tool of labour market policy, expanded in fits and starts to help more parents, particularly mothers, return to work.
But too often, that expansion was driven by a single question: how do we support labour market participation?
Not: what is the system we actually want to build for children and families?
The result is the system we see today: a system that has achieved a great deal, but one that is fragmented. One where family support sits to one side.
And where early education has not always been treated with the same clarity of purpose as the rest of our education system.
Our Best Start in Life strategy was a deliberate break from that approach.
It said: we will not treat these things separately anymore. We will think about children, families, early education and support as one connected system.
And the early education and childcare review is the vehicle that will take us from where we are now—to that end state.
I had the opportunity to speak about this just last week at the National Day Nurseries Association.
A hall packed full of brilliant private providers—nurseries who have done a phenomenal job delivering the recent expansion of entitlements. And I was very clear with them; I understand that these are private businesses; I understand that they must be sustainable and that they should be able to make their own business decisions.
But I also told them this:
Government now funds around 80% of childcare in this country.
We have, in effect, created a new public service.
And it is time we properly answer the question of what we want that public service to look like.
Because once you recognise that, everything else should follow from it.
And the central question we must answer is how do we complete the shift from a system that has been primarily about enabling work, to one that delivers genuinely world-leading early education.
A system that rivals what we expect from our schools.
We have already started to take important steps in this direction.
Through our Best Start in Life strategy, we have set a clear ambition for record levels of school readiness.
We have set an ambition to have a qualified teacher in every setting.
We are strengthening inspection, so parents can make informed choices.
And we are investing in workforce development—because quality depends on people.
But the purpose of this review is to think bigger. To ask what more we can do. To learn from what is already working and to design a system that is truly fit for the future.
So as we find ourselves once again making the argument for early education.
As we once again hear nostalgic arguments about returning to the past.
This government is firmly focused on how best we can support children and families today and into the future.
We’re building communities of support for children and their parents in every part of our country.
And through our early education and childcare review, we can ensure our early education system finally delivers for children and families: life chances and employment choices through truly world-leading early education.
Thank you for listening.
The keynote speech was followed by a Q&A session.
Olivia Bailey MP is the Minister for Early Education.
