Sure Start, the government's "vision" for Early Years education is coming to Levenshulme. The city council are planning to convert Broom Avenue Children’s Centre into a “Sure Start Hub”. This involves some major changes, both to the building and to the way it's run.

There are a number of very good reasons to oppose these plans, so it's easiest to itemise each issue:


Privatisation of Children's Services:




These plans invite the private sector into our public services. Sir Richard Leese and Manchester City Council, not content with selling off council housing and bringing private contractors into the NHS, are aiming at an unprecedented sell-out of state nursery care. The Sure Start Plans in Levenshulme are part of this agenda. The council's Children's Services Business Plan 2007-2010 states that: ‘two private providers have won tenders to deliver day-care in Children’s’ Centres and further tendering is underway.’





It is literally unbelievable that executive members of Children's Services such as Sheila Newman are prepared to write in to the South Manchester Reporter to assure parents that Manchester City Council have no intention of privatising daycare, whilst the Council website states clearly, and publicly, not only that privatisation of daycare has already happened in Manchester, but that they're planning more of it. Have these people actually READ their own business plan?

Services are due to be delivered from the Sure Start room in Broom Avenue by a large and aggressive “social business”, the Big Life Company, and their own Aisha Child Care ltd. A social business is a private company and is profit-making, yet gets tax breaks and grants from government as long as it does some ‘good’. It removes services from the public sector. The company can go bust. Money is spent on creating a new layer of managers and consultants to set up and market the new service ‘brand’ to potential customers. Large social businesses cherry-pick services they want to run – unlike the public sector or small voluntary sector groups. Their boardrooms are a long way removed from the streets and from democratic control. The privatisation of public services via social businesses is already causing serious problems for the NHS, state schools and, increasingly, early years education.

There's been much confusion about whether, as a "social business", the Big Life Company are really the private sector as such. A lot of the confusion has been fostered by Sure Start and Big Life representatives who promote the misunderstanding that Big Life are a non-profit organisation. This is not the case:

“We're for loads of profit"
Nigel Kershaw, head of Big Invest and founding member of the Big Life Company.

“Social businesses can hold proudly onto the principle that they can take an incredible level of pride in making profit. So, welcome to the world of the social business.”
Andy Peers, Regional Sales Manager, Big Life (2000).

Sure Start Levenshulme stands for the privatisation of public services, plain and simple, and let no-one tell you otherwise.


Private sector involvement at down the road at Burnage Children's Centre has been a disaster for children. Last year, Ofsted took enforcement action against the private day-care provider which operates out of the centre, saying: “nappies are changed on torn mats with foam exposing, feeds are left in bags on top of a radiator and the fridge is dirty and smells of sour milk. Babies are provided with some manufactured toys, which they hardly access and are left to crawl around aimlessly. Children do not benefit from a consistent staff team, who know the children well to meet their individual needs.” We cannot let Broom Avenue Children's Centre go the same way.

Read the full OFSTED report here.



Welfare to Work:

Additionally, other goverment agendas are beginning to peek through all the council's fraudulent talk about "child poverty": the services on offer are starting to be geared towards welfare-to-work programmes, in readiness for the forthcoming legislation that will force single parents to take low-waged jobs.

Single parents - and often therefore women - will be targetted by draconian and degrading training schemes that force them to take low-waged work. Of course, they'll be offered child-care in privatisated Sure Start settings - often staffed by those on training courses. Low-waged work does not solve child poverty. Single parents should surely be supported to do what's right for THEIR children? Here is a letter from The Times by national campaigner, Kim Sparrow that sums this up:

Sir, We’re not surprised that Sure Start has had no effect on the vocabulary,
ability to count or recognise letters, shapes and rhymes of preschool children.
(“£3bn scheme to help preschool children learn has had no effect”, Aug 28).
Its main intention, along with New Deal, the Child Support Agency and
supposed free nursery care for all three-year-olds was to get mothers on
benefits into work. Where are the figures to show that dusk-to-dawn cleaning,
working on super- market cash tills, in sweatshops and factories, lifts mothers
and children out of poverty? Mothers are the lowest paid of all workers, earning
less than other women who receive only 82 per cent of men’s wages for full-
time work, much less for part-time. Black women can expect 32 per cent less
than white women. Things are on course to get worse for children from toddlers
to teenagers as 70 per cent of mothers on welfare are to be targeted by the
Government for waged work by 2010. Instead of valuing mothers’ vital work of
caring for and educating our children by giving us time, benefits and resources,
we are forced to be available as cheap labour to maximise the profits of industry.
Government advisers on this are investment bankers, after all.

KIM SPARROW, Single Mothers’ Self-Defence, Crossroads Women’s Centre, London NW5

We live in an area where there is much child poverty, a lack of nursery school places, a lack of things for children and young people to do and where we still have no decent community facilities. Does anybody believe (except Sir Richard and his cronies) that introducing the market into Early Years Education is the answer?



The architectural plans themselves:


This site was a last resort for Sure Start after the plans were thrown out by the school governors at Chapel Street School, and it shows. The plans involve converting one room into a private sector crèche run by the Big Life Company’s Aisha Childcare, and squeezing the existing kids into the remaining two rooms.


This will mean dividing the middle room with a “glazed partition”. As a result, there will be no windows in the central room, which will now require “mechanical ventilation”, which, as anyone who's worked in an office knows, is expensive, noisy and unreliable. With a glass conservatory at the back and a glazed screen at the other end, this extra "room" promises to be a real "sun trap" (as the architects politely put it) or "green house" as we'd term it.


To replace the 52.2sqm, privatized room, they’re building a 31.4sqm glass conservatory on the back. Replacing a 52.2sqm room with a 31.4sqm conservatory is a loss of 20.8sqm to the 50 kids currently in state daycare. And since no additional land is being added to the Centre’s grounds, this extension means that the existing outdoor play-area will become 31.4sqm smaller in turn. Additionally, a room of 28.4sqm currently in community use by voluntary groups is also going, as it’s being converted into Sure Start’s reception.



If such a lot of space is being lost to children, how can there be no negative impact on their development?


The application number is 084080/VO/2007/N2, and the deadline for comments is 12th September 2007. The planner dealing with the application is Paula McGovern, any letters can be emailed to p.mcgovern@manchester.gov.uk

You can comment on the plans online at:

http://www.publicaccess.manchester.gov.uk/publicaccess/tdc/DcApplication/application_detailview.aspx?caseno=JMCP54BCK3000

and you can see all the details, including the plans themselves, at:

http://www.publicaccess.manchester.gov.uk/associateddocs/MCCList1.aspx?084080/VO/2007/N2

Alternatively, details of this application can be viewed at the planning division reception in room 7017 of the town hall extension, between 9.30 am & 4.30 pm, Monday to Friday.



Disruption whilst the building work is carried out:


The centre is due to be closed from the first of October. Kids in daycare at Broom Avenue will have to be taken to Slade Lane Children's Centre in Longsight . Many of the parents who use the centre operate on a tight schedule, with most of them working during the day. This additional inconvenience can throw daily routines into disarray and is extremely inconvenient.

No-one would begrudge some inconvenience if the changes were to the benefit of children. But to ask parents to sit still for this disruption in order to privatise our services and reduce space is plain insulting.

The letters sent out by the centre give no completion date for the work, although when pushed, the Centre are saying it'll be closed until February/March 2008. That's a closure of 6 months. Then, once the work is completed at Broom Avenue, the kids from Slade Lane are being transferred to Levenshulme, causing further disruption to them and their parents.

This means that BOTH Centres have a complete freeze on taking on new kids until April 2008. Many children have been on the waiting list for Broom Avenue Children's Centre for well over a year, some as long as 18 months. So these parents and any new ones can stick another 6 months on that before the Centre's even CONSIDER admitting their kids. The Council seem unable to understand: the demand in Levenshulme is for good quality state-run daycare. That's why all the state-run Children's Centre have waiting lists backed up to forever. It's next to impossible to find state daycare in Levenshulme. There's a good reason why State Daycare is so in demand: it's better than all the other daycare. Even the Minister of State for Schools, Jim Knight says so, although in the usual alien management-speak:

"The EPPE study has also shown it is the quality, rather than ownership of pre-school provision that is most important for improving children's attainment and that while good quality provision is found across all sectors the maintained sector provides the highest quality provision overall."

So, whilst it doesn't matter who owns it, the state-owned stuff is better. Perhaps the higher quality is a result of the better-qualified staff and the absence of a cut-inducing bottom-line? Or maybe, as Jim seems to think, it's just an inexplicable co-incidence?

So what do the Council offer us? Private sessional care, and at the expense of state daycare.

(In fact, according to the minutes of the most recent Ward Co-ordination meeting of 12/11/2007, there may not even be any sessional care in the Sure Start room at all! The "sessional care" which was minuted on the list of services in is now just "the potential for the development of sessional care".)



Sure Start's "consultation" process:

Levenshulme has not been consulted on these plans. This is understandable since any real consultation would result in local people getting together and trying to scrap these disgraceful plans. Instead the City Council have surrounded the whole process with half-truths, evasions and outright lies in order to attract the minimum attention whilst they smash up our kids' services.

Both Pam Tideswell (the Head of Sure Start Manchester) and Lorraine Butler (Sure Start District Commissioning Manager) have confirmed that the option of using Broom Avenue Children's Centre as the hub of Sure Start Levenshulme was never up for discussion. Likewise any input by parents or the wider community into the building plans themselves was never an option. Lorraine Butler has even questioned whether the word "consultation" is accurate for the Council's process in her email correspondence with us:



Throughout the process, information has been handed down as a "done deal", the steering group have been repeatedly told that they can have no impact on the plans, begging the question of what possible "steering" function they could have.

In terms of informing the parents of kids at the Centre, this has been done in a half-hearted and unhelpful way. A poster on the door which says "come and look at the plans" is not good enough. Only after we had been thrown off the site (those thrown off the site by management were parents of kids actually attending the Centre) for handing out leaflets questioning the plans did Sure Start think it important to issue parents with copies of the plans, and a letter full of the usual half-truths. It goes without saying that the issue of privatisation was never mentioned in any of this literature. Likewise, it was only after we arranged a meeting, off our own bat, with Lorraine Butler and Pam Tideswell, that they saw fit to offer appointments to other parents.



At the end of the meeting that we had with Tideswell and Butler, we informed them that we believed the wider community should have a say in these plans, and reminded them that a private meeting with six parents is not consultation. To remedy this, we proposed to organise a public meeting with representatives from the National Union of Teachers, who would give their take on Sure Start nationally, from ourselves and from any Sure Start representative they chose to send. In order to engage with the local Muslim community too, we proposed to hold this at the Madina Mosque.

On 27th of June we got a message from Pam Tideswell saying that she "believe(d) that consultation has taken place with parents attending the centre and with parents in the wider community" and refusing to attend our meeting. Later, Friends of Levenshulme received further emails from other Sure Start managers informing us that they would be boycotting our meeting and that they had "been urging others to do the same". We wrote back to Tideswell and to the other Sure Start employee to assure them that they would be given every opportunity to put their side of the argument, only to be met by stony silence.

Since they were not setting the agenda themselves, the City Council refused to engage in open debate and to defend the Sure Start plans in front of the Levenshulme public. The only conclusions we can draw are:

1) They have no interest in engaging with the community.
2) They are unable to defend the plans.

We've since been in touch with the Leader of the Council about this. Please click below to see our letters to him.


Click here to read our letters to Richard Leese and open letters in the press about Sure Start Levenshulme.


If you'd like to be involved with the campaign against Sure Start Levenshulme and the privatisation of Children's Services, or just to find out more, drop us a line on:

levenshulmecampaign@googlemail.com