This new Sure Start plan for children is a moral mission: a watershed moment for our government | Bridget Phillipson

toIke many young mothers, Jenna was not sure where to start. But this is where the local family support service entered. It gives advice to breastfeeding, and a space to meet with other fathers and her son Billy will not play with other children. She reassured Gina that she was on the right track – decisively, Billy was prepared to achieve when he arrived at school.

The Gina service was the first famous start centers in the Labor Party in Washington, my city in northeastern England. I knew it well: Before I became a deputy, she turned a close shelter for women who are away from domestic violence. I have linked the women who used our shelter with a confirmed start. The lifeline of those women who, despite everything, were determined to give their children the best beginning in life.

However, unfortunately, after 14 years of conservative government, stories like Gina, and those for many women who were offered to this artery life, are less common. Funding is stripped of confirmed start centers and services that were canceled in renoed family centers. Today, 65 councils, children and families who live under their authority were absent from the last financing. Many lack children’s care places that many families need in our country.

For each of Gina, there is a group of young mothers and families, which have missed the decisive columns of support, which their children leave before they start school.

One in three children, five years old, enter the first year without basic skills Pencil contract and writing his own name They need to achieve the maximum benefit from what education provides to them. Some have not reached basic features such as placing a coat or going to the toilet themselves.

For more vulnerable childrenThe situation is a gray. A little more than half of those qualified to obtain free school meals reach a good level of development at the age of five. For children in social welfare, slightly over one in three. For children with special educational needs, it is one in five.

The gap in the achievement that we see among our poorest and richer children at the age of sixteen, even before they start school, creating a vicious course of lost life opportunities that are very visible in the shameful number of young people who do not earn or learn.

It is the moral task of this government is to bridge this gap, but this must be done. We must build an educational system where all children can achieve and flourish, starting from the first day.

This is why reforming the education system in the first years is my first priority. That is why, just 12 months after the Labor Party entered the government, I am very proud to create our strategy to give every child the best beginning in life.

With the support of 1.5 billion pounds over the next three years, it combines the best start, health services, community groups, and the first years sector, with the common goal of creating children to succeed when they reach school.

We will create 1000 Best start family centersAt least one in each region’s region, Invest a record 9 billion pounds In the care places of the funded children and the first places – and hundreds of millions to improve quality in the settings of the first years and reception lessons.

These centers will bring broken support systems to one place, allowing thousands of families to access anything from registration to breastfeeding, from housing support to children’s discourse and language development.

It is inspired by the strategy from all over the world. I was really affected by what is happening in the countries you visited, such as Estonia, where early education and family support are tightly linked with stellar results. The unfavorable gap is hardly remembered because children are preparing for school to learn. Her children outperform those who suffer from larger and archaeological countries in the international classification. The country punches its economically weight as a result.

At the heart of our strategy is to admit that our country succeeds in a rapidly changing world, it is not enough for some children to do a good job in education: Each child must have the opportunity and tools not only to reach life.

People working always have known that education is the best way to break the relationship between their background and what they will continue to achieve, and the way to prosperity is not only for individuals, but for all society. It is a common topic that passes through every party government: we must use education to spread the freedoms that are very few of them, so that tomorrow is common with us all.

It is the essence of our policy, and the socialist expansion of freedom to allow workers to choose their own way to fulfill: get a better job, to achieve better quality of life or even to start a family.

This strategy is a watershed moment for our government, but most importantly for each one family you need to support. To make it a reality, we will start an unprecedented cooperation between parents, councils, custody houses, children’s schools, schools, government, family support, early education and child care deeply so that no right -wing government can cancel its definition at all, as the conservatives certainly did 14 years old.

Our plan for change will ensure the experience of Gina – and Billy’s success in the future – by every family and every child in our country.

• Bridget Phillipson is the Minister of Foreign Affairs for Education and Labor in Hutton and Sindland South

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