Pen Green children's centre - Standing the test of time

Children's centres matter. They matter to all the children and families who use them, the staff who work in them and the local authorities who are accountable for them. What makes them so distinctive is the collaboration and co-operation of different professional groups, and how they bring together services in new and radical ways. Instead of defining families as hard to reach, children's centres have recognised that it is sometimes their own services that are hard to access. Children's centres need to be accessible to all but they have a particular responsibility to ensure they are accessed by the most vulnerable and disenfranchised. Staff have to work in a different way and co-construct services with families.

In Corby we have evidence from our Tracer Study that our impact on the successful development of some of the most disadvantaged children in the community continues to grow. We work with families on the edge of social services intervention, with families who have profoundly disabled children and with those whose children would enter the care system without additional support. We are also the centre of choice for 40 per cent of the families with children under five in our town.

Children's centres like Pen Green which explicitly address issues of poverty and social division can increase social support, friendships and inclusiveness. They can develop a rapprochement between those who traditionally 'deliver' services and those who use them.

JUDGED OUTSTANDING

Pen Green in Corby has for 30 years been judged excellent or outstanding at each and every Ofsted inspection. Pen Green is Ofsted inspected against three different inspection regimes and this year we were invited to participate in the pilot inspection under the new Ofsted Sure Start Children's Centre Evaluation Schedule while at the same time being inspected under the current Sure Start Children's Centre inspection framework - quite an experience. With four deeply thoughtful HIM's on site the inspection was challenging and thought-provoking. However, it was undertaken in a deeply respectful way which left all the children, parents, staff and governors feeling highly valued.

At Pen Green we work with nursery schools and children's centres across the country on involving parents in their children's learning and to develop children's centres in their role as Early Years Teaching Centres. Pen Green as a fully integrated centre for children and families was the inspiration for the model of integrated centres adopted by government and continues to pioneer innovative and cost-effective ways of working as a universal service for all local families with targeted services for the most disadvantaged.

VITAL COMMUNITY ROLE

Pen Green today is both a maintained nursery school and a well established integrated centre for children and families. The centre's development over 30 years has been planned and deliberate. We now have three pedagogical spaces for children aged two to five - the Den, the Snug and the Studio - and two provisions for infants and toddlers - the Nest and the Couthie.

Pen Green has been a vital agent of social change in Corby and has developed a raft of services for children and families from the poorest areas of the town. The centre has played an important role in the town's regeneration. Pen Green is a centre for the whole community. Three generations of families have used the services and volunteered in the centre. Today we work with 1,798 families and the centre is open seven days a week, 48 weeks a year.

When Pen Green opened in 1983 staff were well aware that the quality of the home learning environment is the greatest single determinant of children's attainment. Today more than 87 per cent of families are actively engaged in our 'Parents Involvement in their Children's Learning Programme'. We also provide a wide range of adult community education for parents. We are a 'University of the Workplace' a 'Training Hospital' offering everything from basic literacy and numeracy, family learning, CACHE Diploma, Foundation degree, Masters and PhDs. We build capacity in the community. Today 56 per cent of our 120 staff came in as parents and trained here.

GROUP WORK PROGRAMME

Pen Green makes a major contribution to the safeguarding of children under five in Corby. Families are supported where mental health issues impact on mother and child relationships, where drug and alcohol misuse impinge on children's growth and development, and where domestic violence shatters young lives.

Despite waiting lists our policy has always been to 'find a way' to engage with a troubled family. Families receive immediate support and are engaged to build up their social networks, so that we can safeguard children from the first referral.

Parents can then re-engage with relationship building and take up education and training opportunities on our campus.

We do not claim to always be the best.

We do not claim that we cannot improve. But we know that our capacity to achieve sustained improved outcomes for some of the most disadvantaged and disengaged children and families in our community takes skill, professional expertise, years of experience and requires an unremitting focus on capacity building. The collaboration between community and children's centre is what makes Pen Green special.

Over 30 years Pen Green has targeted services at those families who needed them most: we know that this is good policy, good practice and good economics. But we also know that if targeted services are to be accessible and acceptable to the most disadvantaged families they need to have a universal gateway. Families in our community vote with their feet and do not readily engage with services that carry a stigma. Services for the poor can too easily become poor services.

Since 1996 we have developed a comprehensive database with unique identifiers for adults and children. We can map and track usage and take up of services by postcode and level of need. We learnt a lot from evaluative critiques of Sure Start local programmes where 'reach' was defined as popping a leaflet through a letterbox. We challenge the notion that 'engagement' in children's centres can be defined as filling in a registration form or making a single visit.

The 2010 Select Committee made the case for children's centres: 'to be given time to bear fruit over the long term'. At Pen Green we have had that kind of time. We need to make a strong case for all the remaining children's centres to continue to be well supported by the local authorities that have the duty to develop them.

Further details:

• The voices of their childhood: families and early years’ practitioners developing emancipator methodologies through a tracer study. EECERA Journal. Vol. 20, No 4, December 2012, 519-535.

• Critical Issues for 21^st century children’s centres, Pen Green publication

• Early Years Teaching Centres Annual Report to DfE 2012. Pen Green publication

• Working with Families. 2^nd Ed. Ch 1.  Margy Whalley & Barbara Riddell"