What are Children Centres?
Children Centres are a government initiative to provide integrated care and education for children under five years old, health services, family support, and a base for childminders. They serve children and families in disadvantaged communities, although local authorities are being encouraged to develop this integrated approach to services for all children. There are currently over 1,000 centres providing care for 800,000 small children.
The centres bring together locally available services and integrate management and staffing structures. Local authorities play a central role in improving the co-ordination, quantity and quality of the services.
The Government is committed to delivering a Sure Start Children’s Centre for every community by 2010. Sure Start Children’s Centres are a vital part of the Government’s 10-year childcare strategy, to enable all families with children to have access to an affordable, flexible, high quality childcare place for their child.
The Sure Start Children’s Centre programme is based on the concept that providing integrated education, care, family support, health services and support with employment are key factors in determining good outcomes for children and their parents.
Most Sure Start Children’s Centres have been developed from earlier Sure Start funded settings and other existing providers including maintained nursery schools, primary schools and other local ‘early years’ provision including voluntary and private settings.
As well as needing qualified and experienced nursery nurses and assistants, research has highlighted the impact qualified teachers can have on the centres.
"Settings which have staff with higher qualifications, especially with a good proportion of trained teachers on the staff, show higher quality and their children make more progress." (Research brief findings from the pre-school period, 2003.)
Children centres are generally open all year round and provide care from 8am-6pm Monday to Friday. This exciting setting suits candidates who are happy to work on a shift basis and who have ideally had experience working with multi-agencies before.
