In the spring of 1998, Norman Glass, a senior civil servant from the Treasury, spent a day visiting two community projects in Birmingham. At the time, Glass was in charge of the Comprehensive Spending Review on Services for Young Children. As part of gathering evidence for the review, he was keen to see how such services actually operated at the front line. I was then Chief Executive of Family Service Units (FSU), a children's charity working with disadvantaged families mainly in inner city areas. FSU had two units in Birmingham, one in Small Heath serving a largely Bangladeshi and Pakistani community and one in Pool Farm, on the south edge of Birmingham, serving a largely low-income white community. I invited Glass to Birmingham to show him how very different communities could be from each other in the same city within a few miles. I organised the visit, so Glass and I rode on the train in a standard class carriage (as FSU was paying for travel, first class would have been entirely inappropriate). This visit, and many more like it all over England, led Glass to recommend the creation of a new programme called Sure Start. It would operate in lowincome areas, provide a range of services for young children and their parents, encourage the involvement of local parents in its governance structures and be open to all families with young children in the area. The expected outcome of the programme was a reduction in the disadvantage that low-income children experienced on school entry.

My Sure Start journey began when someone from the Treasury rang me at FSU, and asked that I come into the Treasury to speak to Glass about young children and poverty. As will be described later in this book, a request from civil servants in the Treasury was an entirely new experience for those of us who had been working in the voluntary sector for years on children's policy. I remember having to ask for the address. I particularly remember sitting on a sofa in Glass's office that appeared later that evening on a television documentary about John Major.