This chapter will describe the way in which the evaluation of Sure Start was set up, and some of the key controversies surrounding the evaluation. Given the size of the evaluation, and the likely attention such an evaluation would get in the research community, it is not surprising that deciding who would do it and, more importantly, how it would be designed proved enormously difficult. There was political conflict, personality conflicts and deeply held scientific arguments about the evaluation of Sure Start. Indeed, Sir Michael Rutter, one of Britain's most esteemed scientists, believed that the way in which the programme was set up made it impossible to evaluate, and that the ‘undermining of the evaluation was political and deliberate’ (Rutter, 2007, p 203). The key debate was in two parts – the design of the programme itself and the design of the evaluation:

• • To what extent should the design of the programme be determined by whether or not it could be scientifically proven to work? There are key features of the original design of Sure Start that made evaluation extremely difficult. It was argued by academics that the design should be determined not by what was already known, but by what could be learned through rigorous evaluation; they argued consistently for a standardised model of inputs that could be tested using the gold standard of evaluation – a randomised control trial (RCT).

• • Given that both ministers and civil servants agreed to a programme design that could not easily conform to the standard of rigorous evaluation, how would we know if it worked, and over what period of time? Could the most rigorous form of evaluation – an RCT – be used given the design we had chosen?

The evaluation story presents a classic case study in clashes between a number of cultures: a scientific community that wanted its research to stand up to peer rigour; a political class who could not conceive of Sure Start not being a success; a wide range of stakeholder organisations who wanted to make sure that their version of what would work would be proven to be true; and a divided civil service community, with the professional analysts wanting a rigorous credible evaluation, but the policy officials, under intense pressure from ministers, wanting to get the programmes going with visible change on the ground and the money being used as intended.