Chapter Eight gave a detailed summary of the results from the National Evaluation of Sure Start and other major research studies that have provided a huge amount of knowledge and understanding about what does and does not work in improving long-term outcomes for children. This chapter will look more broadly at what we have learned from Sure Start about the way government works. It will explore what ministers themselves think should have been done differently, what aspects of the programme made it particularly challenging to implement and what remains as a legacy of Sure Start. This final chapter will:

• • summarise some of the key messages already rehearsed in other chapters on what we know works for children;

• • describe some broader lessons about the difficulties of moving from innovation to the creation of an overall system in public services;

• • give the views of ministers themselves on what they, in retrospect, think should have been done differently; and

• • give some views about both the legacy of Sure Start, and where it might go in the future.

What have we learned about improving the life chances for poor children?

Sure Start was established because of a wealth of evidence that what happens to children in their earliest years has a huge impact, for good or ill, on their life chances. The rationale for investing in services for young children was that if you could ameliorate the negative impact of poverty on children, you could break the cycle of deprivation. Who your parents were and where you were born did not have to be the determining factor of your own life opportunities. Throughout this book there are numerous references to research studies and programme evaluations that support this premise. However, two more recent studies by Daniel Dorling, and Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett challenge it. They argue that ameliorating the impact of poverty will not break the cycle of deprivation (Dorling, 2010; Wilkinson and Pickett, 2010). Both these academics argue that it is inequality itself that results in poor outcomes, not poor outcomes determining life chances. Dorling, and Wilkinson and Pickett argue that the root cause of poor outcomes is not poverty per se, but the difference in incomes between the most well-off and the least well-off.