My involvement with Sure Start has taken me from managing a Trailblazer programme in the Ore Valley in East Sussex, to Sure Start Advisor for two London boroughs, and now to my current post as Children's Centre Locality Manager, covering five centres across 750 square miles of rural North Northumberland.

Before 1997, the providers of early years services were kept going on low levels of funding, short-term allocations and a system that concentrated on the school system, paying little regard to all that went before children were five years old. The practitioners argued that they needed more money for parenting services, a greater emphasis on the needs of the very young and more research into what works and what makes a real difference to outcomes, but went largely unheard.

Early years services had always been underfunded and to a large extent disregarded, with very little emphasis placed on the care of very young children, whether in the family home or in the wide range of care settings that existed in the mid-1990s. In 1997 came the plan for the piloting of Early Excellence centres, provision for young children that combined extended hours of childcare with the quality of early education. Then, in 1998, a review of how government departments could work in a more collaborative way to improve services for young children was announced. The idea of cross-cutting reviews and interdepartmental collaboration seemed a very simple process, but it was one fraught with problems and historic issues of silo working.

There was an early decision by ministers to focus on children under four, an area classed by Norman Glass, the Treasury official in charge of the review, as a policy-free zone. There was also a realisation that improved services for the very young might even result in long-term savings for the taxpayer, a very attractive thought in the light of the huge amounts of money spent on ameliorating the effects of child poverty.

During 1999, I was running a scheme called Play link, funded by East Sussex County Council. The idea was simple. We visited every child aged 18 months in a defined geographical area, an area with high levels of child poverty, poor antenatal health and fragmented and patchy children's services.