Six of the new areas are rural - Oswestry in Shropshire, Herefordshire, Cumbria, Berwick-upon-Tweed, North Devon and Cornwall. Until now there has been only one rural Sure Start project, the bright yellow 'Bendy Bus' a mobile service for families with young children in East Anglia's Fenland. It provides a creche, toy library and meeting area for drop-in sessions and is equipped with video-conferencing and computer facilities.
Sure Start was launched in April 1999 to tackle child poverty by giving families of young children in deprived areas better access to childcare, education, health and social provision. The new projects are the fourth wave of the scheme, adding to the 128 already in place and 66 which are developing their plans. Last year's Comprehensive Spending Review allocated up to Pounds 20m for Sure Start programmes with the aim of doubling the number of schemes.
The contract to carry out the national evaluation of Sure Start in England was also announced last week. The evaluation will be carried out by a consortium of academics and practitioners led by Professor Edward Melhuish of Birkbeck College, University of London. It will look at how successfully Sure Start is achieving its aims and objectives over the next six years.
Last July Nursery World reported that Government figures showed that less than six per cent of the funding allocated to Sure Start projects for 1999/ 2000 had actually been spent. A DfEE spokesman said, 'It does take time to create quality programmes on the ground - it's pioneering a new way of working and it's not going to happen overnight. We have built into the system the capacity to move money through to the next year.'
