Offering insight into the key debates on services for young children, this book tells how Sure Start was set up, the numerous changes it went through, and how it has changed the landscape of services for all young children in England.

This book tells the story of Sure Start, one of the flagship programmes of the last government. It tells how Sure Start was set up, the numerous changes it went through, and how it has changed the landscape of services for all young children in England. Offering insight into the key debates on services for young children, as well as how decisions are made in a highly political context, it will be of keen interest to policy academics, senior managers of public services and all those with a keen interest in developing services for young children.

In 1997, the Labour Government came to power in the UK and committed to reforming public service delivery, particularly towards the improvement of children’s services. This book analyses Labour Party’s subsequent strategy towards public service delivery emphasising, on one level, devolving more power to frontline deliverers, while on the other, strengthening central control through a variety of means, leading to a ‘mixed-approach’ in its overall reforms. The book focuses on the implementation process involved in rolling out its Sure Start policy in order to understand and analyse the dynamics in Labour’s approach to delivery. In so-doing, it draws on implementation and policy network theories to offer an original analytical framework - ‘the implementation network approach’ - to explain the implementation process of Sure Start policy. This book will be undoubtedly appealing to the students and scholars engaged in the fields of Public Policy and British Politics.

So often, the ills of society are blamed on negligent parenting, leading to the development of social service policies built around the concept of early intervention. Interrogating this concept, this book explores the history of our understanding of children, family, and parenting, and its implications for society. With a particular focus on the intersection of brain science and social policy, the authors challenge our long-held consensus on early intervention. Accessibly written and highly topical, Challenging the Politics of Early Intervention is a comprehensive and critical assay of our contemporary belief that so-called bad parents raise substandard future citizens unfit for the new capitalism.

Why do children do the things they do? What can teachers do to manage it all? While there is not a simple method for understanding and managing all behaviors or all children, teachers can give young children the social and emotional tools needed to grow and thrive on their own. Developed and tested in the classroom, Beyond Behavior Management, is a strength-based approach to guiding and managing young children's behavior by helping them build and use essential life skills—attachment, collaboration, self-regulation, adaptability, contribution, and belonging—into the daily life of the early childhood classroom. As a result, children will learn to exhibit more pro-social behaviors, work better as a community, and become excited and active learners. This edition includes two new chapters and content reflecting early learning standards, new research, cultural diversity, and strategies to strengthen the home-school connection. Discussion and reflection questions, exercises, journal assignments, child profile templates, a planning worksheet, and sample scripts are also included. Jenna Bilmes is an early childhood consultant and an instructional designer for WestEd Child and Family Services. She is a frequent presenter to teachers, administrators, and counselors nationally and internationally.

Decades of research have demonstrated that the parent-child dyad and the environment of the familyâ€"which includes all primary caregiversâ€"are at the foundation of children's well- being and healthy development. From birth, children are learning and rely on parents and the other caregivers in their lives to protect and care for them. The impact of parents may never be greater than during the earliest years of life, when a child's brain is rapidly developing and when nearly all of her or his experiences are created and shaped by parents and the family environment. Parents help children build and refine their knowledge and skills, charting a trajectory for their health and well-being during childhood and beyond. The experience of parenting also impacts parents themselves. For instance, parenting can enrich and give focus to parents' lives; generate stress or calm; and create any number of emotions, including feelings of happiness, sadness, fulfillment, and anger. Parenting of young children today takes place in the context of significant ongoing developments. These include: a rapidly growing body of science on early childhood, increases in funding for programs and services for families, changing demographics of the U.S. population, and greater diversity of family structure. Additionally, parenting is increasingly being shaped by technology and increased access to information about parenting. Parenting Matters identifies parenting knowledge, attitudes, and practices associated with positive developmental outcomes in children ages 0-8; universal/preventive and targeted strategies used in a variety of settings that have been effective with parents of young children and that support the identified knowledge, attitudes, and practices; and barriers to and facilitators for parents' use of practices that lead to healthy child outcomes as well as their participation in effective programs and services. This report makes recommendations directed at an array of stakeholders, for promoting the wide-scale adoption of effective programs and services for parents and on areas that warrant further research to inform policy and practice. It is meant to serve as a roadmap for the future of parenting policy, research, and practice in the United States.