CHILDREN from low-income families who grew up near a Sure Start centre did better than their peers at GCSEs, says the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) reports the BBC.
Its research says those living near a centre performed up to three grades better than those further away.
Sure Start began in 1998 to support new parents, especially in disadvantaged areas, but many centres have closed.
The Department for Education (DfE) said its family hubs scheme had a “number of advantages” over the Sure Start model.
The IFS study, funded by the Nuffield Foundation, used postcodes from when children were five years old to determine roughly how close the nearest centre was.
It then looked at the GCSE results of those children 11 years later and found “big improvements” in the performance of those living near a centre, especially those from low-income backgrounds.
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