Parents do a heck of a lot, and deserve to be celebrated and supported. This week, I will be joining the launch of the Best Start Family Hub in the Ambleside Centre in Woodley Precinct. As with all government-funded Best Start hubs, it will offer courses, interventions, play groups and clubs to support families in giving their children the best start in life.
Best Start hubs are a return to one of the great triumphs of the last Labour government, which raised one million children out of poverty and supported millions more in their vital early years via Sure Start centres.
Yet the Conservatives’ austerity gutted Sure Start. By 2024, one in four families with children under five couldn’t access local children’s centres or Family Hubs, rising to one in three for lower income families. Thousands of parents had been cut off from vital services, which would’ve helped them diagnose health and educational issues earlier and gotten specialist support earlier.
The government has given funding to councils to roll out Best Start hubs to help fix this neglect. The hub in Wokingham will support parents from pre-birth, with midwifery and postnatal clinics, all the way through to school, where there will be parent drop-ins and finance courses to help with those all-important formative years.
Research shows that children who lived within a short distance of a Sure Start centre for their first five years were more likely to achieve five good GCSEs at grades age 16. Best Start will build on that legacy, and the two centres coming to our area (on in Wokingham, one in Reading) will mean our community gets to directly benefit.
On top of this, Labour have saved working parents up to £7,500 a year with 30 hours of government funded childcare, in addition to more than £2 billion in additional early years funding, and set up 300 new school-based nurseries, starting in November.
I’m keen to hear from residents as to how these childcare policies are working for you, so please get in touch with my team at yuan.yang.mp@parliament.uk. Additionally, if you want to hear more about my work, you can sign up for updates at https://yuanyangmp.org/get-in-touch/
MP Yuan Yang is Labour MP for Earley & Woodley
