It has been called the world’s most famous children’s centre, a globally influential early-years family project that grew out of one of the UK’s most deprived communities and provided the inspiration for Sure Start. Now this Great British success story faces disaster – at the hands of its local Tory-run council.
North Northamptonshire council’s executive meets on Tuesday morning to discuss proposals to take an axe to the funding of Pen Green, a trailblazing state-funded nursery school in the former steel town of Corby. There is a growing outcry. “Why are they punishing the people who need their support?” said one incredulous parent at a drop-in session.
The council is out of touch with reality, said another parent, Anthony Lee, 43, watching his young son playing in the giant sandpit at the heart of Pen Green. He says the cuts fly in the face of everything the government says it stands for: “If you cut the centre’s funding, it is not levelling up – it’s levelling down.”
Adam Cooper, Pen Green’s chair, told the Guardian up to £800,000 was at risk, and with it scores of jobs. “It’s going to be catastrophic for us. It’s taking away 75% of our funding,” he said. “We’ve had repeated cuts over the years and we are used to cuts. But this scale of cuts will close us down.”
Talk to parents at Pen Green and certain themes recur: it is not just that it provides a great service, but that it is like family; how they trust it; how it doesn’t judge; how it went the extra mile; how it “saved” them at their lowest point. Some said they wouldn’t be alive now without its support. Several weep at the memories.
It is a genuinely world-leading model of integrated early-years care – bringing together innovative, high-quality nursery, health, family support and social care services under one roof to provide the best possible start for families in a town scarred by poverty, ill health and poor educational outcomes. More than 1,000 children a year pass through its many services.
Now nearly 40 years old, Pen Green has been showered with awards and accolades such as school of the year, Ofsted outstanding and teaching school status. It has trained thousands of childcare and family workers and spawned a thriving research centre. Hundreds of people visit from all over the world every year hoping to learn its magic, from Auckland to Bologna, Glasgow to Kazakhstan.
Its ethos is that by reaching out early on to struggling young parents and families and providing them with consistent wrap-around support, it can get their lives on track. This might mean providing therapeutic services, or guiding them through the maze of the special educational needs system. It might mean rebuilding a parent’s confidence, or discreetly providing them with a food parcel.
“Former Pen Green nursery children are now headteachers and senior leaders in Corby primary schools. Nursery children with profound disabilities have taken up university places,” said Margy Whalley, the retired founder and former director of Pen Green.
There are the everyday successes, too: the parental crises solved, the mental health emergencies tackled, the young people kept off the child protection register. It saves money for the NHS and social services, says Whalley. “It’s insane the council would want to decimate something so successful and that has done so much good.”
North Northamptonshire argues in a council paper that essentially it is rectifying a historical funding inequality that has put three other state nurseries in the county at risk of closure. By chopping down Pen Green’s allocation and sharing it out, it argues, it will save the other three.
This is not a straightforward story of cuts, however. According to Cooper, the crisis was avoidable: when the council was created out of the wreckage of the bankrupt Northamptonshire county council in 2021, it failed to ask the Department for Education (DfE) to renew nursery funding on the established basis that reflects the extra services Pen Green provides.
North Northamptonshire council disagreed. It said the DfE will only issue funds in line with historical funding levels if West Northamptonshire council (created at the same time in 2021) agrees. West Northamptonshire, it says, currently does not agree, so funding reverts to a less generous per-head basis. “This is not an issue of North Northamptonshire council’s making,” a spokesperson said.
The council’s leader, Jason Smithers, said: “We recognise the value and importance of early education for children across North Northamptonshire. Therefore we are working to ensure a fair, equitable and transparent funding arrangement for all four of our maintained nurseries to ensure that children and families accessing early education can continue to do so in their own communities.”
Angela Prodger, the co-director of Pen Green – who joined it as a 17-year-old trainee nursery nurse in 1983 – reflected on the appalling timing of the cuts, which seem to undermine almost everything the government says it believes in, from family hubs to levelling up, to supporting families through the cost of living crisis.
She recalled how Conservative MP Graham Stuart, a Pen Green enthusiast, chaired a House of Commons education select committee meeting at Pen Green in 2014. That day he warned against the bureaucratic destruction of “rare, peculiar centres of excellence that do a brilliant job”, not perhaps anticipating that it would be Tory-run councils that would be the destroyer.
Just then local parent Ellie Woods bounded up. She had been in the drop-in session and wanted to correct the impression that the Guardian might have got that Pen Green was like a community. “It’s not a community. It’s a family. It’s like your Nan’s house on a Sunday. You know it is always there for you.”
