Payment By Results – what is the impact on practitioners, researchers, parents and children?

The Payment By Results (PBR) scheme is being piloted by the English Department for Education with an initial nine local authorities from July 2011 with a further 18 coming on board in September 2011. Whilst the DfE does not propose to undertake payment by results directly with individual Children’s Centres, the pilot is intended to encourage local authorities, the commissioners of Children’s Centre providers, to explore PBR as an approach in their local areas. The reason given by the Government for this is: … to incentivise a focus on the proposed core purpose of children’s centres: to improve child development and school readiness among young children and to reduce inequalities. This includes identifying, reaching and supporting the most disadvantaged families to improve their parenting aspirations and skills and to promote health and well being (DfE, 2011a). The DfE (2011b) explains further what is meant by child development and school readiness in their statement on the core purposes of Sure start Children’s Centres. This is defined as: Child development and school readiness – supporting personal, social and emotional development, physical development and communication and language from pre-birth to age 5, so children develop as confident and curious learners and are able to take full advantage of the learning opportunities presented to them in school (p.2). The DfE (2011a) reported that it has consulted on the Payment By Results approach and recognises the following: The need to avoid the risk of perverse incentives. Measures should be meaningful and simple. Measures should incentivise partnership working. It is helpful if the measures can assist in benchmarking. It can be argued that the PBR approach builds upon the outcomes focus that has developed in more recent English government policy. Indeed Hoggarth and Comfort (2010) highlight that ‘Whether we like it or not the search for evidence of outcomes is now part and parcel of life in public services ’ (p.20)