Politics changes lives. You would expect me, as a politician, to say that. But I don’t say it as a politician: I say it as someone whose own life was changed.

I was born on a council estate with a mum who, despite doing everything she could for me, couldn’t help me learn to read and write because she had never been taught herself. As the jargon would have it now, I was not “school ready”. And I am no longer ashamed to say that I left school at the age of 16, pregnant and without any qualifications.

A third of Sure Start children’s centres in England lost, says Labour Read more

It would be easy to think that the direction of my life, and that of my young son, was already set. After all, my mum had a difficult life, and so did I, and a lot of people would have assumed that my son would simply have the same difficult life.

And that easily could have happened. I remember feeling like a failure going to friends and family for help raising my child, worried that I wouldn’t be a good mother.

But the policies of the last Labour government helped to transform my life, and the life of my young son.

I went to my local Sure Start centre, and they put me on a parenting course. I learned things that might seem simple – that it was important to hug and love your child, and read to them.

This might seem obvious, but it wasn’t to me at the time. If I hadn’t had access to the vital support of my local Sure Start centre, I would never have had the help I – and my son – needed.

Instead, the last Labour government ensured that that wasn’t the case. Because of them, I was able to break that cycle and be a better mum to all of my children. Those early interventions have left their lives in a fantastic position, with far more opportunities than I had at their age.

Theresa May’s obsession with grammar schools completely misses that point. For too many children, it is too late

That is something that I thank the taxpayers of Britain for giving to me. But it only happened because we also elected that Labour government.

But under the Tories, things are going backwards.

Since 2010, the government has cut funding for early intervention year after year. More than 1,200 designated Sure Start centres have been lost. Many Labour councils have desperately fought to save these services in the face of relentless cuts from central government, but they are themselves at breaking point.

Three million children benefited from Sure Start by 2010, but with around a third of the centres now lost, how many children – and how many parents like me – are no longer able to access those services?

Unlike the Conservatives, I can see just how shortsighted this is. Not just from personal experience but because the evidence is clear that early intervention does the most to improve the outcomes for our children later in life.

Theresa May’s obsession with grammar schools completely misses that point. For too many children, it is too late. That is why I want the early years to be as much a part of our national education service as anything that happens at school, college or university. I know from both the evidence and my own experience that ensuring children are “school ready” is as vital to their education as anything that happens later in life.

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I understand that many hardworking families across Britain, in particular those from the most disadvantaged backgrounds, desperately need these services; they help us fulfil one of the most basic expectations of people in Britain – that we should give to our children more than we had ourselves.

But unless we invest in those services, we won’t do that for the next generation.

That is why I am proud to announce that the next Labour government will invest in these vital services, investing £500m every year to provide additional funding for early intervention programmes like Sure Start.

We will not only protect the services that we already have but will work with communities across the country to reverse the damage that has been done by seven years of Tory cuts.

Under the last Labour government, Sure Start changed my life, the lives of my children, and the lives of countless children and families across Britain. And a vote for Labour on 8 June will mean that the next Labour government can continue to do the same.