Like many young mothers, Jenna was unsure where to start. But that’s where her local family support service came in. Offering breastfeeding advice, a space to come together with other parents and for her son Billy to play with other babies, it reassured Jenna that she was on the right track – and crucially, that Billy was set up to achieve when he got to school.

Jenna’s service was the first of Labour’s renowned Sure Start centres in Washington, my home town in north-east England. I knew it well: before becoming an MP I ran a refuge nearby for women fleeing domestic violence. I linked up the women who used our refuge with Sure Start. It was a lifeline for those women who, despite everything, were determined to give their children the very best start in life.

But, sadly, after 14 years of Conservative government, stories like Jenna’s, and those of the many women who were offered that lifeline, are much less common. Funding was stripped out of Sure Start centres and services scrapped in rebranded family hubs. Today, 65 councils, and the children and families who live under their authority, have missed out on recent funding. Many more are lacking the childcare places that so many families in our country need.

For every Jenna, there are a host of other young mothers, and families, who missed out on crucial pillars of support, whose children have fallen behind before they have even started school.

One in three five-year-olds enters year 1 without the basic skills – like holding a pencil and writing their own name – that they need to make the most of what education has to offer them. Some haven’t reached essential milestones such as putting on a coat or going to the toilet by themselves.

For the most vulnerable children, the situation is graver. Just over half of those eligible for free school meals reach a good level of development at age five. For children in social care, it’s just over one in three. And for children with special educational needs, it’s one in five.

The gap in achievement we see between our poorest and most affluent children at 16 is baked in before they even start school, creating a vicious cycle of lost life chances that’s all too visible in the shameful number of young people not earning or learning.

It’s this government’s moral mission to bridge that gap, but to do it we must build an education system where all children can achieve and thrive, starting from day one.

That is why reforming the early years education system is my number one priority. And it’s why, just 12 months after Labour entered government, I am so proud to be setting out our strategy to give every child the best start in life.

Backed by £1.5bn over the next three years, it brings together the best of Sure Start, health services, community groups and the early years sector, with the shared goal of setting up children to succeed when they get to school.

We will create 1,000 Best Start Family Hubs, at least one in every council area, invest a record £9bn in funded childcare and early years places – and hundreds of millions to improve quality in early years settings and reception classes.

These hubs will bring disjointed support systems into one place, allowing thousands of families to access help with anything from birth registration to breastfeeding, from housing support to children’s speech and language development.

The strategy takes inspiration from around the world. I’ve been really impressed by what happens in countries I’ve visited, such as Estonia, where early education and family support are bound tightly together with stellar results. Its disadvantage gap is negligible because children get to school ready to learn. Its children outperform those from much larger, wealthier countries in international rankings. The country punches above its weight economically as a result.

At the heart of our strategy is the recognition that for our country to succeed in a fast-changing world, it is not enough for only some children to do well in education: every child must have the opportunity and the tools not just to get by, but to get on in life.

Working people have always known that education is the best way to break the link between their background and what they go on to achieve, the route to prosperity not just for individuals, but for all of society. It’s a common thread that runs through every Labour government: that we must use education to spread the freedoms that today too few enjoy, so that tomorrow they are common to us all.

It’s the essence of our politics, the socialism of extending freedom to allow working people to choose their own path to fulfilment: to get better employment, to achieve a better quality of life or even to start a family.

This strategy is a watershed moment for our government, but more importantly for every single family who needs our support. To make it a reality, we will begin unprecedented collaboration between parents, councils, nurseries, childminders, schools and government, enmeshing family support, early education and childcare so deeply that no rightwing government can ever unpick it, as the Tories did with Sure Start over 14 long years.

Our plan for change will ensure Jenna’s experience – and Billy’s future success – is shared by every family and every child in our country.

Labour will aim to embed a Sure Start-type system of help for deprived children and families so deeply and completely into the state that a future Reform or Conservative government would not be able to dismantle it, Bridget Phillipson has pledged.

Arguing that efforts to close the attainment gap between poorer and richer children was the government’s “moral mission”, the education secretary promised to build on this weekend’s announcement of a new wave of family hubs across England, an effective successor to Sure Start.

Sure Start, a network of centres offering integrated services for the under-fives and their families, launched in 1998 under the last Labour government, and was seen as one of its major successes, with one study saying it generated longer-term savings worth twice the system’s cost.

But much of Sure Start was dismantled amid massive spending cuts by the Conservatives. The new policy of family hubs will commit £500m to opening 1,000 centres from April 2026.

In an article for the Guardian, Phillipson said the centres should become part of a wider network of help for families, one that would not just be impossible to take apart, but that would become so popular that they would become an untouchable “third rail” of British politics.

The family hubs strategy was “a watershed moment” for both government and families, Phillipson wrote.

She went on: “To make it a reality we will begin unprecedented collaboration between parents, councils, nurseries, childminders, schools and government, enmeshing family support, early education, and childcare so deeply that no rightwing government can ever unpick it, as the Tories did with Sure Start over 14 long years.

“We will ensure any such assault on the system will become the new third rail of British politics.”

In a follow-up announcement to the plan for family hub centres, which are intended to be created in every council area in England by 2028, Phillipson’s department has also announced plans to pay qualified early years teachers to work in the most deprived areas, where their work could have the greatest impact.

Currently, the Department for Education says, just one in 10 nurseries have a qualified early years teacher. The incentive scheme will involve a tax-free payment of £4,500 to early years teachers who take a job in a nursery in one of the 20 most disadvantaged communities in England.

In another change, the education watchdog Ofsted will inspect any new early years providers within 18 months of opening, with subsequent inspections taking place at least once every four years, rather than the current six.

Sure Start and its successor programmes have a near-totemic role in the narrative of the modern Labour party, with Angela Rayner, its deputy leader, saying her life as a teenage mother and that of her son were turned around by her local centre, which offered her a parenting course.

In her Guardian article, Phillipson recounted working closely with the first-ever Sure Start centre in Washington, Tyne and Wear, when she ran a refuge for women fleeing domestic violence, before she entered politics.

“It was a lifeline for those women who, despite everything, were determined to give their children the very best start in life,” she wrote. “The gap in achievement we see between our poorest and most affluent children at 16 is baked in before they even start school, creating a vicious cycle of lost life chances that’s all too visible in the shameful number of young people not earning or learning.”

Speaking in interviews on Sunday morning, Phillipson said Labour was also committed to tackling child poverty, but said the fiscal cost of Downing Street’s U-turn on changes to welfare last week would make it harder to implement other policies such as potentially scrapping the two-child benefit cap.

What will Keir Starmer and his colleagues learn from the disaster of their attempt to cut benefits? Most speculation so far has been focused on the prime minister’s prospects, and other ministerial careers. But there are soon going to be more big decisions to make, which will have massive consequences for people’s lives.

One policy area in particular is about to return the political conversation to the subject that defined last week’s fiasco: disability. Once again, Labour MPs from all wings of the party are feeling anxious and restless. Campaign groups and charities – not to mention the huge numbers of people who will be directly affected – fear the worst. With the wounds from the welfare bill fiasco still raw, there is a grim sense of a possible reprisal of the same story.

And this is why. The education secretary, Bridget Phillipson, wants to reform England’s system of provision for children and young people with special educational needs and disabilities, or Send. Long years of Conservative failure – not least, reforms introduced a decade ago that were lamentably underfunded, and an exodus of children from mainstream to specialist schools – have resulted in ballooning costs amid disappointing outcomes. The councils that administer everything are crying out for help. The Treasury, meanwhile, surveys the mess and demands action.

A new education white paper will be published in the autumn. Phillipson says the government needs to “think very differently”. She wants to reverse a trend that took root in the Tory years and prioritise the inclusion of Send kids in mainstream schools. There is talk of somehow “making sure that all teachers are teachers of special educational needs [sic]”. A new neurodivergence task and finish group that will “work alongside the department to drive inclusive education” has been created; £740m of capital funding is being spent on “adapting classrooms to be more accessible and for creating specialist facilities”.

On the face of it, these moves are very welcome. But self-evidently, it will take much more – and a lot of time – to meaningfully turn things around. One of the big teaching unions has already said that without a commensurate increase in day-to-day schools spending, the plans could put “extreme pressure” on teachers. And there is an even bigger tension at the heart of the government’s plans.

Since Labour won the election, rising noise has been coming from Whitehall and beyond about drastically restricting the legal rights to dedicated provision that underpin the education of hundreds of thousands of children and young people. Those rights are enforced by the official Send tribunal, and embodied in education, health and care plans (EHCPs), which set out children’s needs and the provision they entail in a legally binding document. Contrary to what you read in certain news outlets, they are not any kind of “golden ticket”: parents and carers used to unreturned phone calls and long waits still frequently have to fight their local councils for the help their plans set out. But – and as a special needs parent, I speak from experience – they usually allow stressed-out families to just about sleep at night.

For about 40 years, such rights have been a cornerstone of the Send system. But their future is now uncertain: councils, in particular, are frantically lobbying ministers to get parents and their pesky rights out of the way. Late last year, a government source quoted in the Financial Times held out the prospect of “thousands fewer pupils” having access to rights-based provision. Despite the fact that EHCPs are most sorely needed in mainstream schools, a senior adviser to the Department for Education recently said that a consideration of whether EHCPs should no longer apply to children in exactly those settings is “the conversation we’re in the middle of”. There are whispers about families who currently have EHCPs being allowed to keep them, while in the future, kids with similar needs would be waved away, something that threatens a stereotypical two-tier model, another element with worrying echoes of the benefits disaster.

As a result, parents and carers – and many teachers – are terrified. Whenever ministers are asked about what is going to happen next, they tend to come out with the response: “no decision has been made”. On Sunday, the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg challenged Phillipson on whether she is about to “get rid” of EHCPs, which was met with vague words about improved support in schools, familiar claims that the current system is too “adversarial”, and no specific answer. This, needless to say, is not exactly allaying people’s fears.

Just under 483,000 children and young people in English schools now have an EHCP, up 11% on the previous year’s figure. Their numbers have risen partly because ad hoc, informal special needs provision in schools has become so unreliable that the only way of having any chance of securing what a child needs is to apply for one. Official data shows that the majority of applications for EHCPs are initiated by schools and colleges, often as a last-ditch move. In short, many children desperately need them. Without the support such plans are meant to guarantee, even more pupils would either exit mainstream into specialist provision that is often eye-wateringly expensive, or end up joining the increasing numbers of kids who are not in formal education at all.

For the foreseeable future, because even an optimist would have to agree that improvements promised by the government will take years to really kick in, all that will remain the case. So the safest and most humane option would be to leave children’s legal entitlements in place, and start to improve Send provision as Phillipson wants, on the basis that boosted ad hoc help will naturally bring down EHCP numbers and costs. Instead, her most vivid move could be an awful rights grab, which would surely heighten the impression that this Labour party has an ingrained problem with issues around disability.

A new campaign titled Save Our Children’s Rights was launched over the weekend with a letter in the Guardian signed by leading figures from charities and lobby groups, including Disability Rights UK, the National Autistic Society and Mencap – as well as such high-profile Send parents as the broadcasters Christine McGuinness and Carrie Grant, along with the TV naturalist and neurodiversity campaigner Chris Packham (full disclosure: I am helping out, and I was one of the signatories). For the second time in less than six months, are these really the kind of people ministers want to argue with on Good Morning Britain, 5 Live and BBC Breakfast?

As I watched the benefits fiasco unfolding, knowing that the special needs story would soon explode, it brought one big thought to mind. Labour needs to stop sowing fear and dread among people whose lives are already full of those things. Instead of picking on vulnerable parts of the population who already view the future with deep anxiety, they should maybe go after much more powerful interests, who might be compelled into helping the government with its financial woes. Instead, fear is swirling around parts of society that are already unable to cope. Labour governments are meant to make people feel less scared, not more. If there is going to be yet another “reset”, this is where it should be focused.

There is one point that may yet bring clarity to the government’s thinking. Governing politicians habitually pretend they will win future elections. But there is now every chance that Reform UK might end up in power, possibly in partnership with whatever remains of the Conservatives. Judging by his recent pronouncements, Nigel Farage has very questionable views about special needs and disabilities. There is strong evidence that the same is true of Kemi Badenoch. The current fashion on the political right for nonsense about savagely cutting back the state would have deep implications for Send families. If Labour takes away so many children’s basic educational rights, it may well end up leaving them at the mercy of politicians who will then vandalise their lives. “No decision has been made,” say ministers. It is time they took the only morally and politically right one, and fast.