Abstract

In 1997, the Labour Government came to power committed to reforming public service delivery, particularly towards the improvement of children’s services. The paper focuses on the implementation process involved in rolling out its Sure Start policy in order to understand and analyse the dynamics in Labour’s approach to delivery. In so-doing, it draws on implementation and policy network theories to offer an original analytical framework, ‘the implementation network approach’, to explain the implementation process of Sure Start policy in Sheffield and Manchester based on 32 interviews.

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