The budget available for Sure Start (Biztos Kezdet) Children’s Homes for this year is 606 million forints (EUR 1.92M), Government Spokesperson Éva Kurucz said in Monor, near Budapest, at a press conference held jointly with Minister of State for Social Affairs and Inclusion Károly Czibere.
Ms. Kurucz emphasised that the Government wishes to provide even more efficient and better targeted support to families and the professionals who help them, the goal being for disadvantaged children to receive the resources and services they need as early in life as possible.
The point of the Sure Start Programme is to develop cooperation between parents, prospective parents, children and professional partners in the interest of facilitating the physical, mental and social development of infants and small children, the Government Spokesperson said. There are currently 114 Children’s Homes operating in Hungary, with 11 thousand registered visitors until the end of 2014.
Ms. Kurucz explained that the Programme is closely linked to Government measures aimed at eradicating child poverty and malnutrition, pointing out that meals in nursery schools and public education institutions are currently free for some 320 thousand children and partly subsidised for 209 thousand others. The Government is spending 58 billion forints (EUR 184M) on school meals in 2015, 5.6 billion forints more than in 2014.
Providing further details about the Programme, Minister of State Czibere explained that these Children’s Homes can help disadvantaged children and their families at a very early stage while providing complex services and enlisting the help of many different professionals. They provide a flexible service that caters to the needs of individual families, from giving counselling for parents to providing opportunities to cook and to do their laundry.
Mr. Czibere stressed that one of the fundamental elements of the Government’s inclusion strategy is that children should receive support “that prevents the development of an inherited vicious circle of disadvantagedness” as early in their lives as possible.
The Government’s goal is to reinforce the Sure Start network, as an important element of its inclusion policy, he added. Operational funding is of some 6.2 million forints per institution, but it is important to note than new Children’s Homes are also being added to the network; the Government supports the opening of 50 new Homes with average funding of 10 million forints each in the upcoming period.