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Is the government’s enthusiasm for extended schools mirrored by school heads and staff, asks Frances Rickford. And will the idea work in practice?

Schools - especially primary schools - play a starring role in the government’s plans for children’s services. The Department for Education and Skills’ five-year strategy for children and learners, published in July, promised at least one full service extended school in every council by 2006, providing children and parents with child care, health services, adult learning and parent support on site. As well as this, the plan also promises wraparound child care from 8am to 6pm and during school holidays in many more primary schools - 1,000 by 2008.

The government is growing even more ambitious. Education secretary Charles Clarke has now said that every primary school - that’s nearly 20,000 in England alone - should offer all-day, all-year child care. Primary schools are described in the five-year strategy as "hubs of the community", which over time will make a "full offer" to their community. Later this year the government is to publish a 10-year child care strategy, paving the way for universal provision of children’s centres for children under five, many of which will be located on the sites of local primary schools.

But will they? Will heads and school governors be willing to devote their time to setting up extended services when they are already under pressure on, for example, attendance, SATs results, special needs inclusion and curriculum reform? And if they don’t want to is the government - or anyone else - in a position to make them?

Probably not. Successive governments have been transferring power and financial control from local education authorities to individual schools for the past 15 years, so now, legally, it would be difficult for government to instruct them to do anything.

But so far there seems to have been little effort even to persuade them to change. As Chris Waterman, director of the Confederation of Education Service Managers, has pointed out, despite the key role schools hold in the government’s Every Child Matters strategy, the document was not widely distributed to schools and there was little targeted information for school staff, governors or parents. The Children Bill doesn’t mention schools at all and The Next Steps document has few references to them. The government is set to rectify this later in the autumn with another "route map" to children’s service reform. But will this be enough to persuade schools to change?

According to a recent survey by the charity 4Children, change is already under way in schools. All the 11,000 schools surveyed had some sort of out-of-school learning or study support. Nearly half have a breakfast club, a third have an after-school club and in 39 per cent, a play scheme has been run during the holidays. And two-thirds say they are interested in becoming extended schools.

Clarke is keen to emphasise that teachers are not expected to run the extra activities as part of their day job. Instead, parents will be expected to pay for the services they use, and external providers from the voluntary or private sectors will run them.

Chris Davis is chair of the National Primary Headteachers Association (NPHA) which represents about half of the heads of English primaries. He says views on extended schools are mixed, and is adamant that trying to impose them would be counterproductive.

"Everyone is aware that this is on the cards but most are not particularly keen on getting involved. We’ve got so much to do already, most heads would run a mile from taking this on." Davis suggests that the most effective way to change their minds would be money. "Either extra money or some other extra benefit to the school, or an enhancement to the salaries of heads or senior staff, would be helpful."

Clarke has not promised any new money, emphasising instead the sources of financial help available to parents to pay for child care for school-aged children. But Anne Longfield, director of 4Children, believes money will have to be found to help schools to make the transition to 10-hour facilities, and the charity is lobbying the government hard. She also wants the government to make sure extended school services are sustainable. "It will be very sad for schools if they get something set up and it starts to crumble after a couple of years."

But even without the promise of new public money the evidence shows that attitudes in schools have started to shift in favour of extended services, says Longfield.

"In the past, parents have had difficulty persuading schools to allow them to rent parts of the school buildings for after-school clubs or holiday schemes. Government was also reluctant to tell schools it wanted them to be positive about this.

"Now we’ve seen all schools are providing some after-school activities and one in three offer after-school child care. The challenge is to make it an integral part of the school, and not something tacked on."

But many primary heads may, initially at least, want extended services to be run at arm’s length. Chris Davis wants reassurance that extending the hours children are in school will not mean children, or staff, are overburdened. "In disadvantaged areas, there have been extra services outside school hours for a long time. If you feel your school can cope and it is worthwhile it can be very positive for the children.

"But we do have concerns about heads’ workload, and children’s welfare. It must be organised by people who are not part of the school team and run by play workers offering a good non-academic curriculum - and not tire the children out.

"Some parents will take up this offer for the wrong reasons. Enabling them to work is a good reason, but getting the children off their hands may not be."

Nobody seems to openly disagree with the principle of integrated services, and it is hard to argue that school premises should not be used to benefit communities. But is it good for children to have a 10-hour school day? Adrian Voce, director of London Play, says the stakes are high.

"Leaving children at school for the duration of the working day is about parents’ needs, not children’s. If it is to be in children’s best interests too, children should get to do what they choose to co. The service should be run by qualified play workers who know how to give children freedom and opportunities and let them take risks. There needs to be dedicated outdoor and indoor space along the lines of a good adventure playground.

"This is children’s free time in which they need to let off steam and do their own thing. If we don’t have that, if we keep children at school because their parents need to work and deny them their free time, we will sacrifice their childhoods."

So it matters not only that schools develop extended school provision, but that it is done for children’s benefit, not just the government’s, or schools’, or parents’.

Confed’s Chris Waterman has proposed changes that could help to ensure schools develop integrated children’s services.¹ These include a lead governor for children, a written policy on the school’s links with the community, and emphasis in school inspections on the school’s role in delivering services to children.

4Children’s Anne Longfield agrees the government will have to take a more forceful lead if schools are to become hubs of their communities. But, she points out, parents’ expectations have been raised, and they too can lobby their local school to offer more. "We don’t know how long it will take to achieve these changes, but we’ve come a long way already."

¹ Every School Matters? Chris Waterman, available from www.ten.info

Case study - Millfields Community School, Hackney, London

Because of the number of shootings that have taken place in the neighbourhood, the Clapton area of north Hackney is often described as Murder Mile. Millfields community school is in the heart of Clapton, and when head teacher Anna Hassan arrived there 11 years ago, it was facing serious problems.

Now with more than 600 pupils it is Hackney’s designated full service extended school. It has been offering extended services from long before the phrase was invented, and already offers:

• A breakfast club.
• Adult keep-fit sessions.
• A play centre open from 8.30am to 6.30pm, six days a week and during the holidays.
• Professionally run respite care sessions for children with autism alongside family learning courses on autistic spectrum disorders.
• A community nursery and toy library.
• An adult learning suite with ongoing classes in English as a second language, information technology, literacy and numeracy.
• A Saturday school, the "Shine Academy", which runs from 10am to 3pm and is attended by more than 100 pupils.

In the pipeline are a 23-place crèche, drop-in health sessions, access to social workers, and enhanced sports facilities.

Hassan says: "Millfields became the school it is now because of the needs of the whole school community - pupils, parents, carers, staff and the wider community. The services have built up slowly. Initially we wanted to offer parents choices to work or study, and as a result of their increased confidence they began to tell us what they wanted."

Education is at the top of the agenda - the priority is to raise pupils’ achievements. Hassan believes that means involving the whole community. "It’s about establishing an ethos of lifelong learning, and a love of learning for the whole community. By improving schools, communities improve and by improving communities, schools improve."

Surprisingly, Millfields has no more space than the average large urban primary school. Classrooms and other facilities are used by different groups without any major problems, according to Hassan. "We have a fantastic and very secure staff. Before people come here they are told exactly what happens, and are expected to buy into our school. In the staff handbook it says that if you are using someone’s class you leave it the way you found it, and they sign up to that. Sometimes we have minor problems and we deal with them.

"It’s about being professional, and treating each other with respect. Education is about children, and lifelong learning - those are the really important things and we put them first. All the things we do here have at their heart the question of how it will make a difference to our pupils."