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Children's trusts will be asked to help fund co-ordinator posts to run extended hours and services in schools, the children's minister Margaret Hodge said last week.

In last week's budget, £9.4bn was announced to rebuild or refurbish at least half of Britain's primary schools, with the aim of extending opening hours and hosting extra services such as health, social work, child care, parenting support and adult education.

But at a conference organised by the education charity ContinYou, head teachers voiced concerns that funding to pay for co-ordinators would not be sustained.


Although Hodge confirmed start-up funds until at least 2008, she said that beyond that schools would have to look to their partners, including the NHS, children's trusts and Learning and Skills Councils, to sustain co-ordinators' pay. Parents were another source of funding, perhaps using tax credits to pay for child care, she suggested.

"We have just got to be creative. The mistake we would make is to think that this will be entirely funded by government," she added.