The extended schools programme is the latest to join what has become a treadmill of Government initiatives in recent years aimed at integrating services for children, families and the wider community. The Department for Education and Skills named 61 last month and pledged in the recent Green Paper, Every Child Matters, to create a full-service extended school in each local education authority by 2006.
The Government has earmarked 52.2m over three years to develop a network of 240 of these schools and provide core services including childcare, health and social care, life-long learning, family learning, study support, sports, arts, access to information technology - as well as leadership for other schools wanting to extend services.
The DfES says most of this money will go directly to local education authorities and schools through the Standards Fund, while 5.8m will come from the Behaviour Improvement Programme (BIP). LEAs are to get funding to appoint co-ordinators to draw up strategic plans and local managers to work with clusters of other schools.
Parkfield High School in Bilston has been given 80,000 through the BIP to become the first full-service school in the Wolverhampton area and spearhead the development of additional services in other schools.
Assistant head Pam Yeo, who is leading the initiative, hopes the first service - a drop-in centre to help teenagers with issues such as housing - will be up and running in December. An extended school co-ordinator has been appointed and an operational group, comprising school governors, representatives of local community organisations, Sure Start and other agencies, will be formed to take the project forward.
Jenny Leech, out-of-school development manager for the Wolverhampton early years partnership and also responsible for developing extended schools, says, 'It is crazy that we have this space, which is only used 39 weeks a year, when particularly in our urban areas there is a lack of space for children to play.'
Sutton Manor Community Primary School in St Helens, Lancashire, has also been selected as an extended school, and deputy head Lyndsey Glass says a co-ordinator is being sought to 'make the school approachable to the whole community'.
Recently equipped with a purpose-built Foundation Stage unit, the school also plans to offer facilities for local teenagers and, after a needs analysis in the community, a small room has been designated as a counselling area for a school nurse and an adult mental health worker.
The DfES has often been accused in the past of failing to provide sufficient details of its various new initiatives. But not this time. While the DfES emphasises that 'there is no blueprint for the types of activities that schools might provide, or how they could be organised', it has supplied detailed guidance on what full-service extended schools are expected to provide and how they should be funded.
The guidance emphasises that schools cannot spend their budgets on community activities and services. 'Community use of school facilities will need to be self-financing, either through alternative funding streams or charges to users,' it states.
The DfES guidance says that while the focus of school activities 'should be on those that directly benefit school pupils, families, staff and the local community, some activities and services may be able to generate additional revenue for the school'. The extra cash 'can be used to finance further community initiatives or to supplement the delegated budget in supporting the education of pupils'.
Meanwhile the DfES says that if Primary Care Trusts, the Learning Skills Council and other agencies agree to provide services at a school, they will be responsible for funding them.
It is also providing funds for LEAs and schools 'to appoint support staff who will plan, manage, maintain and develop extended services to ensure that governors, heads and teachers are not burdened with this work'.
