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 DfEShas 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'. NW
Further information
* For details of the DfES guidance on extended schools visit www.teachernet.gov.uk/extendedschools. This website also has separate guidance on setting up childcare in schools.
CASE STUDY: BEVENDEAN PRIMARY SCHOOL, BRIGHTON
Improved attendance and behaviour are two of the benefits of providing a range of additional services, according to Joan Marshall, deputy head of Bevendean Primary School near Brighton. But she says it is too early to measure whether extensive links with the disadvantaged local community have resulted in better attainment levels among the school's 425 pupils.
As the school's community manager, she is responsible for ensuring the smooth running of activities which begin with a breakfast club and include a toddler club, family learning sessions, a health visitor clinic and speech and language therapy. In the evening there is Spanish, yoga, computing and arts.
'We are looking at the school as a facility which is not just serving the children from 9 to 3. It's about opening the school to the wider community while keeping the child at the centre of it all,' she says.
Ms Marshall says the health visitor clinic means that parents can bring a child to the toddler group or drop them at the 50-place nursery and also have their baby weighed at the same time.
During the family learning sessions parents and children can each have four hours separately with a tutor each week, before working together for two hours on various projects. With ten years' service at the school, Ms Marshall has got to know the parents of many of the 425 pupils, which has helped to break down any inhibitions they may have had about 'going back to school'.
But she has concerns about the weighty administrative burden that extended schools status entails. 'It can be a huge headache. Just doing the quarterly returns for staff working in our breakfast club can take a day and a half,' she admits.
CASE STUDY: NORTH PROSPECT COMMUNITY SCHOOL, PLYMOUTH
Chris Watts has been spreading the word among fellow headteachers about the benefits of extended schools. But as head of North Prospect Community School in Plymouth, he is not happy with the label, preferring to call them 'community-focused schools'.
He explains, 'Our vision is for the school site not to be just a school, but a learning centre for the area. We dropped "primary" from our title and replaced it with "community" last year and the next step for me would be to change it completely to North Prospect Learning Centre. But that's for the community to decide, not me, because we have to go at their pace.
'What I am looking for is a school that engages so closely with its community that it is just another thing that happens in this community with a bias towards learning and playing a pro-active role in developing partnerships with others.'
Featured recently in a DfES video promoting the benefits of extended schools, North Prospect's strategy of engaging with the community was born several years ago out of harsh necessity as the school had a falling roll, disaffected pupils, poor attainment levels and no early years work.
When he took over eight years ago Mr Watts began by attending community group meetings, courting the local media and pursuing a deliberate strategy of reconnecting the school with the community. 'I have to be honest and say that I did not have most of the staff with me when we set out on this journey,' he says.
Now there is a Sure Start project on site, a nursery, a purpose-built foundation unit, year-round childcare for nought to 11-year-olds, breakfast and after-school clubs, a library for community use, a part-time paediatrician, health visitors, counsellors and a family worker. Links with the local primary care trust mean that a GP will soon be available at school.
The way the school has become embedded in the community is also reflected in its links with the local education action zone and an economic development trust which helps access funds. And soon the community may even be able to launder its washing on the school site. 'We have done the survey, they want it and we're looking at providing the service,' says Mr Watts.
He believes that the community of North Prospect 'can become an exciting, dynamic and vibrant place', but stresses that the school's links are inextricably bound up with tackling teaching and learning issues in the school.
When the Government announced its literacy strategy, Mr Watts and other staff members knocked on the doors of all 260 pupils, discussed it with parents and held a public meeting. He says that when teachers leading subject areas make their contributions to the school development plan, they are expected to do one strand of community development.
It's a two-way process between the school and the community. The school's ICT leader is now a consultant to the local community centre which is able to tap into the school's broadband.
Apart from raising the morale all round, there have been advances in learning. Following sterling work by a team of speech and language therapists and teaching assistants in the foundation unit, Mr Watts says an audit showed significant improvement among most pupils. 'We have a profile now to break the back of this deprivation cycle,' he says.