Extended schools for everyone?

By Jim Sweetman / @Jimbo9848

The notion that schools should be open beyond the normal school day and in holiday time makes obvious sense. Looking back, it is absurd that so much public investment in space and equipment should be locked away for so much of the time.

The original ideas were ambitious. There was talk of post offices, takeaway restaurants, health clubs, clinics and police stations all being housed on school premises so that the school would have a key function in maintaining the well-being of the community and, consequently, could focus its efforts on reducing barriers to learning for both children and adults.

It hasn’t quite worked out like this. The blueprint for collaboration between public and private has been lost in bureaucratic argument. But there has still been change: now, over 90% of schools offer what are called extended services. However, they have not got the mix right and a confused approach is in danger of derailing the electoral advantages of the policy.

The Government view is that extended schools are for all children. If low achievers need to attend catch up sessions in literacy and maths then high achievers will benefit from extended time in computing facilities and libraries. Breakfast clubs and after school clubs are likely to benefit all children with working parents and not just those who are entitled to free school meals. The provision of childcare and classes in parenting skills are not just for those who have problems either. There is a simple need to make more use of school premises and an absolute imperative to develop community.

But, at local authority level, the involvement of children’s services has skewed the agenda so that now it looks as if extended services are part of the social welfare agenda. The local children’s service focus on disadvantage means that the clubs and the play schemes are not universally provided. Worse still, the approach is sometimes tainted with the smell of welfare and the notion that something is being done for somebody and they ought to be grateful. A real opportunity has been lost to democratise the processes, to ask parents and pupils what they want and then to work with them to deliver it. One of the consequences is that a lot of parents do not think that the new provision targets their children.

It gets worse. Ofsted, the school inspection service, ignores the skew and expects the new provision to raise standards and achievement in academic SATs and tests. Given the target audience, it is unlikely to do that. So, although the programme can have a useful effect on attendance it is going to be threatened because Ofsted won’t see it as having any impact on attainment. A Conservative government would happily be able to withdraw the funding on the basis that the benefits were unproven.

Also, headteachers and school governors do not see the returns from a programme which focuses on only one section of the pupil cohort. It does not make it easier for them when, along with the summer play scheme, they have to consider their provision for debt enforcement and, if the community policeman is talking about knife crime and its dangers, uninvolved parents will simply assume that there is an issue in the school that they have not been told about. There is a danger that the notion of extended services for some may make others feel excluded.

Of course, there are exceptions and there are schools which are doing some really interesting work with their communities, but these are the beacons. Elsewhere, the provision is much patchier and time is running out even as the funding is threatened.

If there is a lesson in all of this, it is that government has to be more ambitious and present a more forceful vision to shift embedded attitudes. In extended services, too many people are simply doing the job they always did but in a different place with a new budget code. Instead, they should be working from the bottom up with a new approach addressing the needs and priorities of the whole school community so that the swing voters are studying advanced computing, family learning and foreign languages before having a coffee in the school cafe with the teachers and the working mothers who have just picked up their children from the crèche. That’s a vote-winning vision which has still to be delivered.