Integrating Services Through Extended Schools

  1. The NUT welcomes the recognition of the role of “extended schools” in ‘Every Child Matters’. The multi agency approaches outlined the potential to facilitate access to services amongst local communities and could also have the advantage of freeing teachers in schools to focus on children’s educational needs rather than on substituting for the work which should be carried out by other agencies.
  1. The recent NUT/DfES research commissioned from NFER on the potential and effectiveness of extended schools pointed to the necessity for the development of service provision to be grown from the bottom-up. Extended school service provision cannot be imposed. School communities should be able to identify their needs for location of services and then call for financial and organisational support. Staff have to be involved in decision making. Excessive workload must not be a consequence of extended school provision.
  1. The NUT is concerned therefore about the proposal that “we want all schools to become extended schools”. The imposition by Government of such responsibilities on all schools is very different from the school-led involvement which has characterised the development of this initiative to date.
  1. Teachers must be motivated and have ownership of any major initiative of this kind, if the desired changes are to be implemented. It would also be essential to ensure that adequate resourcing is available to all schools, at least at the same levels as is available for those involved in previous pilot schemes, if schools are to be able to take on such additional responsibilities.
  1. The over-arching approaches envisaged by the initiative would need to be based upon a presumption of a “joined up” strategic approach at local authority level: it is not yet the case that this exists in many parts of the country. It is also essential to ensure that schools participating in the extended schools’ initiative are not subsumed into the larger community organisations which would be established and that they retain their own distinct identity.
  1. The suggestion that many Children’s Centres will be located in schools or on school sites, often as part of the “extended schools” programme, will need careful management if it is not to be seen as an imposed initiative which creates disruption rather than a service. Such developments must be determined and led by schools, taking into account both the needs of the local community and the school’s capacity to implement such a development.
  1. The implications of the initiative for teacher workload are very important. Although the DfES has said that extended school provision should not involve additional workload for teachers, it is inevitable that the responsibility for co-ordination and management of services will fall to head teachers and other senior managers of schools. A comparison between extended schools and the “community schools” of the 1970s could be drawn. The latter were envisaged as dual use with community facilities added. There used to be additional payments for additional jobs, eg, Burnham made provision for head teachers of community schools, which was on a voluntary basis. As noted above, however, head teachers would seem to have little choice about whether their school became an extended school.
  1. There are also a number of practicalities which do not seem to have been fully addressed by Government but which will be of particular importance to schools, such as site security and priority for use of premises. Budget management would also be an issue, for example, wear and tear on premises – why should the cost be borne by school budgets? Also, there are important issues around supervision and line management of adults and children coming into school: who would have accountability for staff and children on the site but not on roll?
  1. In terms of revisions to arrangements for school inspection in the future, which are currently under discussion, inspection teams must represent the full spread of expertise needed to assess additional services for children and their families in extended schools. This would be particularly important, given the proposed reduction in the number of inspection team members.