Financial Boost for Out of Hours Services
Children’s Minister Dawn Primarolo has announced £167m of funding to boost out of hours services in schools across the country.Extended services in schools provide children and young people with innovative and exciting things to do before and after the school day, enabling parents to stay at work for longer, safe in their knowledge their child is being looked after and entertained.
The money is part of the extended services subsidy which has been allocated £8.5m in 2008-9; £40m in 2009-10 and £167m in 2010-11.
Children’s Minister Dawn Primarolo said: “Extended services put schools everywhere at the heart of the community, offering invaluable experiences, extensions to learning and out of hours childcare of the highest quality.
“In an economic downturn it is even more important for schools to be working with parents and carers to offer as much support as possible to helping them get into and stay in employment wherever possible.
“Extended services give schools a unique opportunity to offer parents this support. We are already asking local authorities to pay particular attention to meeting families’ needs over holiday periods and to bring together the full range of childcare and supervised activities on offer for 5-14 year olds in a way that can be easily understood and accessed by families.”
Currently, 86 per cent of secondary and 81 per cent of primary schools are already offering access to these services and this financial boost will help meet the target of every school offering out of hours activities by 2010.
The government would ultimately like every school to offer childcare from 8am-6pm, a varied range of activities including study support activities, parenting and family support, swift and easy access to specialist services like speech therapy and community use of facilities including adult and family learning and ICT.
The allocation of funding follows an announcement by the DCSF earlier this week of £5.5 million to help find innovative solutions to gaps in holiday childcare provision. The money will cover ten pilots, the findings from which will provide an insight into sustainable solutions for holiday childcare.
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