As highlighted in Remodelling Newsletter No. 9, in Norfolk, there are now 56% of schools providing access to the full core offer of extended services. The national target for September 2008 is 50% of all schools achieving this across the country. The DCSF expect every school to be providing access to the full core offer of extended services by 2010.

Since the Spring Term 2006, there have been 7 tranches of extended schools training with over 310 schools attending. The overall feedback has been extremely positive and schools had the opportunity to plan, access tools, share good practice, hear from case study presenters and network with colleagues from other schools, the LA and partner organisations.

From the Autumn Term 2008 onwards, individual schools or clusters can continue to contact the LA's area based teams for advice and support on extended schools, and including local training needs, for example, there may be a need for a cluster consultation event or a school/cluster may be looking to maximise and demonstrate the impact of its services on pupils and the community.

The national monitoring and tracking of every school in the country in providing access to the full core offer has been mentioned during the tranche training. This means that the LA is required by the DCSF to regularly update entries for its own schools on a national Extended Schools Progress (ESP) database, for example, as follows:

School Name		Core Offer
Blank Junior	Cluster: Willow
DfES No	Element	Status
Updated:	Childcare	Full access
July 2008	Access type	Mixed
	Varied menu of activities	Some
	Swift and easy access	Full
	Parenting support	Some
	Community use	None

The data is provided quarterly by the Early Years, Childcare and Extended Schools Development Workers who liaise with and visit schools to audit the services that are currently being provided, either as an individual school or within the cluster, for example, a small rural Primary school might signpost to Adult Learning and sports facilities at the nearby High School or to a childminders' network.

If you would like read-only access to the ESP database on the TDA website and also the Google Earth map facility that highlights where each Norfolk school is in providing elements of the core offer, please contact Virginia Wakely in Children's Services at County Hall on 01603 638092 or via e-mail.

Later this term, it is the intention of the DCSF to show which schools are offering extended services on the consumer website, Directgov (www.direct.gov.uk). The Schools, Childcare and Nurseries Finder/SCAN (http://schoolsfinder.direct.gov.uk) on Directgov already provides contextual details about every school in England as well as each school's performance data, Ofsted report and school profile information. Directgov will add a new category flag to existing school level data that indicates whether a school is providing access to the full core offer of extended services or not and this information will be taken from data uploaded from the ESP database on 1^st October, 2008, and be updated quarterly. Directgov will not give a detailed breakdown of each element but simply denote: Yes, No or Non Applicable. The DCSF is also intending to write to all full core offer schools thanking them for their work and alerting them to the forthcoming Directgov publication and media campaign. Therefore, it is important that each school published on the Directgov site is prepared to respond to queries about their extended services.

For further information on Extended Schools, including a core slide pack: What is an Extended School, a video and useful case studies and toolkits, please access the TDA website. The DCSF is producing a leaflet for parents to explain and promote extended services and a publicity toolkit will be made available during this term for schools to adapt for local use.

If you have any queries on the above or would like more information, please contact Peter Simmonds or Virginia Wakely in Children's Services at County Hall on 07795 265669 or 01603 638092 or your school's Early Years, Childcare and Extended Schools Development Worker.