The Children’s Plan, a long term vision to improve schools and a step-change in the way parents and families are supported to deal with the new challenges faced by young people in the 21st century has been launched.

Eligibility

Various

What For?

The key announcements include:

• £225m will be allocated over the next three years to build or upgrade more than 3,500 playgrounds and set up 30 new supervised adventure playgrounds, designed for the 8-13 age group, in deprived communities;
• £160m will be allocated to improve the quality and range of places for young people to go and things for them to do. This could mean either 50 new state-of-the-art youth centres could be built, or 500 refurbished, or alternatively 2000 smaller scale centres or mobile units. These centres will contain a range of positive activities for young people including sport, music, drama, art facilities etc;
• £100m to extend the offer of free childcare places to 20,000 of the most disadvantaged two year olds, building on the current childcare offer to all three and four year olds;
• £30m will be spent to provide more family learning to help parents and carers develop skills and learn with their children in schools;
• a review of the primary level curriculum to ease the transition from early years into school, to create an even sharper focus on maths and English and to give teachers more flexibility in the school day.
• schools in the 21st century should be central to their communities, designed differently and encouraged to make more effective links with the NHS and other services. Child health services, social care, advice, welfare services and police will where possible be located on the same sites, making services more integrated and more convenient for children and their families;
• £25m will be allocated to fund the Every Child A Writer scheme to offer intensive one-to-one coaching in areas of writing that children find hard to master;
• £18m will be invested to provide additional support for specific groups of children with special educational needs and disabilities;
• £26.5m on piloting new forms of teaching children that have been excluded from school, including piloting the concept of Studio Schools, which specialise in work-based learning and vocational training;
• a package of measures to support families and help parents take a more active role in their children’s education;

How Much?

The new announcements in the Children’s Plan are backed by £1 billion of planned spending over the next three financial years (2008/09 - 2010/11).

Deadline

All figures are presented as over three years except for the £160m youth fund for positive activities, which is over two years.
More Information
http://www.dfes.gov.uk/pns/DisplayPN.cgi?pn_id=2007_0235

Your response: