Extending the school day to 4:30 will help working parents - but it must be used for extra-curricular activities

It must be for nothing else or the law of diminishing returns will take over

Ofsted say children are being let down in PE lessons (Alamy)

This column is not about the sugar tax because I cannot decide whether it is an idea that is utterly brilliant or truly terrible. What I do know is that the best way to reduce obesity in children is through exercise. At least two hours of PE lessons a week, led by a dedicated teacher, plus a rich and diverse array of sporting activities before or after school keeps schoolchildren focused, relaxed, happy and healthy. If only we had a Jamie Oliver for sport, inspiring teachers, parents and children to take up exercise and to lobby the Government to push sport in schools. Just imagine what could be done.

This is why there is great potential in the plans, unveiled by George Osborne in the Budget and by Nicky Morgan in the education white paper, for extending the school day to 4.30pm. Working parents across the country will be delighted at not having to find that extra hour of childcare. But the longer school day must not mean loading more lessons onto children already burdened with homework. The extra hour must be for extra-curricular activities and nothing else or the law of diminishing returns will take over. Private schools may have longer hours and produce excellent results but they also have longer holidays.

The Chancellor spoke in his Budget of a “devolution revolution” and, like the most difficult of revolutions, education reform is incomplete. The white paper – the most wide-ranging in the sector for years – represents unfinished business for the Conservatives. By forcing every school to become an academy by 2022, ministers say they are finishing what Tony Blair started. But that is misleading: Blair’s ministers created academies to protect children from failing schools, not to replace one established structure, LEAs, with another – a network of multi-academy trusts.

Despite the claim that these school reforms are part of the “devolution revolution”, they represent another heave to the centre. While academies may be free from local-authority control, “academisation” – to use the Prime Minister’s word – is a centralising, Whitehall-driven reform that is not about choice. Nor is converting schools to academies about driving up standards.

The Education Select Committee last year found no evidence that the change improved attainment and, in any case, 83 per cent of primary schools are judged good or outstanding but only 14 per cent of primaries are academies. A huge structural change, against the will of many schools, just so the Government can say they have completed the task on academies seems unnecessary and costly. As Schools Week reported, the £140m set aside is not sufficient to convert 16,000 schools into academies, suggesting that the schools themselves will have to meet a lot of the cost.

Similarly, the proposal to axe parent governors from school boards is taking away choice from families. Children are the front line in schools and without parent governors their voice will be diminished.

The Government should stop regarding education reform as unfinished business and listen to parents, teachers and children.

Irritable Duncan Smith

The wording of Iain Duncan Smith’s stunning resignation letter may have had added piquancy thanks to his position on the opposite side of the EU referendum debate to George Osborne and David Cameron, but the ex-welfare secretary’s anger over disability benefit cuts is real.

He has been furious with the Chancellor for years over his department’s budget being squeezed, and No 10 and No 11 knew it. This backdrop makes the way the PM and Osborne handled the two days between the Budget on 16 March and the resignation on 18 March all the more strange.

After Nicky Morgan said on the BBC’s Question Time on 17 March that the benefit cuts proposal was just a “suggestion”, No 10 insisted early on 18 March that the DWP was committed to it. Yet by that afternoon the U-turn from the Treasury came, making Duncan Smith look like a chump. Why didn’t the Prime Minister or Chancellor realise that IDS, a leading Brexiteer, was an unguided missile? Shouldn’t they have handled the fallout a little better?


 As Juliette and Jamie Oliver prepare for a fifth child, he should know better than to lecture new mothers 
 (AFP)

Jamie’s boob revolution

I understand Jamie Oliver’s passion about sugar, even though I am uneasy about the impact on low-income families of taxing it. At least the TV chef is an expert in this area and his views should be respected.

What is less understandable is his new drive for more new mothers to breastfeed their babies. Oliver denies that this is a new “campaign” as such but his remarks have understandably caused irritation among women. Oliver uses evidence linking breastfeeding to reduced incidence of childhood obesity but the scientific research on this is contested: a 2013 study in The Journal of the American Medical Association cast doubt on previous studies and suggested the link had been overplayed.

Whatever the evidence, I think Oliver, whose wife is pregnant with their fifth child, needs to be wary of lecturing mothers on breastfeeding. Of course, breastmilk is best for a baby but for those women who struggle to get their child to feed, the last thing they need is Oliver’s sunny-side-up preaching.

Goodbye to all that

For my last column in the last Independent on Sunday I thought I would look back to my first, from the summer of 2013. I wrote about Tom Watson, who had just resigned as Labour’s election co-ordinator after the row over Labour’s candidate for the Falkirk by-election. In his resignation letter, Watson wrote that he felt like he’d seen “the merry-go-round turn too many times” and it was time to jump off and spend more time with his family.

Of course, Watson is enjoying a political renaissance as Labour’s deputy leader – he is not only back on the carousel but is one of the men operating the funfair. It is a reminder that political careers do not always follow a rise-and-fall arc but can have repeated downfalls and comebacks (see also Iain Duncan Smith). For me it is time, for now, to jump off the merry-go-round.

Twitter: @janemerrick23