From next year, hundreds of thousands of secondary school pupils will stay in school for at least an hour longer each day, for extra lessons, sports or art.
The announcement comes from George Osborne’s Budget, which intends to increase standards and make life easier for working parents.
"I also want to support secondary schools that want to offer their pupils longer school days with more extracurricular activities like sport and art. So we'll fund longer school days for at least 25% of all secondary schools,” George has said.
Head teachers are being invited to bid for extra funding to provide the extra hour of learning and pay overtime to the staff.
Russell Hobby, the general secretary of the National Association of Head teachers has said: “Any expansion of hours must be properly funded, as school budgets are extremely tight. There's not a lot of evidence internationally linking a longer academic day to higher standards, but extracurricular activity is usually valuable.
“As long as this remains at the discretion of schools to meet the needs of their pupils, then it seems positive.”
The Chancellor is also going to pledge that every school in the country converts to an academy by 2020.
George Osborne is due to deliver his eighth budget at 12:30pm today, Wednesday 16th March.
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