play mornings, toy library sessions, open to anyone with young children in the surrounding area - or family literacy and numeracy programmes. Southwark is developing its own 'supplementary schools', often run by voluntary organisations on Saturdays or at weekends, like the Somali school in Bermondsey, which takes a hundred local children all day on Saturday, and enormously increases their confidence - as it does for their mothers, who meet next door at the same time, often the only time they have got out of the house all week. Extended schools are now a mainstream government initiative. But the idea of making schools double as venues for adult education or other community activity was "in our manifesto for years," says Caroline Pidgeon, who has the Southwark education portfolio. "If we are funding a new playground, then we want to know how it can be made available to a wider community. It is a matter of using what we have and to see how it can be extended."
Catch problems early The Luton officials were right in one way: if you get it right with the rising fives, then their success will eventually filter through the education system. But that means tackling problems early in the system, which might mean experimenting with keeping children in reception class for a year longer so they can master the basics of reading and writing (Liverpool) or setting up new pupil referral units, run by youth workers, for children whose teachers or care workers think are at risk of carrying out anti-social behaviour (Newcastle). It might mean new restorative justice programmes to tackle bullying - not just in schools but in children's homes (Portsmouth).
Tackle boredom head on Listing all the initiatives by Lib Dem councils to engage young people in sport, leisure, arts or other activities would take a whole new book, but it can also mean links to employment (Birmingham's Youthwise project), or going to trouble spots to involve young people in more constructive activities (Luton's youth bus), or engaging young people in a range of activities where they live (Sutton's award-winning Phoenix Centre, which now has 692 members in the local youth club). Schools are the core of education, but education has never meant just schools to Liberal Democrats - or just young people. Nor do they believe that education is just about preparing people for the needs of the market (Conservative) or the needs of the
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young people when schools burst out of their buildings