The Rise and the Fall of the UK's "Extended Schools" Policy (1997-2011) and Its Lessons: A Perspective from New Social Educational History

To ensure the high-quality development of after-school services, what is required is more than just increasing financial investment, but also prioritize institutional optimization and efficiency enhancement. In this regard, the rise and the fall of the UK's "Extended Schools" policy offers valuable historical lessons. The idea behind the UK's policy aligns with "Home-School-Community Collaborative Education" in China, while its specific measures share similarities with after-school services. From the perspective of New Social Educational History, the imbalance of power and responsibility in policy implementation within British primary and secondary schools was the institutional catalyst for the policy's decline. This issue stemmed from the Thatcher-era educational and fiscal reforms, evolving through three distinct phases (concealment, amplification, and exposure), in response to the UK's economic shifts between 1997 and 2011. Ultimately, the policy was marginalized due to goal generalization. Drawing from these lessons, China's after-school service policy must take two critical historical lessons that avoiding "excessive reliance on central government earmarked funding" and preventing "overly generalized policy implementation goals".