Parents are abdicating responsibility for their children and dumping them at school for up to ten hours a day, a teachers’ leader said yesterday.

Mick Brookes, the general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, said that schools were increasingly being expected to take over childcaring responsibilities from parents who could not cope.

“I can give you chapter and verse on parents who do abdicate responsibility and dump their children early at school and are late in picking them up,” he told the union’s annual conference in Liverpool.

He was immediately taken to task by Beverley Hughes, the Schools Minister, who said that such parents were in a small minority and that perhaps the Government had a duty to support those parents who wanted to return to work by ensuring that childcare was available.

“We are in a changing world. Many families where there are two parents living together want both to go back to work. Our job in Government is not to prescribe that, but to give parents as many choices as we can,” she said.

She said that children could benefit from childcare. “Research tells us that for toddlers and beyond, high-quality early-years provision makes a measurable and long-term positive difference to children’s ability to shine at school and to their social development, and the challenge for me in extending these opportunities for early-years provision is to ensure it’s of high quality.”

Under the Government’s plans for extended services, all schools have until 2010 to ensure childcare from 8am to 6pm is available to all pupils.

They can either provide it on their own premises or tell parents where to find it in centres run nearby by the voluntary, state or private sectors.

Mr Brookes said he was concerned that this would enable parents who had lost control of their children from an early age to offload them. “If you choose to have children, there’s a responsibility in the early years to look after them until they can be at school,” he said.

He added that many Eastern European parents arriving in Britain were shocked to discover that, rather than promoting the importance of quality childcare at home, the system advocated a “back-to-work culture” that may not be in children’s best interests.

Mr Brookes said he agreed with Ed Balls, the Children’s Secretary, that “government does not bring up children – parents do”. He added: “The Government must stop displacing blame and loading all the ills of society on to the backs of schools. The rhetoric of supporting parents and families must become a reality for all our children.” Clarissa Williams, the union’s president, agreed that schools were being expected increasingly to take on childcare roles. She questioned why the Government had to extend nursery provision from three-year-olds to two-year-olds. “Are parents so distrusted that we want to separate them from their children at the earliest opportunity?” she asked.

Ms Hughes announced that an extra £16 million was being made available by the Government to support families. Of this, £3 million would be made available to support children who had to care for an older relative. The remainder would enable schools, and health and social care agencies, to work more closely together to help the most vulnerable children.

“For children from the most fragile family backgrounds, we have to put in place highly tailored, multi-agency solutions that make a real difference to the child’s life,” she said. The pressure of Ofsted inspections is deterring teachers from applying to run schools, despite some head teachers’ salaries topping £100,000 per year, research suggests. Two thirds of senior school staff believed that the impact of the education watchdog on teachers’ morale was “at best neutral” and at worst “very unhelpful”, the study by the University of Central Lancashire found.

Nearly nine out of ten head teachers believed that Ofsted made it less likely that teachers would apply for the top job.

The National Association of Head Teachers, which commissioned the research of 500 heads and deputies, is worried that the new system of short, sharp inspections does not allow Ofsted’s inspectors to spend enough time in schools. They are not getting a rounded view of teachers’ work, relying too heavily on figures from test results and rarely observing lessons, the union said.

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