The Education Secretary Ruth Kelly today launched a £680 million initiative to keep schools open from 8am to 6pm in order to benefit working parents.

The plan will see schools running breakfast clubs before class, and a range of after-school programmes, which will keep children occupied from when their parents go to work until they come home in the evening.

Ms Kelly said the extended hours would help "latchkey kids" and allow schools to become community centres. But even as she described the plan, teachers' unions questioned whether it was adequately funded, and whether parents would have to pay for the provisions. Many schools across the country already offer breakfast clubs for a small charge.

Speaking this morning at Millfields community school in Hackney, east London, where children were arriving for a breakfast club, Ms Kelly said: "This is just common sense. If you've got a school building, which is a tremendous asset, in the heart of a community, why not use it?"

Ms Kelly said the extra hours will give "parents a great deal of peace of mind, knowing that the child is in a safe and secure environment." The programs will be optional and flexible: "It’s what works for families and what works for children. It is about individual pupils and what works for them."

The additional hours have already been dubbed "Kelly hours" -- just as teacher training days are called "Baker days" after Tory minister Lord Baker.

According to the proposals, by 2010 all parents of primary age children should be able to access affordable childcare "at or through their school at 8am to 6pm, all year round". All secondary schools will also be open from 8am to 6pm all year round. In addition, all three and four-year-olds "will receive 15 hours of free integrated early learning and care for 38 weeks of the year" by 2010.

The Education Secretary said that she hopes more and more schools will start to offer the extended hours. "By 2010 children should have access to a whole range of activities," she said. "Six hundred and eighty million pounds is a significant sum and it should make a real difference."

The extra school hours will be filled by language and music classes, sports activities and the chance to do homework. The programs will be provided by volunteers or private companies. Ms Kelly emphasised that teachers will not have to take part.

The plan has been welcomed as a way to bring school hours into line with the routine of working parents, but this morning unions and politicians questioned whether its funding would go far enough.

David Cameron, Shadow Secretary for Education, said: "We welcome the proposals for breakfast clubs and after school clubs - they can be real help to working mothers.

"But the Government has real questions to answer over funding. We've seen what happens before when they announce worthy initiatives without providing enough money to support them - resulting in a funding crisis and lots of broken promises."

Liberal Democrat education spokesperson Edward Davey raised similar concerns: "These plans sound promising but Ruth Kelly will need to answer questions on whether this is real new money or whether schools will be forced to find these resources from other areas of their budgets."

Meanwhile, a spokeswoman for the National Union of Teachers (NUT) said that funding for the plan sounded larger than it was, stressing that £680m by 2008 "sounds like new money but across 23,000 schools, it will be spread very thinly".

And David Hart, general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, said he supported the plan but it was "fanciful" to suggest that the extra hours would not make extra demands on teachers and headteachers.

Mr Hart also warned that parents would "undoubtedly" be charged for the clubs. A spokeswoman for the Department of Education said that the details of additional hours and programs would vary: "It will be for schools to determine what provision they can provide and how it will meet local needs," she said.

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