Chancellor to call for longer school days

Chancellor George Osborne is expected to use his Budget speech to call for an extension to school days.

Schools will be able to bid for funding for extra activities like sport and art.

Mr Osborne's will also pledge that every school in England will be removed from local authority control.

Schools will either have to have converted by 2020 or have an academy order in place by then.

For any school that fails to have a plan in place, the government will take on radical new powers to intervene and ensure academy conversion takes place.

Academy status, introduced by a Labour government, was originally reserved for schools in urgent need of improvement, but since 2010 schools have been encouraged to convert and have been given extra funding for doing so.

Currently, 2,075 out of 3,381 secondary schools are academies, while 2,440 of 16,766 primary schools have academy status.