Schools are preparing for an extended Easter holiday, The Daily Telegraph has learned, with headteachers having been summoned to speak to ministers about emergency plans.

There is a "real logic" to extending the Easter break by a week on either side, according to Geoff Barton, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL).

"Undoubtedly, people have been having discussions about it," he said. "Parents will already have plans of one type or another for what they are doing with their children over Easter.

"In some ways, it becomes less disruptive if it were just part of a kind of elongated planned holiday."

Virus experts have forecast that the UK is a number of weeks behind Italy, which shut all its schools last Thursday.

The Government's chief scientific adviser, Sir Patrick Vallance, said this week that the UK was four weeks behind Italy "in terms of the scale of the outbreak" if not "in terms of the response". Meanwhile, Dr Michael Tildesley, an expert in infectious disease control at Warwick University, said Britain was two to three weeks behind Italy in terms of the growth of cases.