What if the school day were longer but with longer breaks?

[shelivesthedream]

School timetables are difficult because they are shorter than the standard workday so working parents struggle to deal with dropoff and pickup times, and children are asked to sit still and concentrate for long periods of time.

When I was at secondary school the timetable was approximately like this:

9am-10.15am: Lessons
10.15-10.45: Break
10.45-1pm: Lessons
1pm-2pm: Lunch and extracurriculars
2pm-4pm: Lessons
4pm-5pm: After school extracurriculars (optional)

What if it became like this:
8.30am-9.30am: Lessons
9.30am-10.30am: Break
10.30am-12pm: Lessons
12pm-2pm: Lunch and extracurriculars
2pm-3pm: Lessons
3pm-3.30pm: Break
3.30pm-4.30pm: Lessons
4.30pm-5.30pm: Prep* or extracurricular activities

*Prep happens in UK boarding schools. It means supervised homework – you sit a room and quietly do your homework while a teacher sits at the front and gets on with whatever they like (marking work or lesson prep).

The way I see it, this gives a few advantages over the current school day:
1.   Easier for parents to coordinate around a 9-5 working day
2.   More predictable for parents, especially those with multiple children. No more remembering if tonight is Jenny's choir rehearsal or if tomorrow is Amanda's netball practice – all children always stay at school until 5.30pm.
3.   Proper breaks for children. Honestly, by the time I’d walked to my form room, swapped my textbooks over and scarfed down a snack, the half hour break time was over. And an hour to collect lunch, eat lunch and participate in any kind of activity (especially sports where you have to get changed at either end) is not long enough.
4.   More chance for children to do homework at school. Of course they won’t all take advantage and extracurriculars would get in the way, but one could easily do half an hour in the morning break, an hour at lunch and an hour during prep, leaving you with little to take home.
5.   Equally, more chance for teachers to do their work during the school day. Of course they would have to supervise breaktime and lunchtime sometimes and run extracurricular activities, but they do that already. Teachers are notorious for having to take work home, so I don’t see that this day would actually be longer for them – they’d just spend more of it at school. I think you’d have to include some guarantee that they’d get X free breaks and lunches a week to get on with marking and lesson prep so you didn’t get mission creep with the other stuff – maybe that they’d get three free hours a day (prep included as a free hour as they can work in it) so one hour taken up with the other stuff.

Maybe that day would be too long for primary school children, even with the added breaks (which would be playtime, not homework time), but I’d be interested to hear arguments against it for secondary school children.

[cerat0n1a]

I’d be interested to hear arguments against it for secondary school children.

Suspect there is a road safety argument against finishing so late (in northern Europe at least.) Children would be walking home in the dark at 5:30 for a good proportion of the school year, at a time when roads are at their busiest.

With the current system, those children with carers at home get to leave school early and the others get after-school clubs, homework clubs etc.

Personally, I'd rather children had rather more unstructured free time and/or time with family and friends and rather less in an environment which is mostly about keeping them out of the way while the adults go to work. But I suspect that's not an argument that government or educators would necessarily agree with.

[joonifloofeefloo]

I think an even longer day could move more children out of the system. Plenty of kids are already having a hard time doing the 845-245. Sucks for kids who are introverted, sensory sensitive, special needs, or bullied, or who just need more independent/free time. I already pulled my kid out of the gong show, so I don't care on our count, but for kids from families with fewer options, I sure do.

I think it could work, though, if they made schools a joyful and safe space for everyone, and included introvert rooms. I don't anticipate these happening.

[GuitarStv]

Children need constant supervision, regardless of their 'break' status.  That means additional man-hours, which means more work for teachers.  This probably means additional hires and will therefore raise costs of education.  Any time that you force someone to be at work for longer, it makes their day longer . . . so I suspect that this measure would be unpopular among teachers.  There would certainly be some nuts and bolts to work out regarding specifics.

I suspect that more frequent breaks would generally be good for kids . . . and having a school day that matches up more closely with the work day would certainly be a boon for parents too.  There would be some winners and some losers.

[shelivesthedream]

Children need constant supervision, regardless of their 'break' status.  That means additional man-hours, which means more work for teachers.  This probably means additional hires and will therefore raise costs of education.  Any time that you force someone to be at work for longer, it makes their day longer . . . so I suspect that this measure would be unpopular among teachers.  There would certainly be some nuts and bolts to work out regarding specifics.

At my secondary school, we had one or two teachers on hall duty at breaktimes and lunchtime and two teachers on dining room duty. They each did it for a week at a time. Obviously I'd be making those times longer, but not creating the need for more teachers at those times.

Fair point, but I do think there's a (slightly optimistic) flipside - teachers already work long long days, they just do a lot of it invisibly (taking homework home to mark, lesson prep in the evenings). If you explicitly make the boundaries of the working day longer and create space in the day for them to do their previously-invisible work, it helps them create a case for things like pay raises because no one can pretend their workday is 9-4.

I think it could work, though, if they made schools a joyful and safe space for everyone, and included introvert rooms. I don't anticipate these happening.

I'm very introverted and while it wasn't brilliant at school, at break time and lunch time we could either go outside, hang out in the dining hall (hellishly noisy), hang out and talk in our form rooms (teachers came round and checked we weren't up to anything or making too much noise) or go to the (silent) library. I tended to do the latter two and it was generally OK for me.

[joonifloofeefloo]

Except for at post-secondary institutions, my region doesn't have quiet libraries anymore :(       There's a movement in and out of schools to make them "fun", "interactive", "community spaces." Because cod forbid we have any quiet place left, lol...   Like me, my kid has never had a quiet homeroom (what I think a form room might be), nor any other quiet option at a school. It's a philosophical matter, and the case for noisy interaction won in this case.

[teen persuasion]

Our local school district has different schedules for different buildings.  The high school and middle school share a campus and the early bus run (school day starts 7:35).  The elementary school is in a different village, and the day begins at 9:15.  Trying to run everything concurrently would mean doubling the transportation budget - twice as many buses and drivers. 

It's bad enough that my youngest is already waiting for the bus in the dark (and he is at the tail end of the pick-up) in the morning.  He's doing modified XC this season, so practice runs until 4:15 (when his older siblings did varsity XC, practice ran until 5:15 daily).  Due to budget cuts years ago, the sports buses were discontinued, so we have to pick them up after any practices.  Then meets begin at 4:30 (to give visiting schools time to transport after the regular day has ended), so the kids often don't get back to their home school until after 7pm, and need to be picked up.

Then there's the craziness that is musical season in the HS.  As the practices ramp up they are daily, or rather, nightly, from 6 to 9:30 or 10pm.  There were many blizzard seasons that I remember driving the girls to practice after dinner, packing a dinner for their brother who simply stayed thru due to swim practice running 'til 5:30; he'd wolf it down before Pit practice began.  That's a long school day: 7:15am bus to 10pm.

It would be nice if school schedules could be coordinated with the local community's job schedules, but I feel like that is an impossibility.  There's too many different schedules.  I'd love to work just 9 to 5, but somebody has to keep the library open in the evenings, too.

What I'd actually like is if we could totally revamp the school calendar.  Why do we still begin the school year in September?  Why do we have 10 weeks off in the summer, but must include snow days to compensate for days lost to storms during blizzard season?  Why not spread the 4 quarters evenly throughout the year, with a few weeks break between each, instead of short breaks around religious-turned-secular holidays?

[Freedomin5]

What about the secondary school students who need to work to support themselves/contribute to family finances? If you end the school day late, you are cutting into their ability to support themselves/their families.

When I was in high school, a few of the students in my class had to work after school and on weekends to have food to eat/help caregivers make each month's rent payment. School let out at 3:15 PM each afternoon. One of my friends worked every day after school from 4 PM to 9 PM at a call center (he was the one calling you during your dinner time) - his parents were recent immigrants who had good jobs in their home countries but could only find factory work after immigrating. Another girl worked at as a cashier at a large grocery store every afternoon 4 PM to 10 PM because her mother walked out on her and her younger sister when she was 12 and her sister was 8, and they lived with her grandmother who was disabled and on social security. She started working at 15 so that they could buy groceries and clothes. And then there was the 15 year old girl who worked as a dancer -- granted, she didn't have to be at work until 9 PM and she worked until midnight when her 23 year old boyfriend picked her up from the topless bar. She had difficulty making it to school by the 9:00 AM start time; she definitely would not have been able to make it to 8:00 AM or 8:30 AM class.

[alsoknownasDean]

I suspect the main reason would be due to teachers not having enough time to do lesson plans and have meetings and that. As a result, there'd probably be more curriculum days required to support the extra hours (or more teachers on).

Also, what about the after school sports (assuming they're not based at the school themselves)? If someone's going to a basketball match or footy training after school?

By the way, I remember getting home from school at 3:45pm absolutely ravenous (and would eat a lot upon arriving home). I wouldn't have been able to cope without food until 5:30-6pm as a growing teenage boy. Could have bought more in the lunch box I spose.

What I'd actually like is if we could totally revamp the school calendar.  Why do we still begin the school year in September?  Why do we have 10 weeks off in the summer, but must include snow days to compensate for days lost to storms during blizzard season?  Why not spread the 4 quarters evenly throughout the year, with a few weeks break between each, instead of short breaks around religious-turned-secular holidays?

That's kinda how it works here in Aus. Summer break is about 6 weeks, and there's three 2 week breaks during the year. Each term is roughly ten weeks. It trips me out that summer break is almost three months over there.

Also 7:30am starts? Holy shit. I would never have made it to school. I would have preferred school to start at 10am instead of 9am.

[teen persuasion]

There's been discussion of later starts for the older kids instead of the younger ones, on the theory that teens need the sleep.  The idea is not happening, because many working parents need the older siblings at home to get the little ones off the bus and watch them until the work day ends.

That 7:30am start means that the unlucky kids at the beginning of the bus run need to be out before 6:30am.  We are a rural district covering 2 towns, so those buses have a lot of miles to cover.

[joonifloofeefloo]

^ Yeah, that's where we decided to pull out of regular school again. Just as he approached his teens, he would have had to wake three hours before his natural wake-time to be at the bus stop in the pitch black, and getting home at 5. His lunch bag was already massive on a regular day. I decided he needed things like sleep and food, not to mention some quiet time and other body integrity (not being hit by other people on any given day, as was happening at school).

[NeonPegasus]

My kids go to a year round school with longer than typical days so I have some experience with this.

Their days run from 8-3:45, which is a full hour longer than other elementary schools. They provide the kids additional physically active time during the day (maybe an additional recess + 1-2 physical activity classes like PE or martial arts). Their other classes have fidget chairs and activity built in and children often work on the floor. The school specifically works to limit homework because of the longer days and it seems less than the recommendation of 10 min/day/grade. I know, for example, that my 5th grader isn't doing 50 min/day. Even so, it is a long day for little kids. They are wiped out when they're done and I'm convinced that most of their good behavior and attention span is given to the teachers. When we get home, it is a rush for them to get through their snack and afternoon/dinner chores, especially when all they want to do is goof off.

Regarding the calendar, they have 200 days attending school, giving them around 12 weeks of break that are broken up around the year. They have two two-week breaks - one in the summer and one at Christmas. Outside of that, they get around 1 week/month off most months. That seems to work well. They have enough time to get bored during break but not to the point of killing each other. It allows us plenty of chances to travel during the year and they never get so far out of the typical schedule to have difficulty returning to it. Also, because they have 20 extra days of school over the mandatory minimum, the school has the freedom to allow for more field trips and the like.

That being said, it would not work for us if we weren't self-employed. Most of the time when they're out, the only "camp" available is the one at the school. We haven't had to use them but I feel bad for the kids that must because they never get a change of scenery. Their schedule never quite lines up with the county schedule so community activities, such as soccer, tend to have conflicts. For instance, there was no chance of them participating in the community diving team because practices were held at times during the summer that were for kids on break.

We will be moving into the public school system next year so we will have a big adjustment.