Extending the school day improves children’s learning

Our Trust gives young people a full year of extra schooling over five years. The country should follow our example

Watching children settle down to take exams this summer has been a tremendous relief. I am a firm believer that exams are a big motivator for children and an important rite of passage for pupils.

Exams are also a differentiator. Some pupils do better than others. This year, what is going to be difficult to manage is that some may do worse than would otherwise be the case due to the disruption of the pandemic. The impact could vary hugely depending on how much teaching was lost.

To be fair to the Government, the regulator Ofqual has tried to address this by, for example, ensuring pupils have had advance information on subject areas. However, these are just short-term fixes. What we really need is a long-term strategy to lift every pupil up to a level where they can achieve their full potential.

I believe the centrepiece, as advocated in the latest White Paper, should be a longer school day. Schools are being requested by the Department of Education to move to a minimum of 32.5 hours per week – which in practice typically means 25 hours of teaching time.

Nadhim Zahawi, the Education Secretary, is right to advocate this but schools should go further by increasing teaching time by even more. At the Inspiration Trust in Norfolk, we have done so for several years now and it works. Take Hethersett Academy in Norwich, which we have transformed into one of the top schools nationally. The children are in school a total of 33 hours per week, with a later pick-up time of 3.45pm on three days. But we schedule 28 hours of teaching time, or another three hours extra per week than the typical school.

Theoretically, the biggest impediment to a longer school day is the standard teacher contract of 1,265 hours per teacher per year. But by reducing “dead-time” in the timetable, for example scheduling fewer internal meetings and centralising professional development online (thereby reducing duplication and travel between sites), it is possible to provide more teaching time while remaining within the contractual limit and with only very modest additional expenditure.

The result is our nine secondary schools provide an additional 500 hours, or 20 weeks, teaching time between Year 7 and Year 11. That is nearly a full year of extra schooling over those five years. This is a phenomenal amount of additional learning that means they are at an advantage over students from other schools that do not do this. We hope this is reflected in our exam results.

This enables us to deliver a broad, balanced curriculum while, critically, also providing enrichment opportunities. At Inspiration Trust art, drama, music and religious education, all have discrete teaching time every week, delivered by subject specialists. We also provide extra subjects, from coding to history of art, to volunteering in the community. As these are timetabled, all children participate. Children may have some choice in the additional sessions but, overall, participation is mandatory.

If a school is well run and a new school timetable, with reduced dead time, is produced prior to the summer holidays, there should be no reason to breach the 1,265 limit during the academic year. That said, getting closer to this number should not be frowned upon either. Our experience of taking over schools is that some of them are effectively only using some 1,100 hours of teachers’ contract time.

After the pandemic, when schools and children were seriously disrupted, a longer school day with more teaching time is an aspirational policy and an obvious means for putting children back on track.