Date: 31/03/22
By Alan Hardie, CEO at NCEAT

This week the Government published its long awaited Education White Paper. White papers are policy documents produced by the Government setting out their plans for new laws and Acts of Parliament. However, in the case of education, many proposals in White Papers don’t need to become laws to make changes. For example, the Department for Education can publish an ‘aspiration’ for schools and ask OFSTED to report on it, or make changes to qualifications and ask OFQUAL to implement them. Often this is a much easier route than taking a Bill to parliament where MPs and the House of Lords can discuss the proposed changes, debate them and modify or eliminate them through voting.

Let’s take the proposal in the White Paper that all schools should open for 32.5 hours each week. It seems on the face of it to be a really appealing idea – children spend more time at school, so learn more and get better outcomes. Who could argue against this?

Unfortunately it turns out that this proposal is not quite what it seems. Firstly there is no additional funding to accompany the proposal. This means that the additional staff required to make this happen have to come from existing school staff and budgets. As in almost all schools, staff are already working to their maximum contracted hours, and delivering a lot of extra things on a voluntary basis, more staff will need to be employed with no extra cash for schools to do this.

Secondly, there is nothing in the guidance around the 32.5 hours per week to say that this means extra learning time for children. Many schools, including ours, are currently under the 32.5 hours per week or 6.5 hours per day. The main reason for this is that over time, lunch breaks have been reduced.

When I started teaching many years ago, it wasn’t uncommon for schools to have up to one hour fifteen minutes for a lunch break. In secondary schools, most of the pupils went home, or at least off site, so schools were often very quiet. As things have changed since then, such as safeguarding restrictions on pupils leaving school sites, lunchtimes got much busier and many pupils got bored easily. As it is the time when schools have fewest staff available as other than senior leaders, teachers can’t be directed to work during their lunch break and can only volunteer to help. The pressure on a small number of staff to supervise a school’s worth of pupils led to most schools cutting the lunchbreak right down. There are some schools, not NCEAT ones, who have only 20 minutes for a lunch break.

To accommodate this, most schools started to take the half hour or so they reduced the lunch by off the end of the school day, so that schools finish earlier than they did in the past. Pupils still spend the same amount of time in lessons that they always have, which is around five hours, plus time for tutor groups, assemblies etc.

So let’s be clear, the proposal for a longer school day or week isn’t about giving the pupils more educational opportunities as this won’t be achievable without a significant increase in funding. So what is the reason for this change?

Sadly, I think that it is about political point scoring and trying to please some of the core voters by saying ‘look we’ve extended the school day so children will learn more and catch up’. Unfortunately that’s not how it works if you don’t fund it to make that happen. Learning is about the quality of the experience much more than the quantity. If they funded schools so that we can run compulsory clubs, activities, tutoring, etc to lengthen the school day then I would be entirely in favour of it. My worry is that without the funding, then it will just mean more unstructured time, bored pupils and even more stretched staff.

Our challenge for our schools in NCEAT is to find a way of adding more productive time to the school day which will enhance our pupils’ experiences and make it more enjoyable, without having the additional funding to do so. We won’t back away from the challenge, but it is a huge ask for schools to meet it.