An argument for longer school day and shorter holidays

An argument for longer school day and shorter holidays

Michael Gove has recently unveiled in a speech that he would like a longer school day and a shorter holidays.  Although this plan may sound radical, is not as radical as it may first  sound in fact many academies already implement these policies, and Gove says our current system was designed around an agricultural economy in which children would help with with the harvest during their school holidays.  Whether or not this is true matters very little, as school timetable reform is practical and can offer a stack of benefits to students and parents. 

One of the strongest arguments for these reforms is to help working parents, your average full time employee will work 9 till 5 but the school day starts at 8 and finishes at 3:30. This can lead to parents having to look for after school care or having to work part time or not at all.  Increasing the length of the school day would save parents child care costs, and getting a young child to and from school will be less of a hurdle for parents who want to work.   This is mainly a benefit for parents off young children as this is less of a problem for parents of older children who are more capable of getting themselves to and from school.  Importantly the reforms would also have a positive effect on the education of the child, after all this is the most important aspect of any sort of education reforms.  A longer school day could be used in several different ways to benefit a child, one suggestion is to use the extra time to make sure students can get at least one hour of PE a day.  This would help tackle the countries childhood obesity problem and relieve pressure on the NHS by giving children a daily dose of exercise, and installing an exercise ethic in children.  Extra time in the school day could be employed to help older children with their studies by making it an enforced study period, or use it for support sessions to help struggling students or use it for other extra-curricular activities. With the new reforms schools could provide all sorts of extra-curricular activities in the additional time rather than an extra lesson, however schools could increase their lesson length from 1 hour to 70 minutes.  This additional 10 minutes in each lesson can facilitate late students, allow students time to unpack, and give teachers time to settle the class down while still having a full hour of teaching.   Some of the academies that already run longer days put forward the argument that longer 9 till 5 days better prepare children for the world of work.  This is because it’s as long as a day of work so when students go to work they will not face the additional challenge of longer days.  Longer school days will face opposition from both students and teachers that does not however make it a bad idea as almost every reform to education faces opposition.  As for shorter holidays I think there may be much more resistant than a longer day, the argument for shorter holidays is that children's academic performance dips if they spend too much time away for school, so if they had shorter holidays then they would not suffer this dip.  However if holidays are to short students particularly younger ones are likely to suffer a dip in performance due to fatigue.  Again childcare costs are an argument for shorter holidays as parents can rarely schedule their holidays to coincide with their child’s school holiday which means childcare costs, shorter holidays are unlikely to solve this problem but they will reduce it.  Personally I like the idea of longer school days, but although I can see an argument for shorter holidays I would rather see half-term holidays removed and keep the main holidays the same length.       

 One of the best things about academies is the freedom they enjoy; they are testing grounds for new ideas to improve education.  The department of education needs to cherry pick the best reforms and apply them to local authority controlled schools, this would improve the every school in the state sector.  It is important that local authority schools are not neglected due  to the rise of academies and that the department of education actively helps them to compete with academies and try to make them an attractive choice for parents to send their children.  The whole idea of academies was for greater competition in education.  So it is important that they are not just competing with each other but are also forced to compete with local authority controlled schools and that local authority schools are not left behind to become relics of the old education system.